Sinica Podcast

Outside observers typically view China’s media as utterly shackled by the bonds of censorship, unable to critique the government or speak truth to power in any meaningful sense. In part, this is true — censorship and other pressures do create “no-go” zones for journalists in China, as well as gray zones that sometimes rapidly turn red. But Maria Repnikova, a professor at Georgia State University, believes that the critical role of media in China is underappreciated. While allowing that “speaking truth to power” in the sense of a free press in a liberal democracy is obviously not how China works, many investigative journalists and journalist-intellectuals play a surprisingly active role in giving feedback and constructive criticism to the Party-state. Maria discusses this theory in her new book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism, for which she interviewed 120 sources — journalists, officials, and experts — to uncover exactly how the improvised “dance” of mutual feedback between the media and the government in China really happens. On Sinica, she discusses both this research and her work on Russia, comparing the management of media in both countries and questioning how we should understand the role of media in authoritarian countries in general. Recommendations: Jeremy: The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, by Hermann Giliomee, a fascinating history of the people who migrated to South Africa from the Netherlands, from the time that they arrived and began calling themselves African right to the end of apartheid. Maria: Losing Pravda: Ethics and The Press in Post-Truth Russia, by Natalia Roudakova, one of the best overviews of the delegitimization of media in Russia, from the Soviet period to the Putin period. Kaiser: Pop music of the late 1970s. Kick back, go on Spotify, and listen to some Billboard top 100 hits from ’77 to ’79. . Introducing SupChina Access, a membership program that gives you exclusive access to SupChina's digital newsroom, succinct summaries of the week in China, discounts on SupChina events, and more. Sign up here!

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China, as we say at the beginning of each Sinica Podcast episode, is a nation that is reshaping the world. But what does that reshaping really look like, and how does — and should — the world react to China’s role in globalization? Few are better placed to answer these questions than Kishore Mahbubani, a veteran former diplomat from Singapore who recently ended a stint as dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He remains on the faculty there but is taking a sabbatical, in part to write a book for Penguin UK titled Has the West Lost It? His most recent book was titled The ASEAN Miracle: A Catalyst for Peace. In this podcast, Kishore, as he often does, brings up a number of provocative ideas (read here a piece in the World Post last year in which he raises many of the same ideas), particularly for Americans. Among them: The most important event of 2001 was not the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. The U.S. and China are perfectly positioned for an infrastructure cooperation deal, but China’s communist identity, more than anything, makes such cooperation unthinkable. To address this psychological block, Americans — and all Westerners — should think of China’s government as led by the Chinese Civilization Party, not the Chinese Communist Party, because its goal is to revive Chinese civilization, not to export communism. If Americans don’t start preparing for a world in which they are the number two power, the political shock when it happens could very well lead to a president even more misguided than Trump. (Both the International Monetary Fund moving its headquarters to China and Chinese currency becoming the primary international reserve currency in the coming decades are inevitable, for example, Kishore argues.) Recommendations: Jeremy: A field guide to the wild birds of Beijing (北京野鸟图鉴 běijīng yěniǎo tújiàn), available only in Chinese. Kishore: A recommendation to visit Indonesia, what Kishore calls “one of the most underrated and underappreciated countries in the world.” A decade ago, it was hit hard by the financial crisis and many Westerners thought it would fracture as a country — but now, it is the most successful democracy in the Islamic world. Kaiser: A typically tongue-in-cheek tweet from New York Times reporter Chris Buckley, which purports to show how the Warring States–era political philosopher Han Feizi explained the selection process for the Politburo Standing Committee at the 19th Party Congress last fall.  

