Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Henry Sanderson, a former AP and Bloomberg reporter who was based in China for many years, about his book Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green — a book that reminds us of the very ugly fact that the metals that are needed to make electric vehicle batteries need to be dug out of the earth, and processed in ways that are anything but environmentally friendly. Henry talks about China's outsize role in lithium, cobalt, and nickel processing, as well as some promising chemistries that allow for EV batteries without some of the problematic metals.

2:49 – China’s role in the EV battery supply chain

9:36 – Global Chinese investments in lithium mines

14:04 – Is cobalt a necessary evil?

18:56 – Can NGO pressure induce better corporate behavior in EV battery supply chains?

21:28 – How Indonesia used its nickel resources to attract Chinese FDI

26:17 – China’s efforts to innovate around scarce metals

32:08 – China’s metal processing industry: State- or market-driven?

36:06 – Lessons from Europe’s battery industry

40:42 – Electrification of two-wheeled vehicles

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: London Review of Books

Henry: The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung

Kaiser: Tracking the People’s Daily newsletter by Manoj Kewalramani

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

It's been one year now since Vladimir Putin launched his assault on Ukraine, and China has sought to maintain the same difficult, awkward straddle across a difficult year. Did Beijing's efforts to project the impression that it had distanced itself from Russia in the wake of the Party Congress mean anything? And how should the U.S. manage its expectations of what China can or will do? Evan Feigenbaum, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, joins us again as he did a year ago. We're also joined by his colleague Alexander (Sasha) Gabuev, who is a senior fellow at Carnegie, who headed the Carnegie Moscow Center until recently.

4:37 – Are Beijing’s actions surprising?

7:34 – The nature of China-Russia relations

15:45 – How has Beijing concretely supported Russia?

22:07 – Did Beijing know Putin was going to invade?

29:48 – European perspectives on the No Limits partnership

37:02 – Beijing’s assessment of Russia’s military performance

39:07 – What Beijing has learned from Russia’s invasion

46:47 – What carrots can the United States offer China?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Sasha:  Writing From Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965 by Mark Andryczyk

Evan: The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War,1916-1917 by Philip Zelikow

Kaiser: Jessica Chen Weiss on The Ezra Klein Show and The Problem With Jon Stewart; "Avoiding Catastrophe Will Be the True Test of Fractious U.S.-China Relations," an op-ed in the Financial Times by Jude Blanchette

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 Raffaello Pantucci, co-author of the 2022 book Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire, which examines China's presence in Central Asia. Based on extensive travel and interviews undertaken both before and after the tragic murder of his co-author, Alexandros Petersen, in 2014, the book is a highly readable if difficult to categorize melange of analysis and anecdote, history and travelogue, and it paints a complex portrait of China's extensive efforts to build out a network of commercial and cultural ties throughout the pivotal region.

3:48 – Remembering the late Alexandros Petersen

9:35 – Xinjiang’s importance in Beijing’s Central Asia policy

13:36 – Central Asian states’ reactions to Xinjiang internment camps

24:39 – Assessing China’s soft power in Central Asia

37:10 – BRI: strategic calculus or ad-hoc scramble?

43:32 – Evolution of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

49:45 – China’s characterization of terrorism

54:45 – The SCO today and China’s growing security footprint

1:03:03 – China in Afghanistan

1:10:36 – Current status of the BRI

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Raffaello: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan; The Geographical Pivot of History by Halford Mackinder

Kaiser: Volt Rush by Henry Sanderson

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

This week, we've got a short show focused on the Chinese balloon that became the obsessive focus of American attention from Thursday through Sunday, February 5, when an F-22 shot it out of the sky off of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Gerard DiPippo, a senior fellow with the Economics Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, joins to discuss the incident and its potential fallout.

We'll have the transcript for you on the website in a day or so.

2:27 –Establishing the facts about the Balloon

4:32 – Precedents for U.S. reactions to aerial surveillance

7:36 – Was the balloon’s flight path intentional?

9:34 – Why did the Pentagon go public?

