Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Stephanie Studer, China correspondent for The Economist, who recently published a special report in the magazine about China’s “Post-90s” generation; and with Alec Ash, author of the book Wish Lanterns, which looks at a cohort of Chinese youth born between 1985 and 1990. The two explore the apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, the cosmopolitanism and socially progressive attitudes of young Chinese today and, on the other, their increasingly assertive national identity. 

9:15: Social liberalism and nationalism

10:55: Less impressed by the west

27:38: China’s millennials and their western counterparts

38:06: A progressive generation and regressive regime 

43:12: How state actors affect post-90’s discourse

Read more about China’s new youth here on SupChina, by Alec Ash. 

Recommendations:

Stephanie: Frank Dorn’s jigsaw map of 1936 Beijing, available on the Beijing Postcards website.

Alec: He recommends traveling to Dali, Yunnan, as well as trying the provincial cuisine. 

Kaiser: The column Beijing Lights, published on the Spittoon Collective website.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Deborah Seligsohn, who served as the State Department’s Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007. She is now an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia, where she currently teaches a course on pandemics and politics. She recalls her firsthand experience with China’s SARS response in 2003, shares her views on how much China improved in the intervening years, and talks about how, when, and why China mishandled its initial response to the novel coronavirus in the winter of 2019–2020. Deborah also offers her critical perspective on the persistent “lab-leak” theory.

This show was recorded on March 12, with an addendum recorded on March 29, in which Deborah addresses some of the news relating to the search for COVID’s origins that came out in the intervening weeks.

6:50: Understanding the origins of COVID-19

34:16: Chinese scientists’ unwillingness to share data 

43:54: The World Health Organization’s handling of the virus

54:36: The lab-leak theory

Recommendations:

Deborah: Coronation, by Ai Weiwei, and the podcast In The Bubble: From The Frontlines.

Kaiser: The rise of made-in-China diplomacy, Peter Hessler’s latest piece in The New Yorker.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Ryan Hass, the Michael H. Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute, a senior adviser at the Scowcroft Group and McLarty Associates, and the China Director at the National Security Council during the second Obama administration. Ryan’s new book, Stronger: Adapting America's China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence, lays out a great approach to right-sizing the challenges that China poses in the decades ahead and identifies a set of sensible U.S. responses: running faster instead of trying to trip the other guy, regaining confidence and avoiding declinism and defeatism, and not turning China into an enemy. 

4:42: Differences in Biden and Trump administrations

25:37: How interdependence with China raises American interests

29:31: A firm and steady approach to America’s foremost competitor

43:54: Risk reduction and crisis management vis-à-vis China

Recommendations:

Ryan: Any publication by William J. Burns, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Kaiser: Works by Susan B. Glasser, particularly those narrated by Julia Whelan.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ex-venture capitalist Lillian Li, who moved to China from the U.K. last year and has been looking at China’s tech ecosystem from a unique perspective — combining an investor’s eye, an academic background studying development, a grounding in Chinese language and culture, and a comparative instinct. Lillian shares her views on how technology platforms have become institutions, how the U.S. and China have responded to this development in starkly different ways, and the major features that distinguish the technology ecosystems of the West and China. 

10:19: Waiting on the next era of technology

25:06: The challenges faced by institutions

34:48: The future of the tech-government relationship

39:44: Two parallel worlds, China and the U.S. 

47:10: Scale is no longer guaranteed

Recommendations: 

Lillian: But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, by Chuck Klosterman. 

Kaiser: Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

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In August 2020, the CGTN anchorwoman Chéng Lěi 成蕾, an Australian citizen, was detained in Beijing. Six months later, she was formally arrested and charged with violations of China’s expansive state secrets law. This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with ABC reporter Bill Birtles (whose involuntary departure from China was linked to Cheng Lei’s case), longtime Beijing-based Financial Times correspondent Lucy Hornby, and Chinese law specialist Donald Clarke, a professor of law at George Washington University, about the case and its relation to the deterioration of ties between Beijing and Canberra.

12:19: What we know about Cheng Lei’s time in detention

21:18: Reciprocal hostage taking, or something else?

25:00: Dawn raids on Chinese journalists in Australia

34:42: The public response to Cheng Lei’s arrest

Recommendations:

Lucy: Revolutions, a history podcast exploring political revolutions, hosted by Mike Duncan. 

Don: The Construction of Guilt in China: An Empirical Account of Routine Chinese Injustice, by Yu Mou, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zachary D. Carter, and the search software X1.

