Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes veteran Asia reporter Demetri Sevastopulo, who covers the U.S.-China relationship for the Financial Times. They discuss some of Demetri's scoops, like the news that Vladimir Putin had requested military aid from Xi Jinping, leaked just before National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's meeting in Switzerland with State Councillor Yang Jiechi and just three weeks after Russia's invasion; and the news that China had tested a hypersonic glide craft in October of last year. But the focus of the discussion is on the Biden administration's China policy and its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — an Asia strategy that, by all accounts, has met with a tepid response in the region.

1:47 – How Demetri landed a beat as U.S.-China relations correspondent

5:24 – How the FT scooped the story on Putin's military assistance request to Xi Jinping in March 2022

12:05 – The Chinese hypersonic glidecraft

24:42 – The DC China policy scene: A dramatis personae

40:11 – The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework: all guns and no butter

52:54 – The Quad and AUKUS: American-led security arrangements

A full transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com

Recommendations

Demetri: Gunpowder, an Irish gin from County Leitrim; and Roku, a Japanese whiskey by Suntori

Kaiser: Chokepoint Capitalism, a forthcoming book on how monopolies and monopsonies are ruining culture, by Rebecca Gilbin and Cory Doctorow

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Mark Leonard, founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author most recently of The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict. Mark talks about how despite the bright promise that increasing connectedness — whether in trade, telecommunications, or movements of individuals — would usher in a world of better mutual understanding and enduring peace, the reality is that this connectedness has made the world more fractured and fractious. He explains how the three "empires of connectivity" — the U.S., China, and the EU — each leverage their extensive connectivity to advance their own interests. He also unpacks his assertion that the world is coming to share China's longstanding ambivalence toward connectedness.

1:05 – Kaiser tells how researching an abortive book project presaged Mark's conclusion that familiarity can breed contempt

7:58 – How Mark came to be a deep ambivalence about connectivity

16:03 – The three "empires of connectivity" and how they leverage or weaponize connectivity

31:41 – How all the connected empires are taking on "Chinese characteristics"

41:41 – How the Russo-Ukrainian War fits into Mark's framework in the book

51:49 – Chinese intellectuals and the shift in their thinking

A full transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Mark: Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History by Zhang Feng

Kaiser: "A Teacher in China Learns the Limits of Free Expression," the latest piece by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker; and the Israeli spy thriller Tehran on AppleTV.

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This week on Sinica, Deborah Seligsohn returns to the show to talk about the sad state of U.S.-China scientific collaboration. As the Science Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007 — arguably the peak years for collaboration in science — she has ample firsthand experience with the relationship. Debbi, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia, sees the U.S. decision to dismantle what was a diverse and fruitful regime of collaboration as a consequence of the basic American conception of the relationship: our tendency to see that relationship as one of teacher and student. She also argues that the American obsession with intellectual property protection is fundamentally misguided and inapplicable to scientific collaboration, which rarely deals with commercial IP.

3:15 – The rationale for prioritizing U.S.-China scientific collaboration in the 1970s

9:11 – A highlight reel of Sino-American scientific collaboration across four decades

31:03 – The stubborn American belief that freedom and democracy are necessary — or even sufficient — conditions for technological innovation

39:37 – The price we've paid and will continue to pay for the collapse of collaboration

44:00 – The end of collaboration and the DOJ's "China Initiative"

48:17 – How to rebuild the U.S.-China scientific partnership

A full transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Deborah: A Buzzfeed story by Peter Aldous about the strange origins of the "lab-leak theory" in the right-wing of the animal rights activist community; and two podcasts — Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast and the Brookings podcast by David Dollar, Dollar and Sense.

