Sinica Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Legendary BBC presenter and China editor Carrie Gracie, live in London Oct 06, 2022

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy were live in London with a very special guest: Carrie Gracie, whose career with the BBC spanned three decades as a China-based correspondent, news presenter, and China editor. She talks about her podcast series on the Bo Xilai scandal, her longitudinal documentary series on White Horse Village, and her struggle with the BBC to win equal pay for women.

6:02 – Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel and Carrie’s coverage of the Bo Xilai scandal and Chinese elite politics in 2012

11:38 – Overview of the main characters: Bo Xilai, Gu Kuilai, Neil Heywood, and Wang Lijun

35:18 – How the 2012 power struggle shaped Xi Jinping’s leadership style

41:42 – Carrie’s key takeaways from following the Bo Xilai case

44:33 – White Horse Village: documenting life of farmers across a decade in rural China

50:56 – Changing conditions for foreign journalists in China

56:52 – Advice to reporters starting in China

1:01:05 – Assessing media organizations’ progress on dismantling the gender pay gap

A transcript of this episode is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Yellowstone, a drama series about a family-owned ranch in Montana

Carrie: Everything Everywhere All at Once; the Disney animated film Mulan

Kaiser: the UK progressive rock band Porcupine Tree's current Continuation/Closure tour — Europe dates

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

A conversation with Minister Xu Xueyuan, Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Washington Sep 29, 2022

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Minister Xu Xueyuan, Deputy Chief of Mission at the PRC Embassy in Washington, D.C.

A few words about the process, in the interest of transparency:

Minister Xu’s team did request questions in advance, and they were all accepted without alteration except to suggest that two questions, both related to public diplomacy efforts, be combined. Questions on subjects like Taiwan, Xinjiang, and China’s Zero-COVID policy were all accepted without even any suggestions on changes of wording. Kaiser was also able to follow up on questions without any objection at all.

Where Minister Xu cited numbers and made factual claims, we made a good faith effort to check them — for example, on the number of acres in the recent offshore oil lease approvals made by the Biden administration.

Doubtless, there will be listeners who will wish that Kaiser had been more forceful, and there may be some who believe I was perhaps too forceful. Sinica is not a “gotcha” show and never has been, and we believe there is value in hearing the perspectives of a ranking Chinese diplomat, and we hope you agree that the interview is very much worth listening to.

The interview has only been edited only for clarity and concision — taking out filler or hesitation words and pick-ups.

2:56 – Does the Biden administration’s China policy diverge from Trump's?

8:29 – China’s role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

15:09 – China’s position on the Ukraine war

19:21 – How the Ukraine conflict factors into Beijing’s decision-making on Taiwan

23:11 – The diminishing appeal of “one country, two systems”

29:56 – Beijing’s suspension of climate talks after the Pelosi visit

38:20 – U.S.-China coordination on alleviating global economic issues

46:37 – The possibility of diplomatic concessions to improve relations

52:29 –The decline in people-to-people exchange between China and the U.S.

1:00:27 – China’s Dynamic Zero-COVID policy

1:08:16 – The 20th Party Congress’ impact on U.S.-China relations

1:10:51 – Considering the Xinjiang issue from the American perspective

1:20:10 – The unintended consequences of wolf-warrior diplomacy

1:24:45 – Differing views on China in the Global South vs. Global North

A full transcript of this interview is available at thechinaproject.com.

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

China in the Global South, with Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden Sep 22, 2022

Show notes

This week on Sinica, we kick off the new network show, the China-Global South Podcast, with a conversation with the show's hosts and co-founders of the China-Global South Project (formerly the China Africa Project), Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden. Kaiser chats with them about where the show is going, and common misconceptions about China's role in the Global South.

1:45 – Reasons for launching the new China-Global South Podcast

13:50 – What Washington’s framing of China’s activity in the Global South gets wrong

19:24 – Explaining the lack of China expertise in Africa and the Global North

25:27 – The unresolved history of Western colonialism in Africa

28:44 – How Chinese statecraft navigates Africa’s colonial legacy

36:00 – The infantilization of African agency

45:03 – The limited development options of African stakeholders

47:33 – China’s environmental impact on the Global South

57:13 – How small states can effectively navigate great power politics

A transcript of the podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Eric: Following Gyude Moore, Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development: @gyude_moore; Hannah Ryder; CEO of Development Reimagined: @hmryder; Ovigue Eguegu; Policy Analyst at Development Reimagined: @ovigweeguegu; and Christian-Geraud Neema; and Francophone Editor at the China-Global South Project: @christiangeraud

Cobus: The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa by Ching Kwan Lee

Kaiser: Chinese traditional bow maker AF Archery; The Way of Archery by Gao Ying, translated by Jie Tian and Justin Ma

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

Surveillance State: Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin on their new book on China's tech-enhanced social controls Sep 15, 2022

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin join the program to discuss their new book Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control. From Urumqi to Uganda and from Hangzhou to the Bronx, the book explores every facet of technological surveillance from the technocratic mindset that birthed it to its spread, with Beijing's help, to many countries of the developing world. But it also examines the role that U.S. tech companies played in giving rise to it.