13:26 – The thinking behind Blinken’s postponement

15:47 – Reactions in U.S. media

17:19 – Beijing’s perspective on the U.S. reaction

20:23 – How Gerard Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Balloon

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Gerard: The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present, by John Pomfret

Kaiser: Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations by Pete Millwood

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, our live recording from the Rizzoli Bookstore in the Flatiron district of Manhattan with the legendary Ian Johnson, who has covered China for a host of publications spanning 35 years. Ian, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, offers his analysis of media coverage, shares some pet peeves in the way China is reported, and offers a sneak peek at some of the themes of his forthcoming book.

4:31 – Beijing’s shifting diplomatic messaging

12:10 – U.S. media coverage of China’s COVID-19 policies

14:45 – Structural biases of reporting on/in China

24:05 – Reporting on China through social media

29:46 – Resisting and recasting the blob’s China narrative

39:52 – How think tanks affect China discourse in the U.S.

43:03 – The importance of history to the CCP

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Paul French's Ultimate China Bookshelf, a new feature at The China Project

Ian: Golden Age by Wáng Xiaǒbō 王小波, translated by Yan Yan; Blue Note jazz LP re-issues 

Kaiser: Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, narrated by Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini

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

When the National Bureau of Statistics recently revealed that China's population had shrunk in 2022 for the first time in 60 years, conventional wisdom predicted that China was headed for catastrophe, as its workforce shrank, its pension coffers dried up, and its healthcare system grew overtaxed. Not so fast, says Bert Hofman, who spent 22 years in Asia with the World Bank, focused chiefly on China. Now a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Government at the National University of Singapore, Bert offers a deeply-informed take on the challenges China does face — and how it might address them without suffering economic stagnation.

4:24 – Why population decline isn’t necessarily bad

5:55 – Why are low birth rates a challenge for China?

7:49 – How China can offset the “demographic tax” of population decline

13:40 – Is declining investment such a bad thing for China?

18:27 – Common prosperity and the pension system

23:45 – Challenges and solutions for healthcare reform

27:41 – The logic of beginning with fiscal reform

33:18 – The shortfalls of focusing on raising fertility rates

38:06 – What can China learn from other countries?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

Recommendations:

Bert: China Reconnects by Wang Gungwu; The Last of Us on HBO Max

Kaiser: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

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, we welcome back Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. Debbi spent October 2022 through early January 2023 in Shanghai and Beijing, experiencing quarantine, testing, and lockdown at firsthand — and witnessing the protests and the sudden reopening. As a close observer of public health issues, she lends valuable perspective to what happened in these critical months.

8:13 – Overview of how zero-COVID impacted different demographics in China

17:54 – Which level of government was held accountable during the zero-COVID protests?

23:03 – Factors that contributed to the breakout of protests

29:05 – Rationale behind the sudden lifting of COVID regulations

38:17 – Assessing Beijing’s failure to effectively expand its medical capacity

45:45 – Efficacy of Chinese vaccines

49:45 – Understanding poor vaccination rate amongst the elderly population

55:45 – Breakdown of China’s COVID situation after the relaxation of zero-COVID measures

1:03:32 – Unpacking the new negative test requirements imposed on Chinese travelers

1:09:56 – Is China under-reporting its death rate?

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Debbi: two-part interview with Jesse Jenkins from the Volts Podcast, detailing the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS act, and the Infrastructure Bill

Kaiser: Demon Copperhead, the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver. A coming of age story set in Southern Appalachia.

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, we're proud to introduce you to Susan St. Denis, who joined The China Project full-time recently after running the China Vibe Official TikTok channel for The China Project for the last several months. Kaiser and Susan talk about what people are getting wrong about TikTok, the challenges of presenting complex issues in this medium, and much more!

1:01 – Introducing The China Project’s official TikTok channel: China Vibe TikTok

08:25 – Challenging the assumption that TikTok content is inherently dumbed down

12:13 – Why Susan’s content was a good fit for The China Project

14:30 – Unique challenges of covering China on TikTok

19:16 – Providing a balanced account within TikTok’s landscape of extreme views on China

21:52 – How different generations view China

28:35 – How to access Susan’s China TikTok content

29:39 – How legitimate are the security and privacy concerns surrounding TikTok?

