Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
1 Creator
1 Creator
A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.
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Top 10 Sinica Podcast Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Sinica Podcast episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Sinica Podcast for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Sinica Podcast episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
10/24/24 • 55 min
This week on Sinica, in a show recorded in Beijing, I speak with Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang, the authors of two excellent newsletters — The Beijing Channel and Ginger River Review, respectively — and two of the guys behind the YouTube show "Got China." They're making a great effort to bridge Chinese journalism with Anglophone reporting on China with perspectives and insights from within the Chinese state media system.
4:24 – How Jiang Jiang and Liu Yang became journalists
11:42 – How Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang decided to launch their newsletters, and the advantages of being tǐzhì nèi 体制内
20:29 – Jiang Jiang and Liu Yang’s Got China show
25:46 – Liu Yang’s and Jiang Jiang’s empathy for American perspectives
29:53 – The negative American discourse on the Chinese economy and “China collapse theory”
37:21 The recent press conferences on monetary and policies, and the response in the realty market in Beijing
46:17 What’s next for Got China
Recommendations:
Liu Yang: Modern Chinese Government and Politics 《当代中国政府与政治?》, a Chinese-language textbook
Jiang Jiang: The Chinese podcast Bié de diànbō 别的电波; and Shan Weijian’s Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America
Kaiser: The album The Last Will and Testament by Swedish metal band Opeth; and the Provincial Cuisine Club in Beijing, for trying food from different parts of China
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2 Listeners
08/19/21 • 62 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the Columbia historian Adam Tooze, who returns to the program a year after his first appearance. A prolific writer and wide-ranging public intellectual, Adam was trained as a Germanist and has focused, in his writings, largely on economic history. His books include The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931, and Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World. In July, Adam published an ambitious essay titled “Why there is no solution to our age of crisis without China” in The New Statesman, in which he lays out a brief history of China from the crisis of the Qing Empire in the 19th century through China’s “Century of Humiliation” up to the project of national rejuvenation, which has been the focus of Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 time in office. Adam talks about why he feels it’s important to occasionally venture outside one’s own field of specialization, as he did in writing on China as a non-specialist; the folly of two oft-cited historical analogies, comparing China with both Wilhelmine and Hitlerian Germany; the importance of comparative history in making sense of contemporary international relations; and America’s difficulty, when it comes to China, in accepting pluralism from anything but a position of dominance.
16:02: What we get wrong about the Thucydides Trap and other historical analogies about China
21:17: Why the modern P.R.C. is not a mature fascist state
28:58: The iterative nature of China’s economic modernization
46:59: China as a civilization vs. China as a nation state
A transcript of this episode is available on SupChina.com.
Recommendations:
Adam: Stalingrad, by Vasily Grossman.
Kaiser: The Spanish-language television series The Legend of El Cid.
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2 Listeners
10/04/24 • 80 min
This week on the Sinica Podcast, I chat with my dear friend David Moser, a longtime resident of Beijing, formerly an occasional co-host of Sinica and associate professor at Beijing Capital Normal University. We have a long history of exploring the underlying issues in our approach to China, and this week, we unpack some of those, focusing on the role of outsiders in Chinese society and their role in "changing China," drawing on David's response to an essay I recently published.
3:46 —David’s thoughts on Kaiser’s essay (“Priority Pluralism: Rethinking Universal Values in U.S.-China Relations”)
5:18 —How David thinks about going on state media and the reasons he does so
10:37 —How David’s engagement with state media has changed over time
15:04 —Conscience, moral intuition, drawing lines, and whataboutism
26:35 —The outsider urge to change China: the differences between the U.S. and Chinese governments and COVID as a test of the two systems; the role of American policy in working toward positive change and the importance of continuing engagement; and so-called Enlightenment values and priority pluralism
50:46 —The debate over cultural differences
57:09 —China’s notion of whole-process democracy versus American democracy
1:05:55 — “Give them time:” Anticipating when we will see big changes in China’s political culture
Recommendations:
David: Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought; and his own article, “A Fearful Asymmetry: COVID-19 and America’s Information Deficit with China”
Kaiser: The “Open Database for China Studies Resource Guide” published by ACLS
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1 Listener
Overreach and overreaction, with Susan Shirk
Sinica Podcast
10/20/22 • 66 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Susan Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific and Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD, about how the deliberately collective leadership of the Hu Jintao years set the stage for the over-concentration of power under Xi Jinping and created conditions for overreach. She argues that Chinese overreach was met with American overreaction — not just in the Trump years, but continuing into the Biden administration.
