NüVoices

Sophie Richardson is the China Director at Human Rights Watch, a position she’s held since 2006.

She frequently testifies to parliaments around the world and is the author of China, Cambodia and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which examines Chinese foreign policy since the 1954 Geneva Conference. She speaks Mandarin, earned a doctorate from the University of Virginia and a BA from Oberlin College. 

Sophie joins Sophia Yan, NüVoices board member and Telegraph China correspondent, to discuss human rights in China, what it feels like to be sanctioned by the Chinese government, and how HRW keeps its staff healthy mentally and emotionally healthy given demanding work.

Joanna Chiu's new book, China Unbound, details China's rapid international rise, and the ways Western nations have contributed to a state of global disorder. The book weaves historical and political context with Chiu's reporting across four continents.

Guest host Madeleine O'Dea, award-winning author of The Phoenix Years, speaks with Chiu, who chairs NüVoices, about how Western governments have failed to adjust to the reality that China doesn’t simply want to join the existing global order but instead re-shape it. The two also share advice on book-writing, and the characteristics of China-related storytelling from diaspora perspectives. 

Clare Fearnley became New Zealand’s ambassador to China in 2018, cross-accredited to Mongolia. She was previously ambassador in Seoul, where she also oversaw Pyongyang, consul-general in Shanghai and head of the New Zealand Commerce and Industry Office in Taipei.

She has also been posted to the New Zealand Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. While working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Wellington, she was director-general for north Asia, and has led international trade litigation, including cases at the WTO. 

Ambassador Fearnley has arts and law degrees from the University of Canterbury. She is a Mandarin speaker, and studied at Beijing University and at the Beijing Languages Institute in the 1980s. 

Clare joins NuVoices board member and Telegraph correspondent Sophia Yan to chat about New Zealand-China relations, how and why Asia piqued her interest early on, and New Zealand’s gender equality successes.

Barbara Demick is the author of Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town (2020), Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), and Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo neighborhood (1996). She spent 12 years as bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul and previously reported from the Middle East and Balkans for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Barbara has won many awards for her work, including the Samuel Johnson prize (now the Baillie Gifford prize) for non-fiction in the UK, the Overseas Press Club's human rights reporting award, the George Polk Award, the Robert F Kennedy Award, and Stanford University's Shorenstein Award for Asia coverage. Her North Korea book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was a press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Bagehot fellow in business journalism at Columbia University, and a visiting professor of journalism at Princeton University. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Yale College, and now lives in New York City.

Barbara joins NuVoices board member Sophia Yan to discuss her most recent book, Eat the Buddha, which tells the story of Ngaba, a town high on a Tibetan plateau that is one of the most hidden corners of the world, and near-impossible for foreigners to visit. Through the rich tales of those linked to this town, Barbara illuminates decades of intertwined Tibetan and Chinese history, and explores what it means to be Tibetan today — to preserve a culture, faith and language despite all odds. Barbara talks about navigating reporting on China, despite the challenges, imparts sage writing advice, and previews her next book in the works. 

Recommendations:

Sophia: Read Barbara's books! Eat the Buddha; Nothing to Envy; Logavina Street. Also this fascinating New Yorker article from May that I just read (the issues take forever to arrive abroad) about cutting-edge research on using electricity to regenerate limbs.

Barbara: The Ministry for the Future, a science fiction book set in the near future about people trying to save the world from the ravages of climate change. I was reading it as the New York City subways flooded from the tail of Hurricane Ida. 

Evan Osnos' forthcoming Wildland: The Making of America's Fury, about how America is tearing itself apart with political polarization. 

Yes, I know you'd say not exactly soothing bedtime reading. More cheerful listening to podcaster Mike Duncan's Hero of Two Worlds about the Marquis de Lafayette.

Self-Care Suggestions:

Sophia: Not looking at your phone and emails/messages the minute you wake up! Try setting a timeframe – say half an hour – or perhaps until your morning routine is over (ie brushing teeth, washing face, making/having breakfast. Look out the window, enjoy your coffee/tea/Oatly/delivered

Lotus Ruan conducts research and writes at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Her work focuses on the roles of government and private actors in shaping internet governance agendas and digital rights. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and Tech in Asia.

On this episode, Lotus joins DC chapter member Rui Zhong to talk about her research on Chinese app privacy, Apple's “Chinese operations equilibrium,” and why China's technology policy process is so challenging to navigate.

Recommendations:

Lotus: The Taiwanese television series The Making of an Ordinary Woman.

Rui: The video game Hades (Supergiant Games).

Self-care suggestions:

Lotus: Reconnecting with friends. 

Rui: Omni Foundation classical guitar concerts.

