Sinica Podcast

Latest Episodes:

As the U.S. and China part ways, the Global South finds its own path, with Kishore Mahbubani Apr 13, 2023

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kishore Mahbubani, who served as Singapore's UN Ambassador and has written extensively on ASEAN and the U.S.-China rift, returns to the show to discuss his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, and to advocate for the pragmatic approach that's held ASEAN together for over five decades of continuous peace and growing prosperity.

4:36 – Kishore talks about Macron’s state visit to China and the controversy around his comments in media interviews

8:53 – How the Ukraine War has highlighted divisions between the West and the Global South

11:45 – Pragmatism: is this a euphemism for amorality?

15:26 – ASEAN as a template for multipolarity

19:38 – Cultural relativism, moral absolutism, and the shift in the American intelligentsia

24:56 – How does ASEAN handle specific issues of U.S.-China tension?

29:12 – Investment and trade: China and ASEAN vs. U.S and ASEAN — guns and butter

40:04 – The Belt and Road Initiative and American attitudes toward it

44:10 – Kishore’s “three rules” for U.S. engagement with ASEAN

49:49 – China’s recent diplomatic efforts: Saudi-Iran, and the Ukraine War

52:34 – How receptive has the American strategic class been to Kishore’s ideas?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Kishore: John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Kaiser: The Silk Roads: A New History of the Worldby Peter Frankopan

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Sinica at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, Boston 2023: Capsule interviews Apr 06, 2023

Show notes

This week on Sinica, something different: Kaiser asks over a dozen scholars of various facets of China studies to talk about their work and make some recommendations! You'll hear from a variety of scholars, from MA students to tenured professors, talking about a bewildering range of fascinating work they're doing. Enjoy!

3:00 – Kristin Shi-Kupfer — recommendations: this essay (in Chinese) by Teng Biao on Chinese Trump supporters; Han Rongbin's work on digital society; and Yang Guobin's work on digital expression on the internet in China.

7:48 – Lev Nachman — recommendation: Ian Rowen, One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism; and the city of Taichung, and especially its night market food on Yizhong Street and the Fang Chia Night market.

9:27 – Lin Zhang — recommendation: Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia; and Gary Gertle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century

15:32 – Maura Dykstra — recommendation: Richard von Glahn's contribution to the Oxford History of Modern China about registration in imperial China

19:00 – Jonathan Elkobi — a Rand Corporation study on economic cooperation between Israel and China; the fusion band Snarky Puppy

22:22 – Seiji Shirane — Seediq Bale (Warriors of the Rainbow)and Lust, Caution

25:18 – Zhu Qian — Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the 20th Century, and two films: Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness and Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin

31:23– Fabio Lanza — Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911–2021; and Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital by Leopoldina Fortunati

33:04 – Catherine Tsai —:Hiroko Matsuda’s The Liminality of the Japanese Empire

34:46– Lena Kaufmann — Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial Chinaand other works by Francesca Bray

39:05 – Josh Freeman — Works of Uyghur poetry by Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed, Ekhmetjan Osman, Tahir Hamut Izgil, Perhat Tursun, Dilkhumar Imin, Abide Abbas Nesrin, Erkan Qadir, and Muyesser Abdul'ehed Hendan.

41:32 – Susan McCarthy — Joanna Handlin Smith, The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China

49:18 – Brian DeMare — William Hinton, Fanshen

50:47 – Juliet Lu — Maria Repnikova, Chinese Soft Power, and Samuel L. Jackson reading Adam Mansbach's Go the F--k to Sleep

58:29 – Sabina Knight — Wu Ming-Yi, The Man with the Compound Eyes, translated by Darryl Sterk

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

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The Maoist legacy in Chinese private enterprise, with Chris Marquis Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Chris Marquis, a professor at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, and formerly at Cornell’s business school, about the book he co-authored with Kunyuan Qiao, Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. In it, they examine how even in China's private sector, socialization into the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party among some entrepreneurs has left an enduring legacy that is visible in some of the ways Chinese private enterprises conduct business.

3:35 – Motivation for Mao and Markets

5:34 – Enduring elements of Maoism in contemporary Chinese enterprise

12:35 – Variation among “Maoist” entrepreneurs

20:40 – Differentiating superficial and authentic Maoist entrepreneurship

35:04 – Is today’s China ideological or simply nationalistic?