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Associated Press (AP) reporter Gerry Shih was hard at work in 2017 writing a remarkable series of articles on China’s Uyghur Muslim minority. By traveling not just to China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where 10 to 15 million Uyghurs live, but also to Syria, where some have fled and taken up arms with militant groups, he sought to answer the most politicized and consequential questions about the ethnic group. These include: How long and to what extent have authorities in Xinjiang forced Uyghurs into indoctrination camps? How long and to what extent have they compelled residents to give DNA samples to the state? What role has Chen Quanguo 陈全国 had in building Xinjiang’s new digital police state, and will he succeed in subjugating separatist thought? Are China’s Uyghurs involved in global jihadi terrorism? Where and how do they get recruited, and how does China try to influence Uyghurs overseas? His four articles released in December were as follows: December 17: In western China, thought police instill fear December 23: Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China December 28: China's crackdown on Uighurs spreads to even mild critics December 29: China's Uighurs work to fend off pull of jihad They are part of a larger AP series titled “China's Uighurs on edge,” comprising 12 stories that seek “to flesh out the profile of a people whose voices have largely been silenced or gone unheard under the blanket of security in the region.” They also were published around the same time that the Wall Street Journal (paywall) and BuzzFeed published similarly alarming stories about the police state in Xinjiang. For more on Muslims in China, check out a previous Sinica Podcast titled “Islamophobia in China, explained by Alice Su and Ma Tianjie,” and an article on SupChina that seeks to answer the question “Where does Chinese Islamophobia come from?” Recommendations: Jeremy: A re-recommendation for Birding Beijing, a great site if you’re interested in birds in China. It is now in the second year of tracking cuckoos who fly all the way from Africa to China to migrate. (Also listen to a Sinica Podcast and read a SupChina Q&A with the website’s founder, Terry Townshend.) Gerry: The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics, by Andrew Small of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. With Belt and Road’s rising importance, it is a must-read, Gerry says. Kaiser: Kialo.com, a place for online debate that’s supposed to help people bridge contentious issues. It enforces ground rules, limits the number of words you can use, and crowdsources the most compelling arguments on both sides for each claim.  

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Yukon Huang thinks that China’s economy is extremely unconventional. Unsurprisingly, then, that nearly all the conventional economic wisdom we hear about this economy — particularly the two hugely popular poles of opinion that treat it as either an unstoppable force or a crisis-in-waiting — is wrong. So goes the contrarian take of the former World Bank Director for China and Russia, who is now Senior Fellow in the Asia Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Huang detailed his thoughts on China’s economy is his most recent book, Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom Is Wrong. http://supchina.com/2017/10/24/cracking-the-china-conundrum-makes-bold-claims/ He sat down with Jeremy and Kaiser at SupChina’s NEXT CHINA Conference on January 17, and in this live podcast, answered provocative questions and defended surprising statements:  "Why is it that people think China's unbalanced growth is a risk, when it actually is a positive development?" "Why do people think [China] has a debt problem, when actually it's a sign of financial deepening?" "Why is it that corruption is seen as an impediment to growth, when in China actually it's been a booster to growth?" "We assume that the more innovative you are as a country, the faster you grow, when actually it's the opposite." Recommendations: Jeremy: The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power, a fantastic collection of essays by scholars at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, edited by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi. And radiooooo.com, a site you should definitely check out if you are a music lover. Yukon: The recent movie Hidden Figures, about black women mathematicians who worked for NASA in the 1960s. Kaiser: A two-part documentary on Channel NewsAsia called China on Film, a collection of the earliest footage ever shot in China, dating back to the last years of the Qing Dynasty.  

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This week on Sinica, we bring you a special preview of a new podcast called 996 Podcast with GGV Capital, which we are very excited to co-produce. Subscribe to the 996 Podcast here on iTunes, and here on Stitcher.  GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Jerry Yang, the founder and former CEO of Yahoo, who orchestrated arguably the best deal in tech history: In 2005, he arranged for Yahoo to invest $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in fledgling Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba at a post-money valuation of $5 billion. Today, Alibaba is worth almost half a trillion dollars. During the interview, Jerry conducts a postmortem for Yahoo’s China strategy, and offers advice for U.S. tech companies looking to expand into China. We’d love to hear your feedback! Please send comments and suggestions to [email protected].  GGV Capital also produces a weekly email newsletter in English, also called “996," which has a roundup of the week's most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com. The 996 podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital and co-produced by the Sinica Podcast. On this show, we interview movers and shakers of China's tech industry, as well as tech leaders who have a U.S.-China cross-border perspective. GGV Capital is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. It has been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs since 2000 from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, ecommerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 200 companies, including Airbnb, Alibaba, Ctrip, Didi, Domo, HashiCorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Slack, Square, Toutiao, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others, with 29 IPOs and 22 unicorns to date. Find out more at ggvc.com.