Kaiser: The sci-fi thriller Severance on AppleTV.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined again by Yawei Liu, Senior Director for China at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia; and by Danielle Goldfarb, head of global research at RIWI Corp, an innovative web-based research outfit headquartered in Toronto. They discuss a survey commissioned by the Carter Center to look at Chinese attitudes toward the Russo-Ukrainian War: whether Chinese people believe supporting Russia to be in China's interest, what they believe China's best course of action to be, and whether they're aware of — and if so, whether they believe — disinformation pushed by Moscow about U.S.-run bio labs in Ukraine. Danielle also discusses other survey research that RIWI has conducted about China that relates to the war in Ukraine.

2:41 – Why public opinion still matters in authoritarian countries

5:35 – Has the debate over the Russian invasion of Ukraine been completely shut down in China?

12:17 – RIWI’s technology and survey methodology

18:47 – The Carter Center questionnaire and its results

28:05 – RIWI’s Military Conflict Risk Index, and the China-Taiwan results

35:26 – The puzzling correlation between education level and propensity to believe disinformation

42:00 – Popular attitudes about the relationships among Russia, China, and the U.S.

A transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com

Recommendations:

Yawei: How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions, by Luke Patey.

Danielle: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez.

Kaiser: Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser is joined by Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations and associate professor of political science at Boston University; and Manoj Kewalramani, chairperson of the Indo-Pacific Research Programme and a China studies fellow at the Takshashila Institution, a leading Indian public policy education center. They offer fascinating analysis and insight into the complex relationship between China and India in light of the Russo-Ukrainian War, as powerful and populous Asian nations caught between their commitments to Russia and their well-founded fear of alienating the West. Their predicaments, however, are about all they have in common: despite Chinese overtures, New Delhi and Beijing have too much historical baggage, too many open wounds, and visions for a post-war geopolitical map that are too divergent to allow them to make anything like common cause.

3:31 – Indian media positions, political elite takes, and popular opinion on the Russo-Ukrainian War

9:05 – Is there a partisan divide in India on the Ukraine War?

12:44 – Manoj's amazing potted history of Soviet/Russian relations with India, from 1947 to the eve of the war

29:38 – Manjari on how China figures into the Indo-Soviet/Indo-Russian relationship

35:33 – China as a factor in Indo-U.S. relations

43:17 – China's relative tone-deafness when it comes to India

55:56 – Sources of tension in the Russia-India relationship

A full transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com

Recommendations:

Manjari: Bridgerton on Netflix

Manoj: The 1995 Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

Kaiser: The high school comedy Metal Lords on Netflix; and Matt Sheehan, "The Chinese Way Of Innovation: What Washington Can Learn From Beijing About Investing In Tech" in Foreign Affairs

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Marina Rudyak, assistant professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg. She offers her unique perspective on the underlying tensions and potential conflicts between Russia and China, the "dialogue of the deaf" that was the China-European Union summit on April 1st, Beijing's failure to understand the European perspective on Ukraine, and China's diplomatic and developmental policies in the Global South.

4:41 – Marina's personal background and its relevance to our topic

6:53 – China and Russia are simpatico in Central Asia? Not so fast.

17:14 – Europe, China, and the national security lens

22:30 – China's goals with respect to Europe

30:32 – What went wrong at the April 1st summit between Beijing and Brussels?

41:37 – European and American efforts to counter China's presence in the Global South

A transcript of this interview is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Marina: Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, by Otto Scharmer

Kaiser: Robert Draper, "This Was Trump Pulling a Putin," in the New York Times Magazine; Fiona Hill, There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century; and Steven Johnson, "AI is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What it Says?" in the New York Times Magazine.

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The COVID lockdown in China's biggest city, Shanghai, hasn't been going exactly according to plan. This week on Sinica, we speak with our business editor Chang Che, who flew back to Shanghai in early March and emerged from quarantine just in time for "dynamic clearing." He gives us a first-hand look at the scramble for basic food, and offers his take on China's vaunted state capacity, the role of neighborhood committees in implementing central government policy, what went so badly wrong in Shanghai, and what lessons might be learned for the next Chinese city that sees an Omicron outbreak.