39:17 – Xi’s Maoist revival: real or imagined?

44:30 – Chris’s transition from business and sociology to Chinese politics

47:09 – Chris’s experience as a Thousand Talents recipient

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Chris: The Entrepreneurial State and The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato

Kaiser: This calendar of lunar phases from theoriginallunarphase.com, and Mongolian salty milk tea, or sūūtei tsai

which is easy to make at home

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Beijing brokers a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, with Tuvia Gering Mar 23, 2023

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes Tuvia Gering of Israel's Institute of National Security Studies, where he focuses on China's relations with Israel and other countries of the Middle East. Tuvia breaks down the agreement to normalize relations between Riyadh and Tehran, which Beijing brokered during secret talks that were only revealed, along with the fruit they bore, on March 10.

6:05 – How was China able to broker the Saudi-Iran normalization?

17:00 – Notable commitments from Saudi, Iran, and China

25:01 – China’s non-energy interests in and engagement with the Middle East

29:03 – Reactions from world capitals

39:28 – Saudi’s balancing act between U.S. security partnership and engagement with China

49:52 – Implications for China as a mediator in Ukraine and other international conflict zones

52:44 – Overview of China-Israel relations

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Tuvia: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on YouTube

Kaiser: The Venture of Islam by Marshall G. S. Hodgson

Mentioned:

Tuvia's Discourse Power Substack

The China-Global South Podcast

Tuvia’s interview with retired PLA Colonel Zhou Bo

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The Xi-Putin meetings, with Maria Repnikova Mar 23, 2023

Show notes

This week, a bonus episode to keep you caught up on the week's biggest China story: Xi Jinping's two days of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Maria Repnikova, a Latvian-born native Russian speaker who is also fluent in Chinese and who teaches Chinese politics and communications at Georgia State University, joins the show again to talk about what each side hoped for, what each side got, and the asymmetries of power on conspicuous display in Moscow.

1:53 – Does Beijing look at the Ukraine War and still see the United States, as Maria argued last year?

3:06 – How Xi and Putin spoke to their own domestic audiences, and to each other’s

4:43 – How the Xi-Putin meeting was viewed in the Global South

8:10 – Why was the elephant in the room go mostly unremarked upon?

10:27 – Junior partner, senior partner, and “optionality”

16:27 – Did Putin come away disappointed from the meeting?

18:03 – How did China’s peace framework come off in the West vs. in China?

21:11 – What might the United States have done differently — and what might it still do to prevent China from drifting too close to Russia?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Maria: Solomon Elusoji, Travelling with Big Brother: A Reporter’s Junket in China

Kaiser: The Polish progressive rock band Riverside, and its latest album ID.Entity

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The expansion of China's administrative state during COVID, with Yale Law's Taisu Zhang Mar 16, 2023

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes Taisu Zhang, professor of law at Yale University, who discusses his recent work on the expansion of the administrative state down to the subdistrict and neighborhood level — changes that are far-reaching, and likely permanent. They also discuss a recent essay in Foreign Affairsi n which Taisu argued that Beijing is shifting away from "performance legitimacy" as the foundation of political rule, and more toward legality — not to be confused with the rule of law.

3:29 – Nationalism as legitimacy, and its grounding in economic performance

7:45 – The CCP’s unique approach to “legal legitimacy”

21:28 – Evidence from the Two Meetings, or 兩會 liǎnghuì

35:56 – Chinese Administrative Expansion in the Xi Jinping Era

49:40 – The role of the anti-corruption campaign in expanding local government authority

56:18 – Changes in local governance after COVID

1:01:27 – Who were the dàbái?

1:04:10 – Technology in China’s post-pandemic power structure

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Taisu: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber; The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development by Yuhua Wang; Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State by Maura Dykstra; The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu; and The Lower Yangzi Trilogy by Ge Fei

Kaiser: Kaiser: Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People's Republicby Mike Chinoy; and the many uses of beeswax

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Jude Blanchette on the Select Committee and the American moral panic over China Mar 09, 2023

Show notes

A second full episode this week for you Sinica listeners! Jude Blanchette joins to talk about the House Select Committee on United States Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, and all that is wrong with it, from its framing of the CCP as an "existential threat" to its focus on the CCP, and how all of this adds up to an embarrassing moral panic that distracts from the serious issues the U.S. confronts when it comes to China.

