Last month, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi welcomed senior Taliban leaders to Beijing, standing shoulder to shoulder for the photographers. China is carefully watching events unfold in Afghanistan. And while it hasn’t yet recognised the Taliban government, the Beijing meeting was a nod towards a potential alliance.

But replacing America in Afghanistan wouldn’t be without its risks – can Beijing succeed where Washington failed? America's 20 year mission in the country cost lives and money. And what would a closer alliance mean for China’s Xinjiang policy, considering the close links that the Taliban has historically had with militant Uyghur groups? 

I speak to Tom Miller, author of China's Asian Dream, and Dr Mike Martin, author of An Intimate War and former British Army officer in Helmand.

It might be an understatement to say that China has a difficult relationship with drugs. Most infamously, the Opium Wars of the 1800s saw British soldiers fight against the Qing dynasty to protect the British right to sell opium to China. When the Qing lost, it wasn’t just the sobriety of their people that they lost – but a series of ports, concessions and reparations signed away in so-called ‘unequal treaties’. Hong Kong was lost to the British at this point, and it’s where the Chinese mark the start of the century of humiliation.

The memory and trauma of opium addiction is still bound up with national decline in the Chinese conscience.

So imagine my surprise to read about widespread drug use (especially ketamine) in the early 2000s in a recent article by the translator and writer Dylan Levi King. Dylan joins this episode, and we talk about what the popularity of ket says about China's reform and opening, how the Chinese see drug abuse as a disease than a crime, and President Xi's moralistic clampdown on the party scene in the years since.

For most people, Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping stand out as the two Communist leaders of the People’s Republic of China. But growing up, it was actually a third man, by the name of Deng Xiaoping, whose legacy I felt the most.

Though less than 5 foot tall, his impact on China’s trajectory was arguably more than Mao’s; and possibly will be more than Xi’s. It was Deng’s vision of reform and opening – which we’ve talked about in passing many times on this podcast – that started a process which transformed China from a Maoist backwater to today’s economic backwater. TIME magazine twice chose him as their Man of the Year.

Yet it was also Deng who gave the final go ahead for the military clampdown of the Tiananmen Square protests. So what sort of leader and politician was he, and how do we reconcile the seeming contradictions between Deng the liberal reformer, and Deng the communist autocrat?

I'm joined by James Carter, Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, and author of Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai.

Further links:

Chinese Whispers: China's long history of student protests https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/china-s-long-history-of-student-protests

Chinese Whispers: How Hong Kong became what it is today https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/how-hong-kong-became-what-it-is-today

YouTube: Zhao Ziyang's speech at Tiananmen Square in 1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZxjV0s2CrA

Tangping, or 'lying flat', is a new lifestyle tempting China's millennials. Describing a minimalist stress-free life where one opts out of a career and raising family, lying flat is the young person's desperate answer to the infinite rat race of modern Chinese workplaces and society. But while there are few lie-flatters as of yet, the allure of the lifestyle has propelled the term into the mainstream. On this episode, Cindy Yu discusses the phenomenon with millennial journalist Karoline Kan, author of Under Red Skies. They talk about why young people are pessimistic about life in a growing China, whether they are a 'snowflake generation' compared to the struggles of their parents and what this means for the Chinese government's social contract with the people.

In the 12 months since the enactment of the National Security Law on Hong Kong, opposition leaders, journalists and activists have been arrested; reforms on education and elections begun; and last week saw the emotional closure of the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily.

On this episode, I speak to Jennifer Creery, who works for the Financial Times in Hong Kong, about the situation on the ground; and Professor Jeff Wasserstrom, a historian of China at the University of California, about the last year and the city's future. We reflect on the strategic erosion over time of Hong Kong's autonomy, the importance of education that the CCP places on its Hong Kong policy, and whether the 2019 protests actually expedited the choking off of the city.

Exactly 20 years ago, China acceded to the World Trade Organisation. In the decades since, the globalised world became what we know today, with hundreds of millions of Chinese and people around the world lifted out of poverty through free trade. But the promised liberalisation - both economic and political - doesn't seem to have happened. China is now challenging western-led world order, and too difficult to disentangle from the world economy. So was it a mistake to allow China into the WTO, and has engagement failed?

With Stewart Paterson, author of China, Trade and Power, and Yu Jie, senior research fellow at Chatham House.

What is it like to be a journalist in China? There are obvious restrictions on freedom of speech, but, as I find out on this episode, there are creative ways to navigate the strict system of censorship. The end result is a complex media landscape - some have to litter investigations with state propaganda; others continue to report on sensitive issues (like the Wuhan Covid cover up) and rely on editors for protection; while growing digitisation and a strongman President continue to threaten what little independence flourished at the beginning of the century.

With political scientist Maria Repnikova, author of Media Politics in China, and former journalist Fang Kecheng, now an Associate Professor in Journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

China has run wild with facial recognition. From using it to ration tissues in public toilets, to identifying highest paying customers in stores and criminals from a crowd, what is a budding technology in the West has furthered state surveillance and corporate snooping in China. But there is a civil fightback happening in the courts, on social media and in public opinion at large. On this episode, I speak to Jeffrey Ding, a DPhil researcher of China's development of AI at the University of Oxford, and Jeremy Daum, Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School, who also runs the blog China Law Translate. We discuss who is driving the tech growth in China; whether citizens have any recourse to turn back the tide; and how this technology is being used in Xinjiang.

The archaic-sounding notion of 'filial piety' has little direct translation into English, but is a deep-rooted part of Chinese culture and ethics. On this episode, I find out about what motivates the subscription to such an unequal view of family life; how modernity changes expectations (and in particular, the impact of the one child policy); and what happens to those deemed by society to be disrespectful of their parents.

With Professor Charlotte Ikels, an anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University.

You might think that in a country as tightly controlled as China, diversity of opinion is hard to come by in written form. But as I find out in this episode, there is a vibrant conversation going on with vastly different views, especially in the intellectual elite amongst professors and journalists. So what do these intellectuals think, and how much can they get away with saying?

With Professor David Ownby, who founded the website Reading the China Dream, which translates writings from Chinese intellectuals into English. He tells me:

In the episode, we also discuss Cai Xia, a former CCP professor now living in exile, and the article she wrote from the US. Click here to read it.