This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Thomas Pepinsky and Jessica Chen Weiss, both professors of government at Cornell University, about their recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Clash of Systems? Washington Should Avoid Ideological Competition With Beijing.” In that essay, they argue that, despite all the talk of Chinese authoritarianism as an existential threat to American democracy, Beijing is mostly on the defensive, and does not seek to export its political system. This is not to say that American democracy is not under threat: It very much is — but not from China. Tom, a specialist on Southeast Asia, looks at the ASEAN countries and their relations with Beijing to show that ideological affinity is not a predictor of close ties to China. And Jessica offers an update to her influential 2019 essay on China’s effort to “make the world safe for autocracy.”

8:08: Defining ideology and ideological competition 

19:57: Beijing’s transactional conduct with nations in Southeast Asia and the geostrategic implications

25:20: How the current rhetoric in the United States fuels Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism

36:01: China as the disgruntled stakeholder 

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

Recommendations:

Tom: The French television shows Lupin and The Bureau. 

Jessica: “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast interview with Jamila Michener, and anything written by Yangyang Cheng.

Kaiser: Music to read by: The Goldberg Variations (particularly the 1982 version performed by Glenn Gould and the version performed by Lang Lang), The Well-Tempered Clavier, and The French Suites, by Johann Sebastian Bach, and the YouTube series “What Makes This Song Great?,” by Rick Beato.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Isabella Weber, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, her book makes important contributions to our understanding of a critical period in China’s recent history: the decade of the 1980s, when a fierce debate between “package reformers” supporting sweeping price liberalization and gradualists who argued that state participation in the market was critical to dampen inflation and maintain social stability. And it sheds light on the run-up to the student-led demonstrations of 1989.

12:20: Debunking a conventional wisdom on China’s economy

22:05: The relationship between states and markets

40:01: A universal need for reform in the early 1980s

1:10:47: Student intellectuals in 1988 and the “full steam ahead” camp

Recommendations:

Isabella: The movie Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa and Cold War, directed by Paweł Aleksander Pawlikowski.

Kaiser: Assigned reading from Kaiser: The Chinese Communist Party: A Chinese Century in Ten Lives, edited by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Hans van de Wen.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by historian Timothy Cheek of the University of British Columbia, political scientist Elizabeth Perry of Harvard, and our very own Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of SupChina, in a wide-ranging discussion of the Chinese Communist Party on the occasion of its 100th birthday. The three each contributed chapters to a new volume called The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in 10 Lives, edited by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mülhahn, and Hans van de Ven. Don’t miss this one!

8:59: Cosmopolitan traditions within the CCP

13:10: Continuity and change within the Party

20:19: The oscillations between flexibility and rigidity

34:25: Intellectuals and their relationship with the Party

50:37: Wang Guangmei and the Peach Garden Experience

A

full transcript of this episode is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: The Dairy Restaurant, by Ben Katchor. 

Elizabeth: Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement, by Cheng Li, and The Wuhan Lockdown, by Yang Guobin.  

Timothy: The Internationale, performed by heavy metal band Tang Dynasty. 

Kaiser: The July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, especially the pieces by Wang Jisi and Yan Xuetong.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yong Cai, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This episode — the first in-person interview since February 2020 — looks at the results of China’s 2020 census, the announcement of the much-maligned “three-child policy” that the Chinese government proclaimed shortly after the results of the census were released, and other measures the Chinese leadership is considering to avoid the demographic crisis it now faces.  

6:55: China’s top-heavy demographic structure

20:38: Techno-optimism and its impact on the declining workforce

30:18: Implications for women in family planning

38:53: An alternative approach to inclusive population studies

Recommendations:

Yong Cai: A Village With My Name: A Family History of China's Opening to the World, by Scott Tong. 

Kaiser: The Kominsky Method, available on Netflix, and All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel, by Anthony Doerr.

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Shortly after Deborah Seligsohn was last on Sinica, in April, the lab leak hypothesis seemed suddenly to gain traction — at least in American media. This week, Kaiser invites Deborah back to the show to talk about why the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a notion long regarded by virologists as less probable than zoonotic transmission, has burst back into the conversation. Deborah served as the State Department’s Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007. She is an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia. 