4:37 – What’s wrong with the Select Committee’s framing of China as an “existential threat,” and why the first hearing was an embarrassment

9:01 – The current moment as a moral panic over China

12:09 – Domestic political drivers of U.S. China policy

15:04 – Why the United States versus the Chinese Communist Party is the wrong framing too

22:46 – Is this more like McCarthyism — or antisemitism?

28:58 – The downstream effects of U.S. tech containment policy toward China

42:01 – The advantage of simplistic, Manichean messaging

46:15 – Prioritizing U.S. issues with China: why Confucius Institutes and TikTok are so far down the to-do list, and what really matters48:59 – And what are the real issues that deserve priority?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com

Recommendations:

Jude: Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam, from Audible

Kaiser: This podcast interview with Angela Rasmussen, the virologist who has been in the front lines fighting back against the resurgent lab leak theory, from the Slate What Next: TBD podcast

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Inside Tencent's "Influence Empire," with Bloomberg's Lulu Chen Mar 09, 2023

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Lulu Chen, who has reported on tech in China for over a decade and is the author of the book Influence Empire: The Inside Story of Tencent and China's Tech Ambition. It's a fascinating look at not only Tencent but at the overall internet sector in China, focusing on the travails and the triumphs of some of the most consequential Chinese internet entrepreneurs.

5:31 – Motivation for and background of Influence Empire

10:15 – Ma Huateng and Martin Lau at Tencent

19:56 – How the Chinese internet sector went from copying to innovating

30:59 – Cutthroat company cultures

33:20 – What made Allen Zhang successful?

37:25 – The Tencent-Meituan food delivery coup

45:21 – Tencent’s position in the online game industry

51:58 – Understanding China’s 2020-2022 tech crackdown

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Lulu: The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters by Gay Talese

Kaiser:Cunk on Earth on Netflix

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China and the electric vehicle battery supply chain, with Henry Sanderson Mar 02, 2023

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Henry Sanderson, a former AP and Bloomberg reporter who was based in China for many years, about his book Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green — a book that reminds us of the very ugly fact that the metals that are needed to make electric vehicle batteries need to be dug out of the earth, and processed in ways that are anything but environmentally friendly. Henry talks about China's outsize role in lithium, cobalt, and nickel processing, as well as some promising chemistries that allow for EV batteries without some of the problematic metals.

2:49 – China’s role in the EV battery supply chain

9:36 – Global Chinese investments in lithium mines

14:04 – Is cobalt a necessary evil?

18:56 – Can NGO pressure induce better corporate behavior in EV battery supply chains?

21:28 – How Indonesia used its nickel resources to attract Chinese FDI

26:17 – China’s efforts to innovate around scarce metals

32:08 – China’s metal processing industry: State- or market-driven?

36:06 – Lessons from Europe’s battery industry

40:42 – Electrification of two-wheeled vehicles

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: London Review of Books

Henry: The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung

Kaiser: Tracking the People’s Daily newsletter by Manoj Kewalramani

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China and the Ukraine War one year after the invasion, with Evan Feigenbaum and Alexander Gabuev Feb 23, 2023

Show notes

It's been one year now since Vladimir Putin launched his assault on Ukraine, and China has sought to maintain the same difficult, awkward straddle across a difficult year. Did Beijing's efforts to project the impression that it had distanced itself from Russia in the wake of the Party Congress mean anything? And how should the U.S. manage its expectations of what China can or will do? Evan Feigenbaum, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, joins us again as he did a year ago. We're also joined by his colleague Alexander (Sasha) Gabuev, who is a senior fellow at Carnegie, who headed the Carnegie Moscow Center until recently.

4:37 – Are Beijing’s actions surprising?

7:34 – The nature of China-Russia relations

15:45 – How has Beijing concretely supported Russia?

22:07 – Did Beijing know Putin was going to invade?

29:48 – European perspectives on the No Limits partnership

37:02 – Beijing’s assessment of Russia’s military performance

39:07 – What Beijing has learned from Russia’s invasion

46:47 – What carrots can the United States offer China?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Sasha: Writing From Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965by Mark Andryczyk

Evan: The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War,1916-1917 by Philip Zelikow