Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, we present the first installment in a three-part series produced in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), highlighting the groundbreaking work of young social scientists who are focused on China. In this episode, Kaiser chats with Jennifer Pan, an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, about three of her research papers that illuminate different aspects of social control in the P.R.C.: the use of the dibao social welfare system, hiring decisions, and the use of clickbait headlines by government officials on social media.

Recommendations:

Jennifer: A series of escapist fiction by Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries.

Kaiser: Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, by Kurt Andersen.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at St. Cross College, Oxford, and director of the University of Oxford China Centre, about his new book, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism. The book is a meditation on how the evolving official narrative of World War II in contemporary Chinese political discourse shapes not only China’s domestic politics but its foreign policy as well.

8:51: What Chinese nationalism looked like before World War II

30:48: Shaping the narrative of China’s wartime experience

47:13: Giving China the postwar period it never had

57:55: Chinese public discussion about the war 

Recommendations:

Rana: The Sword and the Spear, by Mia Couto. 

Kaiser: How the coronavirus hacks the immune system, by James Somers, and the anti-superhero series The Boys, available on Amazon Prime.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Tobita Chow and Jake Werner about what a progressive U.S. policy toward China should look like. Tobita is the direc­tor of Jus­tice Is Glob­al, a spe­cial project of People’s Action that is build­ing a move­ment to cre­ate a more just and sus­tain­able glob­al econ­o­my and defeat right-wing nation­al­ism around the world. Jake is a Postdoctoral Global China Research Fellow at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center. He is currently researching the emergence of great power conflict between the U.S. and China following the 2008 financial crisis and how new strategies for global development could resolve those tensions. The three talk about whether the “tankies” bring anything to the conversation, whether a Biden presidency is likely to move U.S. policy off the current trajectory toward conflict with China, and how human rights should be considered in drafting progressive China policy.

3:58: Much ado about tankies

13:10: A worldwide shift toward authoritarianism

28:44: Imperialism — it’s complicated

33:31: Thoughts on a potential Joe Biden presidency

36:32: Progressive globalization

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Recommendations:

Tobita: The album Fantasize Your Ghost, by Ohmme, and Punisher, by Phoebe Bridgers.

Jake: The Made in China Journal. Also, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, by Herbert Marcuse.   

Kaiser: The show Raised by Wolves, available on HBO Max.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the Los Angeles–based film producer Peter Shiao about his vision of bringing wuxia 武侠 — a genre that tells stories of chivalrous martial artists with supernatural abilities — to global audiences through comics, graphic novels, and films. The son of renowned martial arts novelist Shiao Yi (蕭逸 Xiāo Yì), who passed away in 2018, Peter wants to create a wuxia storyverse that will be to Chinese martial arts literature what the Marvel Comics Universe has been to the superhero genre. Read more about Peter’s Immortal Studios at https://www.immortal-studios.com/.

8:34: Bringing wuxia to mainstream audiences

12:27: Wuxia as a contribution to global pop culture

18:11: Chronicles of the Immortal Swordsmen 

28:30: Regional differences in wuxia writing and appeal

Recommendations:

Peter: Visit Immortal Studios’ website here, and consider supporting the studio.

Kaiser: The 1997 TV miniseries Ivanhoe, featuring the late, great Christopher Lee, who plays the head of the Knights Templar.

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This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Sebastian Strangio, the Southeast Asia editor at The Diplomat, about his new book, In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century. The book examines how each of the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (except Brunei) has coped with China's rapid reemergence as a regional superpower, and offers superbly written on-the-ground reportage by a longtime resident of the region.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: The novel True Grit, by Charles Portis. 

Sebastian: The novel World of Yesterday, by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. 

Kaiser: The Swedish progressive metal supergroup Soen. Start with the album Lykaia.

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Since February, a series of tit-for-tat restrictions on and expulsions of journalists in the U.S. and China have resulted in the decimation of the ranks of reporters in the P.R.C. While the bureaus of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post remain open, they've had to make do with reduced staff and journalists reporting from outside of the Chinese mainland — in Taiwan and South Korea. Emily Feng, a reporter with National Public Radio (NPR), is one journalist who is still in Beijing. She tells us about how restrictions and expulsions have impacted morale and the ability to report on China.