6:05 – The story of Tahir Hamut: a Uyghur poet living under Xinjiang’s surveillance state

12:50 – Will the Xinjiang model for surveillance be expanded to other parts of China?

16:37 – Is China actively pushing other countries to adopt its surveillance state practices?

23:26 – The case of Hangzhou: the benefits of the “smart city” model

27:17 – Is there a fundamental difference between the concept of “privacy” in China and the West?

30:55 – How Xu Bing’s film uses surveillance footage

35:39 – What accounts for Chinese society’s changing views on privacy?

40:12 – China’s tendency to apply an “engineering” mindset to fixing social problems

47:57 – Assessing US companies’ role in enabling Chinese surveillance

52:27 – Devising a policy that effectively bans hardware used for Xinjiang surveillance

1:01:03 – China’s new laws on digital data protection

1:05:05 – What the social credit system’s popular narrative gets wrong

1:10:40 – An example of Chinese propaganda fabricating the surveillance system’s success

1:14:29 – The future of privacy protection in China and the West

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

Recommendations:

Liza: The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy

Josh: TheBackstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang by Perhat Tursun (translated by Darren Byler), a short novel about life for Uyghurs in modern China; The Wok: Recipes and Techniques: by Kenji Lopez

Kaiser: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics and How to Fix Itby Will Bunch

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

Yuen Yuen Ang on Xi Jinping, the Party bureaucracy, and authoritarian resilience Sep 08, 2022

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back University of Michigan political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang, who discusses a recent piece in the Journal of Democracy titled "How Resilient is the CCP?" The essay examines how China's bureaucracy remains surprisingly competent and even relatively autonomous despite Xi Jinping's highly personalistic style of rule.

3:51 – Summarizing debates on Chinese governance in the current China watcher field

8:43 – Defining the concept of institutionalization and contextualizing it to China

13:39 – Explaining Xi’s bureaucratic objectives: maintaining competence but limiting autonomy

18:57 – Remaining areas of autonomy for China’s state bureaucracy

22:11 – Key areas where Xi weakened bureaucracy

26:08 – Institutionalization prior to the Xi era

29:00 – Main sources of resilience and threat under Xi’s new model for authoritarianism

31:45 – Fundamental difference between Mao and Xi

34:52 – The revival of state bureaucracy and technocrats after Mao’s death

40:13 – How do we understand the tension between expertise and ideology in Xi’s governance agenda?

46:15 – Historical roots of technocracy in the Chinese government

49:09 – The CCP’s technocratic bureaucracy as an integral source of resilience

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

Recommendations:

Yuen Yuen: Chinese drama series Zǒuxiàng gònghé 走向共和 (Towards the Republic); and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

Kaiser: Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago, and All the Seas of the World — a historical fantasy novel trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay

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

Avoiding the China Trap, with Jessica Chen Weiss Sep 01, 2022

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back the Cornell political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss, who is back in Ithaca after a year spent as a CFR International Affairs Fellow working in the State Department's Office of Policy Planning. She talks about an important essay published in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, titled "The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Zero-Sum Competition,” which calls on the U.S. to formulate an affirmative vision for the relationship with China instead of pursuing an ad-hoc policy predicated simply on countering what China does.

7:17 – Moving away from the current zero-sum framing of U.S.-China competition and adopting an “affirmative vision”

12:29 – Shortcomings of the U.S. response to China’s strategy in the developing world

15:11 – How competition with China framing has adverse consequences for domestic American politics

18:37 – Can the U.S. benefit from adopting certain aspects of the Chinese approach?

20:49 – The steps needed to return to normalized U.S.-China diplomacy

25:00 – How can the US properly calibrate its China threat assessment?

34:05 – The relationship between China’s domestic challenges and its foreign policy

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

Recommendations:

Jessica: Stephen Walt and Dani Rodrik’s essay on a establishing a new global order in Foreign Affairs [forthcoming]; andAfter Engagement: Dilemmas in U.S.-China Security Relationsby Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein

Kaiser: The Lord of the Rings trilogy audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis

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

Is China's bubble finally about to pop? A conversation with Bloomberg Chief Economist Tom Orlik Aug 25, 2022

Show notes

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome back Tom Orlik, Bloomberg's chief economist and author of the book China: The Bubble that Never Pops. Ahead of the release of the new, updated edition of his book, we ask him about all that has changed in the two-and-a-half years since the publication of the first edition — and whether the real estate crisis, the Common Prosperity agenda, China's fraying foreign relations, or the COVID lockdowns are finally going to bring about the crash long predicted by the "China bears."

