This week on Sinica, Jeremy and Kaiser chat with Jackson Miller, a master’s candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s public policy program. Jackson’s research of illegal trade in Malagasy hardwood led him to discover the bizarre story of Gao Jose Ramaherison — an unemployed man from Liaoning, China, who parlayed his kung-fu skills into political prominence in Madagascar. Recommendations: Jeremy: Recommends that everyone should visit Madagascar, especially for its beautiful and diverse natural environment. He recommends Ile Sainte Marie, an island off the east coast of Madagascar. Jeremy also recommends visiting a bunch of islands near Madagascar before they are all underwater: Comoro Islands, to the northwest of Madagascar, along with Mauritius and the Seychelles. Jeremy also likes the weird Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch and his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. The Twitter account @artistbosch highlights particular parts of this and other paintings by Bosch in bite-sized pieces. Jackson: Joe Studwell’s Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Also, the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief, a fantastic weekly newsletter that gives you a rundown of the big stories from all across Africa every Sunday morning, as well as a schedule of events for tech conferences and more, plus music recommendations. Kaiser: Recommends taking up a new instrument in middle age. With Youtube, there’s no shortage of convenient ways to learn the basics — Kaiser picked up a used drum kit and has been bashing away at it for a while now.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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 bring you part 3 of Kaiser and Jeremy’s interview with Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (see part 1 here, and part 2 here). In the final stretch of the conversation, Ambassador Freeman talks about U.S.-China military cooperation in the 1980s and discusses some aspects of that cooperation that might really surprise you. He also shares his unconventional take on the “three Ts” — Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen. Recommendations: Jeremy: Maka Angola, a website “dedicated to the struggle against corruption and to the defense of democracy in Angola,” which has recently been covering the scandals of Isabel dos Santos, the richest woman on the African continent. See this article from July 23 — Isabel dos Santos: The fall of Africa’s richest woman — and also a Financial Times lunch series piece from 2013 on dos Santos here (paywall). Chas: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard, and a series of seven books on Julius Caesar — here is a link to the first one — by Colleen McCullough. Chas finds much about the collapse of the Roman republic and the rise to autocracy of Julius Caesar “relevant to our current situation.” Jeremy mentions that Mary Beard also edited a series called “Wonders of the World,” of which the entry on the Forbidden City by Geramie Barmé is “the single best thing to read” about the subject. Kaiser: AliExpress, the Alibaba site where you can buy a huge range of products directly from China for surprisingly cheap.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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

This week, Kaiser and Jeremy continue their conversation with Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (see part 1 here), and focus on how he got interested in China, his fascination with the Chinese language, his early diplomatic career, his extraordinary experience as chief interpreter during Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, and his prescient predictions of how China would evolve after the normalization of relations with the U.S. Stay tuned for the third part of this interview, coming next week!

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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

Few living figures of U.S.-China relations are as legendary as Charles W. "Chas" Freeman, Jr., the chief interpreter for Richard Nixon’s world-changing 1972 visit to China, and a former top American diplomat in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. On this, the first of a two-part Sinica interview, Chas Freeman discusses grand strategy — and the current “strategy deficit” — in U.S.-China relations, as well as technological innovation, nationalism, xenophobia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many other topics. Recommendations: While waiting for the next part of the interview, check out Ambassador Freeman’s book, Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, and also this extensive 1995 interview with Ambassador Freeman done by Charles Stewart Kennedy for The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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