Sinica Podcast

I'm trying something different: totally unscripted and very, very lightly edited recordings grabbed on the go where I happen to be. For the inaugural episode, I've got Wang Zichen, the author of the amazing Pekingnology newsletter on Substack, as well as the man behind the Center for China and Globalization's newsletter "The East is Read." Hear Zichen's origin story, his approach to publishing Pekingnology, the skinny on his new Got China show with Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang, as well as his take on what we can expect from the Third Plenum.

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This week on Sinica, I chat with University of Melbourne transnational historian Pete Millwood about his outstanding book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations. The road to normalization is told too often with a focus only on the Nixon-Kissinger opening and official diplomatic efforts culminating in the final recognition of the PRC in January 1979, but there's much more to the story than that, and Millwood tells it deftly, drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with many of those directly involved.

3:33 — Transnational history 

4:44 — The early, “pioneering” trips to China in the 1950s and ‘60s and China’s shift in invitations 

11:14 — The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR) in the 1960s  

16:27 — The role of the Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars (CCAS)

20:43 — Why Nixon’s opening to China was seen as so surprising, and the impact of the UN’s shift in recognition from the ROC to the PRC on American thinking 

24:57 — The Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong ping-pong diplomacy story 

31:21 — Edgar Snow’s meeting with Mao

33:43 — The return leg of ping-pong diplomacy and the National Committee’s “baptism by fire”

36:33 — The significance of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour of China with Eugene Ormandy  

42:23 — Jiang Qing and the controversy around the cancelled performing arts tour in the U.S. in 1975 

46:03 — Kissinger’s thinking in the early 1970s after the first communiqué 

48:48 — The U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association 

50:42 — How scientific cooperation smoothed the process toward normalization under the Carter administration, the state of play in ’77, and how Frank Press CSCPRC argued for greater reciprocity 

1:02:25 — The politics in China in regards to the grander bargain and the decentralization of exchanges 

1:05:43 — The disbandment of the CSCPRC and the reinvention of the NCUSCR 

1:08:58 — Pete’s suggestion for continuing academic and cultural exchange 

1:12:51 — How Pete got interested in such an American and China-centric topic 

1:18:02 — Pete’s current projects 

 Recommendations:

Pete: Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism by Wendy Cheng; Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim (also available as an audiobook read by the author) 

Kaiser: We Met in Beijing, a book of poems by Anthony Tao 

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This week on Sinica, in a show recorded on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions, historian Adam Tooze joins to chat about what the U.S. wants from China, China's vaulting green energy ambitions, and much more. Don't miss this episode: Tooze gets pretty darn spicy!

3:13 How Adam launched Chartbook in Chinese 

5:37 How Dalian and Beijing have changed since Adam’s last visit in 2019

9:01 What the West wants from China, the Thucydides Trap,

15:11 The trajectory of China’s economic development and why it’s hard for the West to reconcile with]

25:11 “Overcapacity” and the politics of renewable energy

31:00 Russo-Chinese relations and the war in Ukraine

37:12 The Global South and China since February 24th and October 7th and the importance of Africa with regards to global development 

41:39 Green energy as a driver of high-quality development in China 

47:49 The “Red New Deal” and the combination punch metaphor 

51:57 Adam’s cognitive style (an interrelated thinker averse to analogizing), climate as a touchstone topic, and China’s importance in global climate politics 

Recommendations:

Adam: The work of Lauri Myllyvirta, including his analysis on Carbon Brief

Kaiser: Rewatching The Wire TV series (2002-2008)

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This week on Sinica, Part 2 of the interview with anthropologist Stevan Harrell, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, about his magnum opus, An Ecological History of China. Be sure to listen to Part 1 first, as many important framing concepts are discussed in that episode!