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China is a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) technology. If you had said that even five years ago — or in many circles, as recently as three years ago — you might have been laughed out of the room. But around the spring of 2015, a recognition of China’s progress in AI began to spread widely. As private companies have invested billions in research and the government has made it a top priority in the years since, that recognition has turned into shock and awe. This week on Sinica, Jeremy and Kaiser are joined by Jessi Hempel, a senior writer with Wired magazine who recently published an excellent piece titled “Inside Baidu’s bid to lead the AI revolution.” Jessi explains on Sinica how the smallest of the three big Chinese tech companies (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) is applying extraordinary talent to AI puzzles, and where its advantages and disadvantages lie in the revolutionary new world of Chinese AI research. Jeremy, Kaiser, and Jessi also discuss: Should we be afraid of our new robot overlords? Are Chinese less afraid of robot overlords than of Westerners? Why? What is the role of the Chinese government in AI research? Will SkyNet be real in China? What are the challenges in making new AI technology? Why does China have unique advantages in this field? Recommendations: Jeremy: Magpie Digest, a newsletter about contemporary China, written by a few ethnographers and social scientists. Jessi: Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart, by Rachel Botsman. It’s the best book that she’s read about understanding how the shift in tech is impacting the shift in organization. Also, it will help you understand bitcoin. Kaiser: The newly released audiobook narrated by Michael Page of The Long Ships, a famous Swedish story of 10th-century Vikings by Frans G. Bengtsson.

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Jiayang Fan is a staff writer at the New Yorker who writes on many topics, but in the past year, has penned several one-of-a-kind pieces on Chinese society. She has been on Sinica before to discuss why so many Chinese people admire Donald Trump. Her most recent piece for the magazine is titled “China’s selfie obsession,” and is a fascinating look at a company called Meitu (美图 měitú; “beautiful picture”), an app and mobile phone producer that is now responsible, it is estimated, for the editing more than half of China’s selfies. So many mobile phone users — including users of Meitu’s own branded phones — have used Meitu’s apps to enhance their self-portraits that the company is now worth $6 billion. But what does the intense obsession with beauty, and the way that young people share beautified pictures online, say about changing values in China? How does this relate to internet celebrity (网红 wǎnghóng) in the country and obsessions over teen male stars (小鲜肉 xiǎoxiānròu; literally, “fresh young meat”)? What redeeming qualities of these phenomena can be found, and why are they especially prevalent in China? Jeremy and Kaiser sat down with Jiayang at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business’s New York campus to discuss these topics. They also discuss Jiayang’s piece from earlier this year titled “China’s mistress-dispellers,” a rare inside look at the booming business of sabotaging the exploits of unfaithful husbands, and what it means for matrimony in the Middle Kingdom. Recommendations: Jeremy: Buying a DJI Phantom 4 drone. Jiayang: Using white pepper in recipes, particularly for hearty soups. She says it’s a bit spicier than black pepper, but “fruitier” and “a lot more complex” — contrary to what the internet says. Kaiser: The article “Where millennials come from,” by Jia Tolentino of the New Yorker. It’s about millennials from a millennial perspective, and skewers some of the common media myths about the generation, while also identifying what the author thinks is actually worth criticizing. And Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Yu-Hsiang, by James E. Sheridan, about an interesting general from the Warlord Era whom Kaiser’s maternal grandfather worked for as a diplomatic adviser.

