Sinica Early Access

This week's podcast was recorded live at The Bookworm in Beijing, which is why you'll notice the prolonged and decidedly rambunctious audience pop at the start of the show: No matter where Sinica goes, it'll always be most enthusiastically received in the city where it began. Beijing is the best. The entire episode is a hoot, as SupChina Asia managing editor Anthony Tao sat in for Kaiser and Jeremy to talk music with longtime jazz musicians David Moser (no stranger to Sinica listeners) and Jess Meider. Stick around for the musical performance at the end!   (This is the song David and Anthony reference at the end, in case it's not obvious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8tZO97uhyE)

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both professors at the University of British Columbia, about their translation of Zhang Yingyu's Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection. Anyone who has lived in China in recent decades will understand intuitively why a podcast ostensibly about current affairs in China would want to talk about a 16th century book, but for anyone who doubts the relevance for today's China, we believe it all will become painfully clear as you listen.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mao Zedong famously described the relationship between China and North Korea as “like lips and teeth.” But the relationship hasn’t always been quite so cozy. This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks to two scholars of China and North Korea — Ma Zhao, Associate Professor of Modern History and Culture at Washington University in St. Louis, and John Delury, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. They were both at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Washington, DC, and they shared their insights into the history of this complicated and often fraught relationship. Please note this was recorded on March 24, a few days before the world learned that Kim Jong-un had traveled to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week Kaiser hosts solo as Jeremy is on holiday. Our guest is Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Chair of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, and the topic is the Chinese Communist Party’s relationship with history: How it controls historical inquiry, manipulates historical knowledge, and even erases historical remembrance.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Some 350,000 students from China currently attend American universities. Many of them enjoy their experience and return to China with new friends, broadened horizons, and marketable skills. But for others, their experience of America is marred by social isolation, intense political pressure, and racism. On this week’s podcast, recorded live at the China Institute in New York, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Siqi Tu, a graduate student in sociology at the City University of New York looking at Chinese high school students in America; and Eric Fish, author of China’s Millennials, who is now working on a second book about university students from China in the U.S. It’s a wide-ranging conversation that examines some of the problems that Chinese students often face, and some of the problems Chinese students can sometimes create.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

China's President Xi Jinping has set a very ambitious goal: The total elimination of poverty in China by the year 2020. As that date fast approaches, we sit down with Gao Qin, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work, and Director of the China Center for Social Policy at Columbia University. Qin is author of an excellent book on the subject of social assistance in China published just last year called Welfare, Work, and Poverty: Social Assistance in China, which looks at one of China’s most important social assistance programs, Dibao, that covers some 60 million people.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this week’s show, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Carl Minzner, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and specialist in Chinese law, about his new book End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise. No mere litany of the ways in which China has grown illiberal in the time since the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989, the book explores the underlying reasons for China’s hardening and approaches the question with admirable empathy. With the recent announcement of proposed changes to China’s constitution that would end the two-term limit in place since 1982, the conversation around the reasons for the illiberal turn is more urgent than ever. The topic is one that Kaiser and Jeremy have discussed before many times on the show, but Carl brings fresh angles to the conversation, including an exploration of how changes in China’s educational system may be foreclosing social mobility in China.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.