Bill: The politics of being Chinese in Australia, a comprehensive survey of attitudes and experiences of the Chinese-Australian community, by Jennifer Hsu. 

Kaiser: The British History Podcast, hosted by Jamie Jeffers.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to talk about the faulty assumptions that American analysts and policymakers continue to make about politics in China — and the flawed policy built on those problematic assumptions. Despite much recent academic research into the behavior of authoritarian states that offer better models for understanding China’s politics, several older and less accurate heuristics persist. Jude deftly skewers these and offers useful approaches to thinking about Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 and the CCP leadership. 

4:57: “Collapsism” and China’s political system

10:45: The shortcomings of engagement with China

24:21: “Xi besieged” 

34:26: The “hidden reformer” fallacy

Recommendations:

Jeremy: The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease, by Charles Kenny, and The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority, by Sean R. Roberts.

Jude: Cabin Porn: Inspiration for Your Quiet Place Somewhere, by Steven Leckart and Zach Klein. 

Kaiser: Two essays by Thomas Meaney: The canonization of Richard Holbrooke and The limits of Barack Obama’s idealism.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Julie Klinger, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware’s Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, about rare earths — a family of 17 elements that are essential to the function of modern industry and are indispensable in everyday technology. Julie debunks many of the myths surrounding China and rare earths, and lays out her ideas about why, despite the relative ubiquity of mineable rare earth deposits, China has dominated production of these vitally important minerals for decades. 

3:00: Debunking conventional wisdom on China and rare earths

9:55: What are rare earths and how important are they

21:30: How China’s near-monopoly on rare earths came to be

32:49: Mining and environmental degradation

45:32: China’s decision to slow down rare earth production and its consequences

Recommendations:

Julie: Going outside for the sake of going outside, and The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life, by Jamie Lorimer.

Kaiser: “The chip choke point,” by Tim De Chant, in The Wire China (listen to the article on China Stories).

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Wall Street Journal correspondent Te-Ping Chen to talk about her just-released collection of short fiction, Land of Big Numbers: Stories. Featuring 10 short stories all set in China or featuring Chinese characters, it showcases both the author’s keen eye for detailed observation and her imaginative powers and offers an unfailingly empathetic look at China from a wide range of disparate angles. Te-Ping even reads a passage from one short story, “Lulu,” which was previously published in The New Yorker.

10:51: A real-life inspiration for her fiction

28:30: A reading from “Lulu”

37:10: The cultural disconnect between China and the U.S.

43:16: Te-Ping’s writing and publishing process

Recommendations:

Te-Ping: A short story collection titled What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah, and My Country and My People, from a collection of essays from the 1930s by Lín Yǔtáng 林语堂.

Kaiser: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with three of the guests in a remarkable room on the drop-in voice chat app Clubhouse, which ran for 14 hours on Saturday, February 6. The room, called “Is there a concentration camp in Xinjiang?,” brought thousands of listeners from China and around the world to talk about the ongoing extralegal internment of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. We spoke with the Han Chinese filmmaker who started the room (and wishes to remain anonymous); one of the main moderators, the journalist Muyi Xiao of the New York Times; and Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur attorney in the U.S. whose brother, a successful tech entrepreneur, has been put in the camps and has been incommunicado for three years.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: The Ministry for the Future: A Novel, by Kim Stanley Robinson. 

Rayhan: The Queen’s Gambit, available on Netflix.

Muyi: A type of Wuhan hot dry noodle: 想念武汉热干面 (xiǎngniàn wǔhàn règānmiàn), available for purchase on Yamibuy. 

L: The 2012 film No, directed by Pablo Larraín.

Kaiser: The book Land of Big Numbers: Stories, by Te-Ping Chen.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks with Dan Wang, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, who also contributes a regular opinion column to Bloomberg. Combining firsthand knowledge of China’s tech sector with broad erudition and a humanist’s perspective, Dan offers a unique take on China’s innovation ecosystem, the country’s efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in technology, and the role of economic growth, fundamental optimism, and inspiration in China’s rise as a tech power.

13:53: The outsize importance of economic growth

25:02: An overemphasis on digital technology

33:55: Reciprocity and technological codependence 

49:12: Technology is more than just tools and patents

Recommendations:

Dan: The works of Marcel Proust, and the ham and mushrooms of Yunnan Province. 

Kaiser: The Netflix series Flavorful Origins and Great State: China and the World, by Timothy Brook.

Read Dan's 2020 annual letter: http://danwang.co/2020-letter/

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