Sinica Podcast

Latest Episodes:

China's judicial decisions database and what it means Jan 14, 2021

Show notes

By the end of 2019, Chinese courts had uploaded some 80 million court cases to a massive, centralized database — a gold mine not only for people working in the legal professions in China, but also for researchers interested in what the court decisions can tell us about Chinese jurisprudence, criminal and civil procedures, and Chinese society more broadly. This week on Sinica, we present a show recorded back in December 2019 — prelapsarian days, before shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions, and remote podcasting. Kaiser speaks with Rachel Stern, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and in the UC Berkeley political science department, and with Ben Liebman, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University. Both scholars have worked extensively with the database, and share their insights into why the Chinese government has pushed courts to upload cases to the database, and how it might transform the way that courts work in China.

7:19: What’s in the database, and how it’s unique to China

28:00: Pushing back against the techno-dystopian narrative

34:12: Creating a marketplace for legal implications

41:21: The limitations of artificial intelligence

Recommendations:

Rachel: A collection of translated essays written by Chinese intellectuals, titled Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China;Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China, by Karoline Kan; and the NüVoices podcast.

Ben: The works of artist Stuart Robertson.

Kaiser: The popular Chinese talk show Informal Talks (非正式会谈 fēi zhèng shì huì tán), available to watch on YouTube.

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Ryan Hass on the Biden administration's China direction Jan 07, 2021

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back former National Security Council China director Ryan Hass, who offers his perspective on the likely direction that the incoming Biden administration will take when it comes to managing the American relationship with China — the most difficult and most consequential of bilateral relationships. Thoughtful and measured as always, Ryan makes a good case for why the Biden team is not, in fact, boxed in by Trump’s antagonism toward China, and will chart a path that will diverge substantially from the one taken during four years of Trump without retreading the path taken during the Obama presidency.

1:56: The structural issues at the heart of U.S.-China tensions

6:59: Can the American political center hold?

12:10: What can be deduced from Biden’s personnel choices

28:34: How the Biden election has changed Beijing’s political calculus

38:36: Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and a Biden administration

Recommendations:

Ryan: Anything written by John le Carré.

Kaiser: Ed Yong, a writer for The Atlantic, especially his recent piece How science beat the virus.

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Ian Johnson and Lin Yao on "liberal" Chinese Trump supporters Dec 31, 2020

Show notes

Why have so many prominent critical and dissident intellectuals from China come out vocally in support of Donald Trump? This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy set out to answer that question, and are joined by journalist Ian Johnson of the New York Times and by Lin Yao, a political scientist now earning a law degree at Yale, who writes frequently on Chinese intellectuals and U.S. politics.

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Historian James Carter on the final days of Old Shanghai Dec 25, 2020

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with James “Jay” Carter, a professor of history at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, about his terrific new book, Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, which focuses on horse racing as an unlikely but effective way to tell the story of Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1928–1938) and World War II. We also talk about the challenges of presenting Chinese history to non-specialists, and about Jay’s weekly column in SupChina, “This Week in China’s History.”

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Veteran diplomat Evan Feigenbaum on U.S. policy in a changing Asia Dec 17, 2020

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Evan Feigenbaum, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research in Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi on a dynamic region that encompasses both East Asia and South Asia. Evan also served as deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian Affairs under Condoleeza Rice during the second George W. Bush administration, and as vice chairman of the Paulson Institute, before joining Carnegie. Evan offers his unique perspective on how American policy over the last two decades has failed to keep up with changes happening in Asia, and how the increasing economic integration of the region has meant that the U.S. faces the threat of marginalization and relegation to a unidimensional role as a security provider. He offers useful ideas that the incoming Biden administration would do well to consider.

Recommendations:

Evan: The documentary Statecraft: The BUSH 41 Team,available on Amazon Prime, and the cooking podcast Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio.

Kaiser: The Ministry for the Future: A Novel, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

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China and India: Pallavi Aiyar and Ananth Krishnan on mutual misperceptions Dec 10, 2020

Show notes

This week on Sinica, we bring you a conversation with Pallavi Aiyar, a prolific writer and, until 2008, a Beijing-based journalist, and Ananth Krishnan, who reported from China for The Hinduand India Todayuntil 2018. The two chatted with Kaiser and Jeremy as part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in November, covering subjects from popular Chinese misconceptions and stereotypes about India to India’s curiosity about — and sparse media coverage of — its powerful neighbor to the northeast.

5:49: Mutual cultural ignorance between China and India

11:06: Indian views on Chinese authoritarianism

32:03: Social mobility and classism

42:00: Comparing Chinese and Indian nationalism

52:23: 2020 as an inflection point in India-China relations

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Is coercive environmentalism the answer? Dec 03, 2020

Show notes

In this episode of Sinica, which was taped live at the fourth annual NEXTChina Conference on November 11, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro, co-authors of a new book called China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. Li, an assistant professor of environmental studies at NYU Shanghai, and Shapiro, the chair of the environmental politics program at American University, tackle the question of whether a state-led authoritarian approach is needed to address the crisis of global warming and other looming ecological catastrophes. And while their focus is on the environment, the book interrogates more broadly the whole technocratic authoritarian approach to governance, with relevance to pandemic response, population policy, and much more.

3:43: State-led environmentalism in China

16:18: Mechanisms of state power and enforcement on the environment

23:12: Environmentalism and China’s illiberal turn

31:06: China’s space ambitions and technocratic leadership

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Chilies and China: Brian Dott on how a New World import defined regional cuisines in China Nov 27, 2020

Show notes

This week on Sinica, we teamed up with Columbia University Press and the Columbia Global Centers to convene a conversation with Brian Dott, a professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at Whitman College and the author of The Chili Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography. Kaiser — who is something of a chili head himself — chats with Brian about how, when, and why the chili pepper came to China and became such a fixture of the cuisines of Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou, and Yunnan.

7:19: Where chilies made landfall in mainland China

16:22: Chinese cuisine and cultural identity

25:48: Theories on how chilies proliferated throughout China

35:54: Chilies and medicinal applications

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Jennifer Pan studied clickbait in Chinese propaganda. You won’t believe what she discovered! Nov 19, 2020

Show notes

This week on Sinica, we present the first installment in a three-part series produced in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), highlighting the groundbreaking work of young social scientists who are focused on China. In this episode, Kaiser chats with Jennifer Pan, an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, about three of her research papers that illuminate different aspects of social control in the P.R.C.: the use of the dibao social welfare system, hiring decisions, and the use of clickbait headlines by government officials on social media.

Recommendations:

Jennifer: A series of escapist fiction by Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries.

Kaiser: Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, by Kurt Andersen.

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Rana Mitter on the reshaping of China’s World War II legacy Nov 12, 2020

Show notes

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rana Mitter, professor of the history and politics of modern China at St. Cross College, Oxford, and director of the University of Oxford China Centre, about his new book, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism. The book is a meditation on how the evolving official narrative of World War II in contemporary Chinese political discourse shapes not only China’s domestic politics but its foreign policy as well.

8:51: What Chinese nationalism looked like before World War II

30:48: Shaping the narrative of China’s wartime experience

47:13: Giving China the postwar period it never had

57:55: Chinese public discussion about the war

Recommendations:

Rana: The Sword and the Spear, by Mia Couto.

Kaiser: How the coronavirus hacks the immune system, by James Somers, and the anti-superhero series The Boys, available on Amazon Prime.

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