2:38 – Chang's experience of the lockdown

7:46 – The current mood in Shanghai

11:02 – Neighborhood Committees: the foot soldiers of pandemic prediction

14:00 – Explaining the relatively low rate of vaccination among the elderly in Shanghai

18:47 – The case for locking down Shanghai, and how they might have done it better

31:01 – The reputational damage to China

33:31 – Schadenfreude

41:04 – Why a state that can test 26 million in a day can't keep people fed

A transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Chang: Tokyo Vice on HBO Max

Kaiser: The National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, in a show taped on March 23, Chinese foreign policy expert Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, and former national intelligence officer for East Asia Paul Heer join Kaiser for a discussion of possible scenarios that China might face in the eventual aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

5:03 – The uncertain outcome of the war

10:06 – Russia as a pariah state

14:43 – Which is the junior partner, Russia or China?

17:17 – Can China impact the course of the war?

22:32 – The three levels of Chinese support for Russia

31:39 – What inducements could the U.S. offer China to move decisively away from Russia?

36:35 – Scenarios beyond the war: Pax Americana, the Extended Director's Cut; and the Law of the Jungle

40:43 – The West Divided, the Pivot Delayed

44:19 – Bandung II

51:01 – What about India?

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

Recommendations:

Yun: The Great Game In The Eurasia Continent by Fang Jinying

Paul: Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate by Mary Sarotte; and Nazis of Copley Square by Charles Gallagher

Kaiser: The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping's China by Kevin Rudd

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Susan Thornton, former Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and a veteran diplomat. Susan makes a compelling case for the importance of diplomacy in the U.S.-China relationship — and the alarming absence of real diplomacy over the last several years. She helps interpret American and Chinese diplomatic engagements over the Russo-Ukrainian War and assesses the prospects for China actually playing a role in negotiating an end to the conflict.

3:42 – What diplomacy is really all about, and why it's so conspicuously absent

7:32 – Does it make sense for the U.S. to expect Beijing to outright condemn the invasion?

10:40 – What should the U.S. actually expect from China?

13:55 – Is China willing and able to play a meaningful role as a mediator?

17:06 – What's up with the leaks?

21:32 – Reading the readouts

28:20 – What is China's optimal endgame here?

32:06 – China's "southern strategy"

34:50 – Do upcoming U.S. midterm and presidential elections matter to Beijing?

41:29 – What are we missing when we talk about China's perspectives on the war?

A full transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.com

Recommendations:

Susan: Butter Lamp, a short film directed by Hu Wei, nominated for Best Live Action Short at the 87th Academy Awards

Kaiser: Birria Tacos. Here's a good recipe! (These should come with a doctor's warning)

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This week on Sinica: Chén Dìngdìng 陈定定, professor of international relations at Jinan University in Guangzhou, offers his perspective on how Beijing views the war in Ukraine that began on February 24 with the Russian invasion. He concludes that while Beijing's short-term alignment with Russia is fairly locked in and unlikely to shift soon, the long-term prospects for the partnership are far less certain. Kaiser and Dingding discuss where Russian and Chinese worldviews are congruent, the unlikelihood that China will put itself forward as some kind of mediator in the war, and China's domestic considerations in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

4:37 – China's assessment of Russia's comprehensive national power

8:09 – Has the course of the war and Russian underperformance caused Beijing to recalibrate?

10:37 – When did the Sino-Russian convergence really happen?

24:47 – India and Vietnam as complicating factors in the Russo-Chinese relationship

27:26 – Does Xi's personal relationship with Putin matter?

29:16 – The leaks of alleged intel showing Russia asked for Chinese military assistance

38:23 – The significance of the Hu Wei essay calling for Beijing to break with Moscow over the war

46:38 – Domestic considerations

A transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations

Dingding: The late Ezra Vogel's Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Kaiser: Kingdom of Characters: the Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

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