11:35 – The thesis of Overreach and misconceptions based on the title
15:50 – The decline of collective leadership
19:57 – Selection process of politburo members
27:48 – The advantages of China’s former collective leadership system
31:40 – How collective leadership often lead to overreach
39:40 – How personalistic, overly centralized rule can also result in overreach
43:02 – Increased paranoia, insecurity, and “permanent purge” culture under Xi
49:59 – American overreaction to China’s ambitions
A transcript of this episode is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Susan – Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World by Howard French
Kaiser – His hobby of Asian archery and finding a community/activity you’re passionate about outside your professional line of work
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1 Listener
Sinica at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, Boston 2023: Capsule interviews
Sinica Podcast
04/06/23 • 63 min
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 <...
1 Listener
10/27/22 • 58 min
This week on Sinica, Evan Osnos, staff writer for The New Yorker, joins hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn to talk about his new piece on one of the most puzzling figures to come out of China: Guo Wengui, a.k.a. Miles Kwok, who took what he learned about dealing with power and money in China and applied those lessons to the U.S., insinuating himself with leading figures of the American right. Who is this mysterious man, and what is he really after? In an unscripted episode that will bring some listeners back to the grotty apartment in Beijing where Sinica recorded in its very early days, Evan, Kaiser, and Jeremy parse the mysteries of the strange phenomenon of Guo Wengui.
03:37 – Who is Guo Wengui?
10:07 – Orville Schell’s experience with Guo Wengui
14:48 – Steve Bannon’s comparison between Guo and Trump
17:40 – The process of fact-checking this piece
23:03 – Guo’s potential ties to the pro-Xi Jinping clique
26:02 – VOA’s interview with Guo
30:06 – Guo’s campaign against Teng Biao and other Chinese dissidents
33:57 – Guo’s role as an interlocutor on behalf of the MSS
39:00 – Steve Wynn’s efforts to extradite Guo
42:10 – Guo’s impact on the Chinese diaspora community
45:11 – Guo’s influence on US-China relations
A transcript of this interview is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Jeremy: "President Trump's First Term," by Evan Osnos, a New Yorker article written in 2016 predicting what would happen to the U.S. if Donald Trump won in 2016. (Spoiler: he did. And Evan was right).
Evan: An audio tribute to legendary New Yorker editor John Bennet: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/johnbennet.php
Kaiser: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet, a forgivably melodramatic historical fiction novel with an emphasis on architecture
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1 Listener
07/15/22 • 67 min
This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Triolo, Senior VP for China and Technology Policy Lead at Dentons Global Advisors ASG, formerly and probably better known still as Albright Stonebridge Group. Paul provides an in-depth overview of today’s semiconductor landscape, from export control issues, to the unstable equilibrium between U.S., China, and Taiwan’s industries. He walks us through the strategic importance of semiconductors in U.S. national security considerations — and how unintended consequences of our current policies toward China might actually end up undermining U.S. national security.
04:45 – An overview of semiconductor geopolitics and supply chains
20:33 – Why the U.S. is cutting China off from advanced semiconductor technologies
27:02 – The shift in technology export controls from Trump to Biden
32:08 – The CHIPS Act and subsidies for the semiconductor industry
37:43 – Deterrence and Taiwan’s semiconductor industry as a “silicon shield”
46:16 – Lessons learned from the chip shortage
52:30 – Why is the U.S lighting a fire to Chinese self-sufficiency efforts?
