Sinica Early Access

This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Lucy Hornby, the deputy bureau chief of the Financial Times in Beijing and a veteran guest on the show. She has appeared on Sinica before to discuss professional representation for women in China, the last surviving comfort women in the country, and domestic environmental challenges. The two discuss shadow banking in China and its history; the cat-and-mouse relationship between regulators and shadow financiers; the advent of fintech and the proliferation of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms; and Lucy’s reporting on a pyramid scheme involving selenium-infused wheat in Hebei.

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In lieu of Sinica this week, we are proud to announce the newest addition to our network, Ta for Ta, hosted by Juliana Batista. Ta for Ta is a new biweekly podcast, which captures the narratives of women from Greater China at the top of their professional game. “Ta for Ta” is a play on the Chinese spoken language that demonstrates equality between the sexes. Tā 他 is the word for “he”; tā 她 is also the word for “she.” Chenni Xu is the inaugural guest, a corporate communications executive and gender advocate. She moved back to New York after spending nearly a decade abroad in Beijing. Tune in to hear about the #MeToo movement in China and the proponents at the fore, Chenni’s views on gender inequality and professional representation for women, as well as her own experiences as a woman and an Asian American in China. Subscribe to Ta for Ta on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Stitcher, or plug the RSS feed into your favorite podcast app. For more musings and links relevant to this episode of Ta for Ta, check out this post on Juliana’s Medium page. Juliana loves to hear from listeners — send her a message at [email protected].

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with the Honorable Kevin Rudd, the 26th prime minister of Australia and the inaugural president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. He is also a doctoral student at Jesus College, University of Oxford, who, through his studies, hopes to provide an explanation as to how Xi Jinping constructs his worldview. Mr. Rudd elaborates on the extent to which the Chinese government’s worldview has changed, the current direction of that worldview, and how much of that can be owed to Xi Jinping and domestic political maneuvering.  The two take a deep dive into the state of ongoing flux in the U.S.-China relationship; the now-strategic competition between the U.S. and China; what the new rules for engagement are; Chinese foreign policy transitioning to a more active approach; the most significant changes in the bilateral relationship over the past 12 months; and the current state of Australia-China relations.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Danny Russel, career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 2013 to 2017, and currently vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI). The conversation centers on all things diplomatic in East and Southeast Asia: the Trans-Pacific Partnership; internet freedom in China; the country’s “illiberal turn”; espionage and intellectual property theft during his time in Washington; the Obama administration’s position on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and, finally, reflections on the current state of the U.S.-China relationship.

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This week on Sinica, Jeremy and Kaiser speak with Kai-Fu Lee 李开复, who has returned to discuss his new book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. Kai-Fu is a prominent member of the international artificial intelligence community and is chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, founded in 2009. Kai-Fu brings to Sinica a wealth of knowledge on topics that have developed into rather large points of contention in the U.S.-China bilateral relationship over the past year: AI and its various usages across a wide range of industries; the “high-octane” nature of Chinese data; tech policy in China, venture capital and its interplay with domestic private companies; the future of China’s AI industry and what that means for the rest of the world; and the nuances of the business and finance aspects of running a technology company in China. Kai-Fu previously spoke about artificial intelligence on Sinica last summer.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Nury Turkel, a prominent voice in the overseas Uyghur community and the chairman of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, now based in Washington, D.C. We discussed Nury’s own experiences as a Uyghur and an activist both in China and the United States; the increasingly vocal Uyghur diaspora around the world in the wake of widespread detentions in Xinjiang; the relative absence of state-level pushback outside of China; and the international organizations that advocate for Uyghur rights in China and the accompanying pushback from Beijing.   If you aren’t yet up to speed on the deteriorating state of affairs for Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, take a look at SupChina’s explainer for a comprehensive overview of the reporting of information from October 2017 through August 2018.

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This week, the Sinica Podcast network adds another show: ChinaEconTalk, hosted by Jordan Schneider. In this crossover on Sinica, Jordan discusses "China's Grand AI Ambitions" with Rhodes scholar Jeff Ding. Jeff Ding breaks down how China stacks up to the rest of the world in the race to develop AI. He delves into the connections between Chinese tech companies and government AI targets, AI’s military implications, as well as the ethical considerations of AI applications in China’s police state. Jeff also discusses his recent paper “Deciphering China’s AI Dream,” as well as recent articles on AI he has translated from Chinese media on his ChinAI newsletter. Subscribe to ChinaEconTalk on iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, or by plugging the RSS feed straight into your podcast reader.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Jude Blanchette of the Crumpton Group, a keen observer of the CCP leadership. We pick his brain on the rumors swirling around Beijing this summer, about public criticisms of Xi’s leadership, about the lack of any real succession plan in the eventuality that Xi is somehow incapacitated or steps down, and an emerging political science literature on authoritarianism.

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This week, Kaiser chats with Paul Haenle, who is Maurice R. Greenberg Director of the Carnegie Tsinghua Center for Global Policy and previously served on the National Security Council as a staffer under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Their conversation — which runs the gamut from North Korea to Taiwan to the Belt and Road — was recorded live at Schwarzman College in Beijing on September 6.

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This week, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Andrew Small, senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C. Andrew is one of surprisingly few scholars with specialized experience researching China's relations with what it calls its "all-weather friend" — Pakistan. His book from 2015 on the subject is titled The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics. Kaiser, Jeremy, and Andrew discuss how Sino-Pakistani ties have been impacted by the recent election of Imran Khan to prime minister, Pakistan's economic difficulties, and the numerous projects that comprise the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC – one of the most important components of China's Belt and Road Initiative. 

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