1:44 “– The Four Horsemen of Ecopocalypse” and ecological disasters during the Mao period, and the story of the double-wheel, double-bladed plow

11:00 – The effect of the introduction of water systems and fertilizers on agricultural production 

21:03 – “The replumbing of China:” The South-North Water Transfer Project and the National Water Network

27:32 – Areas of progress: Air pollution and the energy mix 

32:48 – Areas lacking appreciable improvement: Soil contamination, water pollution, and flood vulnerability 

36:04 – Ecological civilization and breaking the binary between development and environmental protection

47:00 – Steve’s cognitive style: A fox of the two cultures

53:23 – nSteve’s views on authoritarian environmentalism 

58:46 – The Environmental Kuznets curve 

1:05:54 – A preview of Steve’s current book project about the Yangjuan Primary School in Liangshan 

Recommendations:

Steve: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories; Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook; and the 2023 film The Taste of Things, starring Juliette Binoche 

Kaiser: The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad 

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This week on Sinica, Part 1 of a two-part podcast with Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Washington. Steve's groundbreaking book An Ecological History of Modern China represents the culmination of a professional lifetime of work in disparate fields. It synthesizes ideas from geography, earth science, biology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and more. It's a book that will make you change the way you think not just about China, but about history more broadly, and about resilience in natural and social systems. In this first part, we focus on some of the core framing concepts of the book and how Steve demarcates China in both space and time. Part 2 is next week!

5:01 How Steve thinks about ecological history and resilience theory/ecology in relation to Chinese history 

17:09 Social-ecological systems and the systems approach

24:46 The importance of etic and emic scale 

30:15 How diversity contributes to resilience 

36:18 The Malthus-Boserup Ratchet 

42:43 The importance of buffers 

51:24 The adaptive cycle 

55:41 Ecological buffers and the threats they face] in the major regions of China: China Proper, Zomia, and Chinese Central Asia 

1:06:28 Steve’s periodization of modern Chinese history from the perspective of ecological history 

Recommendations at the end of Part 2 next week!

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This week on Sinica, the highly-regarded writer Peter Hessler joins to talk about his new book, out July 9: Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. Over 20 years after teaching with the Peace Corps in Fuling (the subject of his first book, Rivertown, Pete returns to China to teach at Sichuan University in Chengdu. He writes about the two cohorts of students, with whom he has maintained extensive contacts, to offer fascinating insights into how China has changed across this momentous period with touching, deeply human stories.

3:47 – Why Pete couldn’t teach in Fuling again

6:56 – How Pete stayed in touch with his Fuling cohort 

9:46 – Pete’s SCUPI [(Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute)] cohort 

13:51 – Pete’s Fuling cohort 

19:35 – Chinese rural values: pragmatism and modesty

23:08 – The physical and psychological differences between the Fuling and Chengdu cohorts 

29:32 – “Educated acquiescence” in the Chinese education system 

35:07 – The Hessler family’s experience with Chengdu Experimental Primary School

43:04 – The impending lack of “Country feel,” and Pete’s sense of humor 

47:02 – Facing criticism over his reporting during the pandemic  

52:13 – Pete’s experience being jǔbào’ed and teaching Orwell’s Animal Farm 

59:01 – Pete’s take on the COVID origins debate

1:02:10 – Competition and authoritarianism in China, and the phenomenon of Chinese and Chinese American Trump supporters 

1:06:57 – Serena’s investigation for Chángshì and why Pete’s contract was not renewed 

1:15:28 What’s next for Pete 

Recommendations:

Pete: Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux, a forthcoming novel about George Orwell’s time in Burma as a policeman; Burmese Days by George Orwell 

Kaiser: the Meta Quest VR headset 

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This week on Sinica, a conversation that I moderated on May 30th called “Assessing the Impact of US-China Rivalry on Ukraine and Taiwan,” put on by the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China. The main organizer was my friend Vita Golod, who is the chair of the Ukrainian Association of Sinologists.