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations – 

Susan: Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China by Han Suyin; The China America Student Conference (www.iscdc.org)

Kaiser: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford; and an ambivalent endorsement of the Conqueror series by Conn Iggulden.

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, we proudly present Episode 1 of the newest season of Strangers in China: Lockdown Part 1: A day in the life.

The 2022 Shanghai lockdown came to Clay’s neighborhood early and caught him off-guard. Struggling with his mental health, Clay documents how lockdown works on a granular level giving listeners an audio tour of his neighborhood as it plunges into the uncertainty of all the minutiae of day-to-day life living under the control of the apparatuses that shut down an entire city for several months. The boredom, the stress, the terror. He documents clashes with local bureaucracy and the ingenuity of the people of Shanghai who had to live through these dark and strange times. Clay ventures out into a city as it’s about to enter the full city lockdown and gives listeners a sense of what a city looks like before it's irrevocably changed. 

Music credits:

Csus

https://soundcloud.com/csus

Moss Heim-

https://soundcloud.com/mossheim-experimental/cutup-test-cycle-7000

Trey

https://soundcloud.com/tristan-phipps-1/trance

Jaies

https://soundcloud.com/jaiess

Bary

https://soundcloud.com/bary_is_cool

Ginger pitcher

https://soundcloud.com/gingerpitcherfredfroh

TDP-Experimental

https://soundcloud.com/user-99078702

Xxiuk

https://soundcloud.com/xxiuk

Lakey Inspired

https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

TazLazuli

https://soundcloud.com/tazlazuli

Terri skills

https://soundcloud.com/beatz-by-terri-skillz

Lofee

https://soundcloud.com/lofeetunes

Dr3am____

https://soundcloud.com/dr3am-official

Purrple Cat

https://soundcloud.com/purrplecat

Ye Old Experimental Junk

https://soundcloud.com/ye-old-experimental-junk

Le gang

https://soundcloud.com/thisislegang

Obani

https://soundcloud.com/obani

Jozwyn

https://soundcloud.com/jozwyn

MCV

https://soundcloud.com/just-chillin-654995634

Works consulted

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60893070

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-12/shanghai-residents-remain-largely-under-lockdown-despite-easing

https://isdp.eu/publication/xi-jinping-and-the-administrative-hierarchy-and-subdivisions-in-china/

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/elizabethperry/files/managed_campaigns_-_proofs.pdf

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178528.shtml

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1184356.shtml

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/694299

https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1209&context=psilr

https://www.smh.com.au/world/pocket-of-poverty-the-new-shanghai-has-left-behind-20121109-293dl.html

https://www.scmp.com/video/china/3187061/shanghais-old-west-gate-neighbourhood-emptied-demolition-and-redevelopment

https://academic.oup.com/columbia-scholarship-online/book/20259/chapter-abstract/179324873?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

The work of Michel Foucault

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

We proudly present Episode 1 of the new season of Strangers in China, part of the Sinica Network from The China Project. In this season, host Clay Baldo provides an intimate look at the lockdown in Shanghai, from the foreboding that preceded it through the harrowing days of the lockdown itself.

Be sure to subscribe to the show, too! Just look up Strangers in China in your podcast app of choice and hit subscribe.

2:21 – A preview of this season of Strangers in China

8:23 – The Shanghai fāngcāng方舱 and emergence of spontaneous mass gatherings

13:28 – Explaining the role of neighborhood committees/ jūwěihuì 居委会 in China  

18:39 – The exploration of mental health throughout this podcast

24:21 – Clay’s process in producing the podcast

28:06 – The editorial choice to not dub over Chinese speakers 

31:29 – Can the protests like the one that broke out on Urumqi Lu emerge again?

37:15 – Examples of strong group solidarity during the lockdown

43:35 – Clay’s thoughts on the recent loosening of restrictions

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Clay: 3 Shanghai fashion Instagram accounts to follow – Windowsen (@windowsen), Susu, (@_su.su.su.su). Lexi (@jing_sen_); and the book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. 

Kaiser: The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson

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