3:00: The persistence of the lab leak theory

11:40: Navigating the political and institutional landscape within China 

25:36: A view from Beijing’s perspective

31:02: Eliciting cooperation from Beijing, and what should our priorities be

Recommendations:

Deborah: The podcast This Week in Virology, particularly episodes 760 and 762, which touch on the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Kaiser: Richard L. Watkins, a candidate running for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andrew Jones, a Helsinki-based reporter who over the last several years has secured a place as the go-to English-language journalist covering China’s space program. With the successful arrival of the Tianwen spacecraft in Martian orbit and the deployment of the Zhurong Mars rover, China is catching up quickly with NASA in space exploration milestones. But China’s space program also comes in for criticism for its opacity and for potentially dangerous practices — like the uncontrolled reentry of a large Long March 5B rocket in early May. Andrew gives the latest on China’s outer-space ambitions, including planned missions to Jupiter’s outermost Galilean moon, Callisto, and beyond the edge of our solar system.

7:09: A look at the China National Space Administration

13:02: Major missions done by China’s space program

24:31: U.S. hesitance toward space collaboration with China

48:39: China’s private space companies

52:53: Potential future Chinese space missions

Recommendations:

Andrew: The TV series The Expanse, available on Amazon Prime Video, the FIRST UP daily newsletter from Space News, the Axios Space newsletter, and the podcast Moonrise by the Washington Post.

Kaiser: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yingyi Ma, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University and the author of the book Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education. Yingyi’s book, which focuses on the specific experiences of Chinese undergraduates, examines the push-and-pull factors that have made studying abroad — and studying in the U.S. in particular — a “new education gospel” for many parents in China. She discusses why after 2006 Chinese students surged into American colleges and universities, and how despite their eagerness to build “cosmopolitan capital” by studying in the U.S., they’ve faced challenges in navigating American higher education.

6:56: A duality of ambition and anxiety

13:00: “Cosmopolitan capital” and globalization

39:57: The sacrifices made by Chinese families and researchers

43:58: American higher education and Chinese undergraduate students

46:14: With regard to education, the grass is always greener on the other side

Recommendations: 

Yingyi: Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, and the popular Chinese-language podcast Story FM. 

Kaiser: The app Weee!, specializing in Asian and Hispanic food delivery.

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Have China and Russia entered into a de facto anti-American alliance? Is Russia, which in Soviet days was for a time the “older brother” to Mao’s China, now comfortable with playing junior partner to Xi’s China? And has the United States, which in its opening to China demonstrated formidable acuity in managing the “strategic triangle,” now jettisoned that model and its logic? This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Ali Wyne, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's Global Macro practice, to discuss the motivations, the capabilities, and the strategies of Beijing and Moscow in their dealings with Washington — and with each other.

3:54: What of the rules-based international order?

15:04: The relationship between China and Russia

27:35: Inflection points in the early 2000s

48:52: Strategies and tactics employed by China and Russia 

Recommendations:

Ali: Stronger: Adapting America's China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence, by Ryan Hass, and the documentary series Chasing Life, by Sanjay Gupta. 

Kaiser: The audiobook for The Committed, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and narrated by Francois Chau.

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Veteran China scholar Orville Schell has written a dozen books on China, but his latest book — which Schell published at the age of 80 — is his first novel. My Old Home: A Novel of Exile is a bildungsroman that follows the life of Li Wende and his father, Li Shutong, from the early days of the Cultural Revolution to the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989. This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Orville about the windows on China that nonfiction is unable to open but that fiction can; the challenges of writing a novel after a lifetime of publishing nonfiction; and continuity and change in modern Chinese history. 

Recommendations:

Orville: The works of the famous writer and essayist Lu Xun, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei (set for release in November 2021), and Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China, by Lian Xi.  

Kaiser: Interior Chinatown: A Novel, by Charles Yu.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Margaret (Maggie) Lewis, a professor of law at Seton Hall University, about her work on the U.S. Department of Justice’s “China Initiative.” Launched under former attorney general Jeff Sessions in November 2018, the China Initiative sought to bring criminal cases against perpetrators of industrial espionage benefiting China, but as Maggie argues, it has in fact resulted in discriminatory ethnic profiling and the criminalization of what she calls “China-ness.” Listen to the end to hear Kaiser’s impression of Cookie Monster as a death metal vocalist.

8:24: Viewing China as an existential threat

17:44: Where the framing and implementation of the China Initiative falls short

28:11: Prosecuting “China-ness”

37:38: The impact on American competitiveness

Recommendations:

Maggie: What Do You Do With an Idea?, What Do You Do With a Problem?, and What Do You Do With a Chance?, by Kobi Yamada; also, Beautiful Oops!, by Barney Saltzberg. 

Kaiser: The album Blackwater Park, by the Swedish progressive metal band Opeth.

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