16:58: Morale among foreign media reporters in China

26:29: Rising tensions and the U.S. strategy of reciprocity

33:33: Reporting from China under increasing pressure

36:08: Journalist expulsions and changing perceptions on China reporting

Recommendations:

Jeremy: A column by Alex Colville: Chinese Lives, featured on SupChina. Specifically, Jeremy recommends Mao’s ‘shameless poet’: Guo Moruo and his checkered legacy.

Emily: The Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. 

Kaiser: The China conundrum: Deterrence as dominance, by Andrew Bacevich.

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This week on Sinica, we discuss the controversy surrounding the decision by Beijing to selectively replace Mongolian-language instruction in schools in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with Mandarin — and how people both in Inner Mongolia and in Mongolia are pushing back. We're joined by Christopher Atwood, one of the nation's leading specialists in Mongolian history and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Christian Sorace, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado College.

7:28: A historical overview of Mongolian history through independence

19:03: The demography of Inner Mongolia

23:09: What the bilingual education policy would actually do

35:07: The impetus for pushing language policy

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Buying books from your local bookstore. He also recommends the website bookshop.org, which allows you to support local bookstores.

Christopher: Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow, and the album At Fillmore East, by the Allman Brothers Band. 

Christian: As a new father, he’s recommending a children’s book: Telephone Tales, by Gianni Rodari. 

Kaiser: The Vow, a true crime documentary series available on HBO Max.

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This podcast was recorded as part of the 2020 SupChina Women’s Conference on September 9, 2020. 

Susan Shirk, chair and research professor of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California, San Diego, is on Sinica this week. Jeremy, Kaiser, and Susan take a broad look at the bilateral relationship as the U.S. inches toward a presidential election in November.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: I’m doomsday prepping for the end of democracy by Farhad Manjoo, and We don’t know how to warn you any harder. America is dying., by Umair Haque.

Susan: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson and The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom. 

Kaiser: Is Russian meddling as dangerous as we think?, by Joshua Yaffa and How my mother and I became Chinese propaganda by Jiayang Fan.

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Jiayang Fan, friend of Sinica and staff writer for The New Yorker, joins Kaiser and Jeremy for a discussion on her recently published long-form piece, How my mother and I became Chinese propaganda. The three talk about the experiences that informed her writing, her mother, and how this piece has been received in the United States and abroad.

7:27: Drawing the ire from both sides of the discussion on China

28:48: The remembered sense of humiliation in Chinese history

33:49: Losing face, family, and Chinese culture

46:40: Sexism within online commentary

Recommendations:

Jeremy: A column by James Carter: This Week in China’s History, featured on SupChina.

Jiayang: Negroland: A Memoir, by Margo Jefferson. 

Kaiser: Dune, by Frank Herbert.

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Since 2010, the China in Africa Podcast has brought balanced, wide-ranging conversations about one of the most consequential developments in the global economy and geopolitics to a worldwide audience. Today, in honor of the 500th episode, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with the show’s co-founders, Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, about its history and the major trends in Sino-African relations that they've seen in a decade of focusing on China's expanding presence in Africa.

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10:43: Does Africa need aid or trade? 

18:21: Beware binary tropes on China-Africa relations

39:47: China’s high-risk vaccine diplomacy in Africa

45:03: How Chinese international development efforts are shifting away from sub-Saharan Africa

Recommendations:

Jeremy: I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, by Michela Wrong. 

Cobus: A partner of the China-Africa Project: the Africa-China Reporting Project at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, a source for investigative reporting on China-Africa issues. 

Eric: The Twitter feed of Gyude A. Moore, former Minister of Public Works in Liberia, and an article written by Moore in the Mail & Guardian titled A new cold war is coming. Africa should not pick sides. 

Kaiser: Avast, ye swabs. Kaiser is studying up on pirate lore. He recommends The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down, by Colin Woodard.

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