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Shunan Teng is the founder and owner of Tea Drunk in New York City, which specializes in heritage, wild, historical, and other famous teas. Every spring, she travels to the renowned tea regions in China and works alongside the heritage farmers to produce the most coveted teas. In this episode, Shunan shares her tremendous knowledge of tea with Cindy and talks about the teas and regions they come from, the production process and making techniques that differentiate the six major types of tea, and how to approach tasting tea to unveil its full complexity.

Recommendations:

Shunan: Audiobooks by online writer Yuè Guān 月关.

Cindy: The Israeli television show Shtisel, and the French television show The Bureau. 

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Kathleen McLaughlin is a science and labor reporter based in Butte, Montana, whose work has been regularly featured in the Washington Post and The Guardian; she was also the Beijing correspondent for Science Magazine. Her work has spanned fashion, pharmaceuticals, electronics manufacturers, and medicine. She’s also an alumni of the MIT Knight Science journalism fellowship. Her forthcoming book is Blood Money, a multinational investigation into the vast market for human blood plasma and its sociopolitical implications. 

Kathleen and Washington, D.C., NüVoices chapter member Rui Zhong examined the state of science reporting in China in reference to current lab theories of the origins of COVID-19. The current discussions can be couched in both the government’s handling of HIV and AIDS and the recent CRISPR scientist controversy.

Recommendations: 

Kathleen: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith.

Rui: Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons, by John Paul Brammer.

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Sophia Yan is the China correspondent for the Telegraph, has covered the region for a decade, and is based in Beijing. Previously, she reported for CNBC, CNN, and Bloomberg, while based in Hong Kong and Washington, D.C., and has had stints in Tokyo and Honolulu. She received the 2020 Marie Colvin Award for her coverage of China, with judges noting Sophia's determination to "get to the truth, exposing cruelty, injustice, and the abuse of human rights despite all attempts to stop her.” When Sophia isn't reporting, she's tickling a different set of keys — on the piano!  

Sophia chats with NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu about why there are so few foreign correspondents on the ground in mainland China, and whether we risk losing nuanced and immediate coverage of China. They also discuss what Sophia learned from her recent reporting trip in Xinjiang about the "new phase" of persecution against Uyghurs, forced factory labor, and how a Hilton hotel is rising in the wreckage of a bulldozed mosque. For their efforts, Sophia and her colleague faced violent obstruction from police and plainclothes thugs. Read her personal account about obstacles on the ground. Watch her Xinjiang documentary series here, and look for her new podcast series, Hong Kong Silenced, about the city's shrinking freedoms under the national security law that will launch on June 30.

Recommendations: 

Sophia: The book The War on the Uyghurs, by Sean Roberts; Anna Fifield's portrait of Kim Jong-un, The Great Successor; a documentary on the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, The Dissident; and a book about meditation as self-care, Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Joanna: Megha Rajagopalan's Pulitzer-winning reporting on Xinjiang and the new report "No Space Left to Run: China's Transnational Repression of Uyghurs" from the Uyghur Human Rights Project and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.

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Yilin Wang (she/they) is a Vancouver-based writer, editor, Chinese-English translator, educator, and cultural consultant who was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. Her work engages with topics such as Chinese folklore, martial arts literature (wuxia), diaspora identities, gender expectations, migration, and cultural reclamation. Some of Yilin’s work translating the Chinese revolutionary feminist Qiū Jǐn’s 秋瑾 poetry was recently featured on NüVoices' website.

In 2018, Yilin spent months travelling around China for research, leading to the launch of the #LiteraryJianghu Project to promote engagement with wuxia and related Chinese literary traditions.

Yilin chats with NüVoices chair Joanna Chiu about the fascinating themes and genres of their work, and about the day-to-day realities and power politics of being a creative writing and translation professional in North America. For further reading from Yilin on racism in Canadian literature, see her Carte Blanche essay here.  

Recommendations:  

Yilin: The wuxia series Legend of Condor Heroes, translated by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang and Grace Lau's debut poetry collection The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak.  

Joanna: China: The Novel, by Edward Rutterfurd for an immersive narrative approach to learning about 19th century Chinese history, and Yilin's website!

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Sophie Beach is the executive editor of China Digital Times (CDT), an independent, bilingual media organization that brings uncensored news and online voices from China to the world. In this conversation, Sophie talks to Cindy about the genesis of CDT and its vision, the ever-evolving (and opaque) state censorship rules and tactics, and the necessity to amplify persistent voices of resistance of Chinese netizens.

Recommendations:

Sophie: Small Country, by Gaël Faye, and Yi Yi, by Edward Yang.

Cindy: The docuseries Sunderland ’Til I Die and episode 497 of the popular Chinese podcast Story FM.

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