The panelists are:

• Dmytro Burtsev, a Junior Fellow at A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
• Da Wei, Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy and Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University.
• Emilian Kavalski, Professor at the Centre for International Studies and Development at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
• I Yuan, Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taiwan.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Jonathan Chatwin, author of a new book about Deng Xiaoping's "Southern Tour" of early 1992 — a pivotal event that renewed a commitment to economic reforms after they'd stalled following 1989, and seized the initiative from conservatives in the Chinese leadership. The book is called The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future.

2:10 – Why Jonathan focused on the Southern Tour, and the narratives surrounding it in China

7:19 – How the events of ’89 influenced Deng’s thinking 

11:08 – How the political fates of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang affected Deng’s planning 

14:31 – The reformers’ path to victory from the second half of ’89 to January of ’92

20:32 – Deng’s vision of opportunity in the face of communism’s apparent global retreat

24:53 – How Deng’s personal experiences shaped his policy decisions 

27:07 – The strategic signaling and risky timing of the Southern Tour 

34:07 – The influence of the Chinese horoscope, and “The Story of Spring”

37:33 – Shenzhen speed 

40:57 – What Jonathan learned about Deng Xiaoping 

45:00 – Jonathan’s recommendations for learning more about Deng Xiaoping and the post-Mao era 

46:18 – Xi Jinping, the “end” [not sure how to phrase] of Deng’s reform and opening era, and the [parallels with the?] Chinese economic situation today 

Recommendations

Jonathan: China’s Hidden Century, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell, produced to accompany the British Museum’s exhibition by that name; and the app Voice Dream, a text-to-speech reader 

Kaiser: Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, a book about the group of German Romantics gathered in Jena, Germany 

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser is joined by old friend Ed Lanfranco, who lived in Beijing from 1988 to 2009. An inveterate packrat, Ed managed to accumulate an incredible trove of documents, maps, photos, and ephemera from his years there and from the decades and even centuries before his arrival. Ed talks about his collection, and invites scholars interested in his material to get in touch!

2:46 – Ed’s time in China and saving ephemera 

11:47 – Ed’s favorite old Chinese brands 

14:41 – Ed’s map collection 

19:34 – The Tiananmen incident of 1976, Ed’s collection of unpublished photographs from the Panjiayuan Antique Market, and a leaflet from April 7th, 1976 

30:40 – Ed’s patriotic music record collection 

33:28 – Ed’s U.S.-China collection 

38:00 – The story behind Ed’s U.S.-China panda button from 2002 

43:18 – Ed’s Tiananmen ’89 story and collection of leaflets and files 

50:56 – The Underground City of Beijing tour 

53:50 – Ed’s SARS 2003 epidemic experience and artifacts

Recommendations:

Ed: Roger Garside’s Coming Alive: China After Mao; Lin Yutang’s works, especially My Country and My People and The Importance of Living

Kaiser: The Rochester-based progressive metal trio Haishen’s new album, Awaken the Endless Deep 

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This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to welcome — my brother! Jay Kuo is a Broadway writer & producer, and the man behind the terrific U.S. politics-focused Substack newsletter The Status Kuo. In a previous life, from 1996 to 2000, he was also really active in Beijing's gay community, just at the time when homosexuality was being decriminalized and was stepping out of the shadows. We talk about how it all took off. Jay also puts on his other hat to talk about how China figures into American politics with the election less than five months away, and about the legal standing of the TikTok divest-or-ban law.

4:54 – The gay community in Beijing in the ‘90s, and the Half-and-Half bar in Sanlitun 

16:06 – How the gay community in Beijing changed after two major rulings 

27:33 – The end of the “golden era” for the gay community in China

36:26 – Progress and its drivers and obstacles

42:28 – Jay’s “China priors”

50:41 – The issue of China in the upcoming U.S. presidential election 

 57:08 – The TikTok ban bill 

Recommendations: 

Jay: The TV series Manhunt (2024), available on Apple TV

Kaiser: The TV series The Sympathizer (2024), available on HBO; the audiobook of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, narrated by François Chau 

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