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Stephen Roach is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at the Yale School of Management. He was formerly the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm’s chief economist, positions of immense influence on Wall Street. His longtime study of globalization has led to many books, most recently Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China in 2014. He also writes for Project Syndicate. Stephen joins Kaiser and Jeremy on Sinica to discuss many of the findings of his book, and what has changed since it was published. The topics include: The unhealthy codependency between the economies of China and America, and the inverse nature of their savings rates, investment rates, labor, and consumption. How much of the West has relied on economic policies that promise “false prosperity,” and how China may fall into the same trap. Where the U.S. trade deficit with China actually comes from. Whether savings rates in China are changing dramatically, or will change soon. Why Xi Jinping has formed leading small groups on economic policy, and what that means for the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and China’s economic direction. The path toward rebalancing, for both the U.S. and China. Recommendations: Jeremy: The literary website The Bitter Southerner, which covers the American South from a broad-minded perspective that Yankees often overlook. Stephen: The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, by Richard Baldwin. It forced the former chief economist of Morgan Stanley to rethink many of the ideas he had about globalization. Kaiser: An app called Audm, which has audiobook narrators read aloud long-form articles from outlets such as the Atlantic and the New Yorker.

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This week marks the 80th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, which began with the fall of the capital of the Republic of China on December 13, 1937. Few events in modern Chinese history have a historical valence comparable with the Nanjing Massacre. The wholesale slaughter of Chinese soldiers and civilians, the notorious “killing contests,” and, of course, the horrific sexual violence visited on Chinese women during the six weeks that followed Nanjing’s fall inhabit an understandably large part of China’s historical memory. The details of the event, however, and the way that those details are remembered, remain a sticking point in relations between China and Japan. On the podcast to discuss his own study of the Nanjing Massacre, and the way that historical atrocities are remembered around the world, is Rana Mitter of Oxford University. Rana teaches the history and politics of modern China, and has written several excellent books on China, most recently, China's War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival, which was released in the U.S. with the title Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937–1945. Rana also works with the nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves, which works to provide educational resources about historical atrocities. See in particular these pieces on Nanjing: Facing History's featured resource collection on the Nanjing Atrocities (an umbrella term for all violence visited upon Nanjing by the Japanese in 1937–38), which includes a rich multimedia collection of maps, videos, timelines, and teaching strategies that place the Nanjing Atrocities within the larger context of World War II in East Asia. A print resource called The Nanjing Atrocities: Crimes of War, which is available as a free PDF download or for purchase as a paperback. Two blog posts, 3 reasons to explore the Nanijng Atrocities 80 years later and 80 years later, Nanjing reminds us of the humanity we need today. Recommendations: Jeremy: Re-recommends some previous recommendations from Kaiser: the trilogy of spy novels by Adam Brookes set in Beijing — Night Heron, Spy Games, and The Spy’s Daughter — and Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, by Kurt Andersen. Rana: The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, by Joshua Fogel, a sober, sane, and objective treatment of some controversial questions. And a lighter selection, Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan, a fictionalized account of the first woman diver to serve in the U.S. Navy in WWII. Bonus: Rana has an interview with Jennifer that will air on the BBC’s Arts and Ideas podcast in early 2018. Kaiser: The Empire of the Steppes, by René Grousset, a fantastic book about Central Asian history. And The May 4th Movement, by Chow Tse-tung, a seminal work on the most important intellectual movement of 20th-century China.

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NOTE: If you haven’t read the book and are allergic to spoilers, please be aware that the interesting surprises of Scott’s story are discussed in this podcast.   Scott Tong is a reporter for American Public Media’s Marketplace, and from 2006 to 2010, he helped found and run the radio program’s Shanghai bureau. During that time, he also experienced a lot of culture shock — his Chinese-American upbringing in the U.S., Hong Kong, and Taiwan didn’t prepare him for mainland China as much as he had expected, and while in Shanghai, he uncovered some surprising truths about his family, which has roots in nearby Jiangsu Province. A Village With My Name: A Family History of China's Opening to the World is Scott’s deeply personal reporting and reflection on what he learned about his family, and China’s history, by visiting distant relatives in a forlorn part of Jiangsu Province. It is a highly engaging, eye-opening story that sheds light on how Chinese people engage with their past — and their present. Recommendations: Jeremy: McKay Books, a huge used books store in Nashville, Tennessee. And Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa—From Eisenhower to Kennedy, by Madeleine Kalb. Scott: Resigned Activism: Living With Pollution in Rural China, by Anna Lora-Wainwright. And Rough Translation, an NPR podcast about how foreigners see America. Kaiser: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, by Kurt Andersen.

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