Sinica Podcast

Latest Episodes:

What actually happened at Mar-a-Lago? Apr 20, 2017

Show notes

As a career U.S. foreign service officer and the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs at the U.S. State Department, Susan Thornton has had a hand in the China policy of three successive American administrations. She was stationed in China for the years 2000-2007, and since then has held leadership positions in Washington connected to U.S.-China relations. Before 2000, she specialized in and was stationed in post-Soviet states, including Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. She is an excellent interpreter of how U.S.-China relations have developed in the 21st century, and a key player in current U.S.-China policy. In this podcast: What really happened at Mar-a-Lago? Was the Trump team prepared? Was the timing of the Syria strike intentional? How does the U.S. administration plan to press China on North Korea, and will it continue to criticize China on human rights? This podcast was recorded live on April 12 at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., with the help of that university’s chapter of Global China Connection. Recommendations: Jeremy: “Logical Thinking” (逻辑思维 luóji sīwéi), a popular channel on WeChat that broadcasts a one-minute recording on an issue of society in mainland China every day. Search for “逻辑思维” on WeChat. Susan: The Immobile Empire, by Alain Peyrefitte, a book on Lord George Macartney’s famous trip to visit the Qianlong Emperor in 1793 and cross-cultural perceptions between the British and Chinese empires. Kaiser: Chinese History: A New Manual, by Endymion Wilkinson. The invaluable tome covering China from many different angles is often described as “magisterial.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Virginia Kamsky: A life of business in China Apr 13, 2017

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Virginia A. Kamsky, also known as Ginny, is one of the leading foreign businesspeople in China and a legend of the U.S.-China commercial relationship. She first went to China in 1978 with what was then the Chase Manhattan Bank, before the country began “reform and opening up” and when very few foreigners visited. Ginny founded Kamsky Associates, Inc., in 1980, one of the first U.S. companies to be granted a business license in China. As a strategic advisory firm, Kamsky works with a wide array of clients ranging from automobile, chemical, finance, media, and more. Unlike some foreign business people but like many of the most successful business leaders in China, she has a background in Chinese language and culture, having learned it since she was ten years old. On the podcast, she shares some of her experiences getting to know some of the more notable politicians, executives, and entrepreneurs working in China, and the opportunities and pitfalls of doing business there as a woman and as a foreigner. Ginny will also be featured next month — on May 18, 2017 — as a speaker on the CEO / Leaders panel of the SupChina Women and China Conference in New York. Recommendations: Jeremy: 5 Calls, a smartphone app designed for the American “resistance” to Donald Trump, which gives you the numbers of five elected representatives or government offices in the U.S. to contact every day based on your location. Ginny: A video of Chinese ballroom dancing from 1929, plus the new book of Brookings scholar Cheng Li, Chinese Politics in the Xi Jinping Era: Reassessing Collective Leadership. Kaiser: Crazy Aaron Thinking Putty, a fun toy his son discovered and that Kaiser has found quite useful as a sort of stress ball. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nationalism in Russia and China Apr 06, 2017

Show notes

Is nationalism really rising in China? How does it differ from patriotism? What is “Eurasianism” and how does Russia use that concept? How much of China’s nationalism is rooted in the “century of humiliation” that the country suffered at the hands of Western countries and Japan between 1839 and 1949? Jeremy and Kaiser spoke with two eminent scholars of nationalism in Russia and China to find out. Charles Clover is a correspondent with the Financial Times based in Beijing, and author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism. Jude Blanchette is a scholar currently writing a book on neo-Maoists in China, who, he explains, have their own interpretation of Chinese nationalism. Jude was a guest on a previous episode of the Sinica Podcast dedicated to the subject of neo-Maoists. Recommendations: Jeremy: “The Age of Total Lies,” a translation of an essay written by Vesna Pešić, a Serbian opposition politician and human rights activist. Jude: The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China, published in 1993 by Susan Shirk. Charles: Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond, by Gideon Rachman. Kaiser: Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra, and the 1987 film Repentance, a view into life under Stalinism by Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

China’s push into Eastern Europe: A conversation with Martin Hála Mar 30, 2017

Show notes

16+1, a new Chinese initiative, takes its name from 16 countries of Central and Eastern Europe plus China. It held a summit in November 2016 attended by Premier Li Keqiang and prime ministers or deputy prime ministers from the other member states. Earlier, President Xi Jinping had visited three countries in the region — Serbia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. What’s it all for? How have China’s overtures been received by the governments of Central and Eastern Europe? Many of them — like those of Poland and the Czech Republic — had, until recently, real difficulties in their relations with China. And how have the two powers flanking Central and Eastern Europe — Russia to the east and the EU to the west — reacted to China’s creation of 16+1? For answers to these questions and many more, Kaiser and Jeremy talked to Martin Hála, a China scholar who heads a project called AcaMedia, which is based in his native Prague. Recommendations: Jeremy: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Martin: Black Wind, White Snow, by Charles Clover, Eurasian integration: Caught between Russia and China, by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Kaiser: The “relative calculator” app on WeChat, which calculates the correct Chinese term for family relations. Search for 亲戚计算器 (qīnqi jìsuànqì) on WeChat. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Trump and Xi Jinping: What lies ahead? Mar 23, 2017

Show notes

Earlier this month, Kaiser recorded a discussion in front of a live audience at the 1990 Institute in San Francisco with three luminaries of the China-watching scene: Yasheng Huang, MIT Sloan Professor of Chinese Economy and Business, John Pomfret, author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, and Andy Rothman, investment strategist at Matthews Asia. They got together to talk about how the presidency of Donald Trump will affect trade, politics, the international order, currency policies, and several other sides of the American relationship with China. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Chris Buckley: The China journalist’s China journalist Mar 16, 2017

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Chris Buckley is a highly regarded and very resourceful correspondent for The New York Times, who is based in Beijing. He has worked as a researcher and journalist in China since 1998, including a stint at Reuters, and is one of the few working China correspondents with a Ph.D. in China studies. Chris’s coverage has included politics, foreign policy, rural issues, human rights, the environment, and climate change. He also has an informative and sometimes very amusing Twitter account. In this podcast, recorded with a live audience in Beijing, Kaiser and Jeremy ask Chris about his tradecraft and sourcing of stories about elite Chinese politics, his views on Xi Jinping and the anti-corruption campaign, and what we can expect from the 19th Party Congress this fall. Chris also talks about the joys of journalism in a country that makes it very difficult to do. Recommendations: Jeremy: Interactive infographic about the Party’s “Leading Small Groups” produced by the Mercator Institute for China Studies, Great Wall Fresh - restaurant and wild Great Wall hiking. Chris: Intentions: Examining my peers in the Republic 心路-透视共和国同龄人 by Mi Hedu 米鹤都 (on Chinese Amazon store), All Sages Bookstore (in Chinese)万圣书屋 in Beijing Kaiser: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Big Daddy Dough: Hip-hop and macroeconomics in China Mar 09, 2017

Show notes

By day, Andrew Dougherty is a macroeconomist who manages a China research team for Capital Group, one of the world’s largest actively managed mutual funds. By night, he is Big Daddy Dough, creator of an album of parody hip-hop songs that explain various facets of the contemporary Chinese political and economic situation, from fixed-asset investment to leadership succession. On a recent trip to Beijing, Kaiser and Jeremy sat down with Big Daddy Dough to listen to some of his songs and talk about the serious issues he describes in a lighthearted way in his music. You can listen to Big Daddy Dough’s album and watch his music videos on his website: The Red Print Album. Recommendations: Jeremy: China Heritage website. Andrew: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance. Kaiser: The Devil Made Me Do It, a hip-hop album by Paris. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jane Perlez: Chinese foreign relations in a new age of uncertainty Mar 02, 2017

Show notes

Jane Perlez has been a reporter at The New York Times since 1981. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for coverage of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She has reported on wars, diplomacy, and foreign policy from Somalia to Poland to Indonesia. Since moving to Beijing in 2012, she’s written about everything from China’s space program to the Dixie Mission — the group of Americans sent to Mao Zedong’s revolutionary base at Yan’an who hoped to establish good relations between the U.S. and the soon-to-be-victorious Chinese communists. Last year, she took over from Edward Wong (listen to his exit interview on Sinica here) to become the Times’s Beijing bureau chief. Much of Jane’s reporting has focused on China’s foreign policy, particularly its relations with the United States and its Asian neighbors. So she is the ideal interpreter for us as we try to understand Chinese foreign relations in a new age of uncertainty. Jeremy interviewed Jane in front of a live audience at the Beijing Bookworm for this podcast. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rhino horn and organized crime, from Africa to China and Vietnam Feb 23, 2017

Show notes

John Grobler is a Namibian investigative reporter who has devoted more than two years of his life to examining the complex webs of organized crime funneling rhino horn from Africa to east Asia. Shi Yi 石毅, a Chinese environmental reporter, worked with him and went undercover posing as a businessperson to meet and report on the young Chinese men who engage in this nefarious activity abroad. Jeremy chatted with both of them when he attended the Africa-China Journalists Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa in November 2016 (listen to his other conversations with African journalists on last week’s Sinica Podcast). Separately, Kaiser interviewed Nicole Elizabeth Barnes of Duke University, an expert on Chinese medicine. Nicole, John, and Shi Yi all discussed China’s role in the illegal rhino horn trade, debunking myths about its use as an aphrodisiac and explaining how upper class and status-conscious Chinese and Vietnamese are fueling demand for this and other rare natural products. All three recommended listeners to support WildAid, one of the foremost organizations campaigning against the poaching of elephants and black rhinos. John also recommends supporting Oxpeckers, an African environmental investigative reporting unit that supports his work in Namibia. Nicole further recommended supporting the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and marking World Rhino Day, September 22nd, on your calendar to raise awareness of the work CITIES and TRAFFIC do to monitor and crack down on illegal wildlife trade. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Africa-China journalism Feb 16, 2017

Show notes

In November 2016, Sinica co-host Jeremy Goldkorn attended a conference in his native South Africa called the Africa-China Journalists Forum. The forum was convened to discuss the often-polarized media coverage of China’s involvement in Africa, and to consider how to accentuate the African perspective — rather than the Chinese or Western ones — on how China is changing lives in Africa. In addition to moderating the forum, Jeremy interviewed two organizers of the forum who are longtime observers of China in Africa: Barry Van Wyk and Bob Wekesa. Both are highly knowledgeable of journalism in Africa, and work for the Africa-China Reporting Project at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, where the forum was held. In this short episode, Barry and Bob explain the differences between Chinese, African, and Western journalists, the state of reporting on China-in-Africa issues, and the work that the Africa-China Reporting Project is doing to build a “human grassroots approach” to reporting such a large and controversial story. They also recommended several of their favorite stories that have come out of the project in its work to sponsor aspiring African and Chinese journalists: Nfor Kingsley Monde on China’s role driving deforestation in Cameroon, and on the flipside, Manyanye Paul Ikome on how China has contributed greatly to improving public health in that same country. Other stories on health care, such as this one by Fousseni Saibou. A few highlights from Chinese journalists: Chen Xiaochen on a sisal farm in Tanzania, and Yang Meng on the gold mines of Ghana. Fredrick Mugira on Uganda’s copper mines. Stories on the Standard Gauge Railway being built in Kenya and east Africa, such as this one by Allan Olingo. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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