57:57 – The implications of Pelosi’s planned visit to Taiwan
A transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.
Recommendations:
Paul: Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future; and Ryan Hass, Stronger: Adapting America's China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence
Kaiser: The Boys on Amazon Prime
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1 Listener
09/30/21 • 65 min
This week, Kaiser chats with Manfred Elfstrom, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Manfred’s new book, Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness, examines the state’s dynamic approach to handling labor actions — petitions, protests, strikes, and the like — and how it has blended compromise and coercion to address the demands of workers. The book makes an important contribution to a growing body of literature that seeks a deeper understanding of authoritarian governance in China and more generally among autocratic regimes.
3:27 – How the book’s argument fits into the broader literature on authoritarian governance
9:32 – The book’s geographic focus: The Pearl River Delta and the Yangzi River Delta
22:12 – Repression and responsiveness
32:39 – Why repression and responsiveness undercut one another
43:58 – The bureaucratic incentive to handle labor unrest well
50:28 – Labor issues, common prosperity, and the “Red New Deal”
55:58 – The Jasic protests and the crackdown on the Peking University Marxist study group
A transcript of this interview is available on SupChina.com
Recommendations:
Manfred: Elizabeth Perry’s book Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition; and James Green’s The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and their Battle for Freedom.
Kaiser: The Ezra Klein Show, and particularly the episode featuring Adam Tooze, “Economics Needs to Reckon with What it Doesn’t Know.”
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1 Listener
09/08/22 • 73 min
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
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1 Listener
11/02/22 • 61 min
This week on Sinica, our friends at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs invited us for a live show taping before a small group. Kaiser is joined by Lizzi Lee, MIT-trained economist-turned-reporter who hosts the Chinese-language show "Wall Street Today" as well as The China Project's "Live with Lizzi Lee," both on Youtube; and by Damien Ma, who heads the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank MacroPolo. These two top-shelf analysts of Chinese politics break down what was important — and what was just a sideshow — at the 20th Party Congress, and offer their knowledgeable perspectives on the individuals named to key posts and what this likely means for China's direction. Don't miss this one!
2:40 – Findings from MacroPolo’s “fantasy PBSC” experiment
8:18 – Did China watchers overemphasize Xi Jinping’s political constraints?
12:31 – Support for Li Qiang across different political factions
17:23 – The changing factional composition of Chinese elite politics
20:20 – Return of the technocrats
23:27 – “Generation-skipping” in China’s recent political promotions
28:26 – The selection of Cai Qi
32:46 – Li Shulei as a successor to Wang Huning
37:07 – The future of China’s economic leadership
39:52 – Selection of the vice premiers
41:18 – The future of China’s diplomatic core
45:28 – The Hu Jintao episode
49:22 – Revising the “Zero-COVID” policy
51:17 – Reassessing China’s intentions vis-à-vis Taiwan
A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Lizzi: Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao by Joseph Torigian
Damien: Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong
Kaiser: "Taiwan, the World-Class Puzzle," a Radio Open Source podcast hosted by Christopher Lydon
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1 Listener
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FAQ
How many episodes does Sinica Podcast have?
Sinica Podcast currently has 488 episodes available.
What topics does Sinica Podcast cover?
The podcast is about News, Culture, China News, Film, Chinese, International Relations, Podcasts, Business, China and Politics.
What is the most popular episode on Sinica Podcast?
The episode title 'Historian Adam Tooze on why China’s modern history should matter to Americans' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Sinica Podcast?
The average episode length on Sinica Podcast is 61 minutes.
How often are episodes of Sinica Podcast released?
Episodes of Sinica Podcast are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Sinica Podcast?
The first episode of Sinica Podcast was released on Apr 2, 2010.
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Jun 1
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