China’s college exam, the gaokao, is fetishized as the ultimate test, yet a lesser-known story is how it entrenches regional education discrimination. Its role at social engineering is also clear, with AI suddenly becoming the sixth most popular major in China, on command from above. This month, the Little Red Podcast sets the first ever podcast gaokao. The intrepid test-takers are Edward Vickers from Kyushu University, co-author of Education and Society in Post-Mao China and host of the Asian Education Podcast, Karron Huang, who is studying for a Masters in early childhood education at the University of Melbourne and sat the gaokao in 2015, and Ruixue Xia from the University of California San Diego who coauthored The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China.

Image: c/- Karron Huang. Morning gaokao study session, Foshan No. 1 High School, Guangdong, 2015.

Transcripts are available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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In the latest episode in our series on belief, we’re looking at the CCP’s faith in Artificial Intelligence. China has embraced AI like no other nation, laying out a plan for AI that would see 70 percent adoption across six sectors - including governance – within the next two years. This aggressive approach is driven by commercial imperatives, the desire to shape international standards, and the hope that AI will solve the Party’s biggest worry: social stability. To explore China’s AI dreams, Louisa and Graeme are joined by China Media Project’s Alex Colville, who also writes the China Chatbot newsletter on Lingua Sinica, and Daria Impiombato, a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.

Image: Goose, c/- Andy Hazel, 2025

Transcripts are available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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In the latest episode in our series on belief, we’re exploring the surprising revival of shamanism in China, which has made a comeback despite Mao's best efforts at eradication. Ritual healers and spirit mediums are tapping into online believers and a public thirst for authentic spirituality. Shamanism has also become a tourist draw as a form of cultural and religious heritage, with a shamanic theme park even existing in northeast China until 2021. To explore the diversity of shamanic practices across China and their survival in the face of official scepticism, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Feng Qu, an archaeologist from Nanjing Normal University and Mayfair Yang, a cultural anthropologist from UC Santa Barbara.

Image: Totem poles at the Changbai Mountain Nayin Tribe Shamanic Culture Tourist Resort. Feng Qu, February 2023.

Transcripts available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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In the latest in our series on belief, we’re examining the emergence of incels in the world’s largest manosphere.  China’s growing incel community is fuelled by state-approved nationalism and simple demographics—by one estimate, 30 million Chinese men won’t find a life partner. To find out why so many Chinese men believe that women are the source of their problems, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yihuan Zhang, a graduate researcher at the University of Macau, Ling Tang, a cultural studies lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and Qian Huang from the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen.

Image: Incel. c/- MissLunaRose12 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Transcripts available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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Continuing our series on belief in China, we look at the revival of Buddhism, which is being embraced by citizens and the Chinese state. While temple visits increase, the state is funding temples and martial arts academies from Nepal to Tanzania. As Xi Jinping extols Buddhism with Chinese characteristics, the Chinese state is leveraging Buddhism diplomacy to its advantage. To find out more, Louisa and Graeme are joined by anthropologist Gareth Fisher from Syracuse University, the author of From Comrades to Bodhisattvas, and political scientist Chien-Peng Chung from Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Image: c/- Bitter Winter. Weibo image of Xi Jinping visiting Hongjue Temple, 18 June 2024.

Transcripts available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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In the latest in our series on belief, we’re looking at China’s official belief system—Marxism.  In recent years, netizens have argued China has entered the ‘garbage time’ of history, a phrase borrowed from the dying minutes of a basketball game, which now references a crisis of trust in the Communist Party and its official ideology.  To ask whether Marxism still exists in China, and how Marx influences the Chinese state, we’re joined by two guests:  Alison Sile Chen Zhao, a University of California political analyst and the author of Her Battles, and  Professor Xu Chenggang, a senior research fellow at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and the author of Institutional Genes: Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism.

Episode art: Portrait of Karl Marx. c/- Wikimedia Commons.

Transcripts available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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In our third episode on beliefs and ideologies, we explore China’s newfound enthusiasm for psychiatry. Counselling was only registered as a profession in 2001 yet has seen a massive boom under Xi Jinping. The psy-boom is such that even party branch meetings are doing mindfulness exercises, and practitioners are trying to indigenise counselling practices. There’s plenty to work on; the 2022 China Mental Health Survey found seven percent of the population were suffering from depression, half of them schoolchildren. To explore what’s drawing China to the couch, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yiying Xiong, a counsellor and associate professor at John Hopkins University, Barclay Bram, an audio journalist at the Economist and fellow at the Asia Society, and medical anthropologist Hsuan-Ying Huang, from Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.

Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons, Sigmund Freud's Couch, London, 2004.

Episode transcripts are available at: https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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To welcome the Year of the Snake, we’re launching a new series looking at belief in China. Young Chinese people are increasingly turning to spirituality - even online manifestations of it - and feng shui, in this moment of high unemployment and economic stress. For a Party guided by materialism, this spike in spiritual interest presents a dilemma: how to regulate something you purport not to believe in. To discuss the state's use of spirituality from the Qing to now, we’re joined by Tristan Brown, a historian at MIT and author of Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China and Haoyang Zhai, a researcher at the University of Melbourne.

Image: “May The Snake Be With You” c/- Juliette Baxter

Episode transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/

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China is in the grip of a gender war. While government officials are texting and even cold calling women to urge them have children, the fertility rate continues to drop. Better educated and often better paid their male peers, many urban Chinese women are simply choosing not to marry. To discuss the growing female backlash to the Party’s pro-natal policies, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Chloe Mofei Shen, lifestyle director of Elle China and Qiqi Huang, post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Macau.

Image: “Marrying late has many advantages”, BG E15/716, Landsberger Collection, 1975.

Show transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/

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Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried form, a kilo from the right species goes for around $150,000 on the world market, double the price of a kilogram of cocaine. The most prized maw is found in one of the remotest corners of the planet, the Kikori Delta in southern Papua New Guinea, where the once ignored scaly croaker is being targeted on an industrial scale by Chinese fishing companies, transforming the lives of villagers—and the ecosystem. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism who reported on the fish maw trade for Nature magazine. 

Image: c/- Jo Chandler, Veraibari Village 2024.

Jo’s fieldwork was supported in part by the Walkley Foundation Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism.

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