4:40 – Tom offers a succinct summary of the chief arguments in the first edition of China: The Bubble that Never Pops

8:05 – Is China looking quite as clever as it was four months ago?

11:08 – The Chinese economy’s great COVID shutdown stress test

13:53 – China’s stimulus response

20:22 – The future of the Common Prosperity agenda

25:49 – China’s push for tech self-sufficiency

33:00 – China’s present real estate crisis

38:15 – Xi Jinping’s priorities: triage for the ailing Chinese economy

44:00 – How bad will the damage be from China’s 2022 lockdowns?

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

Recommendations:

Jeremy: The Parker series,: crime fiction by Richard Stark, pen name of Donald E. Westlake

Tom: Surveillance State by Josh Chin and Liza Lin; and Coalitions of the Weak by Victor Shih

Kaiser: The TV drama from Hulu, The Bear

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

China's space program, with NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao Aug 18, 2022

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Leroy Chiao, a NASA astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station for over six months. Leroy is also very knowledgeable about China's space program and was the first American astronaut to visit the Astronaut Center of China outside of Beijing. He discusses the abortive history of Sino-American space collaboration, attitudes toward China's space program in the U.S., and China's impressive accomplishments and its grand ambitions for space.

4:27 – How Leroy became an astronaut

9:09 – The effects of long-term weightlessness

15:10 – Leroy’s access to the Astronaut Center of China

18:16 – The peak years of Sino-U.S. collaboration in space exploration

23:11 – The Wolf Amendment and the end of Sino-American space collaboration

26:36 – Leroy on the most impressive accomplishments of the Chinese space program

37:53 – U.S.-China competition as a driver of advances in space technologies

48:04 – Sino-Russian space cooperation?

49:12 – The weaponization of outer space

52: 58 – Recommendations

A complete transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Jeremy: Nuremberg Diary by G.M. Gilbert.

Leroy: Old Henry, a micro-Western film

Kaiser: Putin by Philip Short; and a preview of a forthcoming paper about the Cyberspace Administration of China, CAC, written by Jamie Horsley

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

China and the American "great power opportunity," with Ali Wyne Aug 11, 2022

Show notes

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Ali Wyne, senior analyst at the Eurasia Group's global macro geopolitics practice and author of the brand new book America's Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition. Ali's book calls on American policymakers to craft a strategy that is guided by confidence and a clear vision of American renewal and emphasizes America's competitive advantages, rather than being determined by the behavior of our notional competitors, especially China.

2:09 – The framework of great power competition and building a foreign policy that is not dictated by the actions of other great powers

16:13 – The competitive challenges from China and Russia

25:38 – America's psychological anxiety over China's rise

39:30 – Eight principles for building a new foreign policy: Principle one – renew America's competitive advantages

51:35 – Principle two: regard the power of America's domestic example, not as a supplement to external competitiveness, but as a precondition for it.

56:22 – Principle three: do not use competitive anxiety as a crutch and principle four: frame internal renewal as an explicit objective of U.S. foreign policy, not as a desired byproduct

1:01:19 – Principle five: enlisting allies and partners in affirmative undertakings

1:08:26 – Principle six: appreciate the limits to American unilateral influence

1:13:38 – Principle seven: pursue cooperative opportunities that can temper the destabilizing effects of great power competition

1:17:29 – Principle eight: rebalance toward the Asia Pacific within economic focus

1:20:12 – How Russia's invasion of Ukraine has affected the framework laid out in Ali's book

A complete transcript of this interview is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Ali: The Foreign Affairs essay "Beijing Is Still Playing the Long Game on Taiwan: Why China Isn’t Poised to Invade" by Andrew Nathan

Kaiser: The Swedish TV show Clark on Netflix

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

Another Taiwan Straits Crisis? CIA veteran John Culver weighs in Aug 04, 2022

Show notes

In a week dominated by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, Kaiser welcomes John Culver, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2017 and as a CIA analyst focusing on China for 35 years. John offers his perspective on Pelosi's trip and provides important context with a discussion of the last Taiwan Straits Crisis, in 1995-96 — a crisis touched off by Lee Teng-hui's decision to visit Cornell University, his alma mater. John also draws important parallels to the Diaoyu/Senkaku crisis of the fall of 2012, after the Japanese government nationalized the disputed islands.

2:47 – A walkthrough of the last Taiwan Strait crisis

13:45 – How China's growing capabilities could affect its decision-making in future Taiwan crises

19:52 – Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and the political environment surrounding her decision

25:14 – Explaining China's interpretation of U.S. actions and the Chinese domestic political context

32:21 – Parallels to the 2012 Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands episode

35:22 – The potential fallout of this crisis

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

Recommendations:

John: The late Alan Romberg's exegesis of the US-China negotiating record, "Rein In at the Brink of the Precipice" and Ryan Hass's book Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence

Kaiser: Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada — and the town of Canmore as a great place to stay nearby.

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

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected