Sinica Podcast

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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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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This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Bloomberg’s chief economist, Tom Orlik, about his new book, China: The Bubble That Never Pops. A longtime resident of Beijing, Tom wrote for the Wall Street Journal before joining Bloomberg as chief Asia economist. His book argues that Beijing's leaders have learned valuable lessons from their own history and from the experiences of other countries, and applied them well to China's own economy.

5:33: The bears have it wrong on China

10:08: Debt obligations and local government finance

18:29: What the Chinese leadership has learned, and what it hasn’t

30:21: Shadow loans, and the shadow banking sector

47:42: The tools that China’s central banks have to deal with risk

Recommendations:

Tom: China’s Unfinished Economic Revolution, by Nicholas R. Lardy, and The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days, by Cáo Xuěqín 曹雪芹, translated by David Hawkes.

Kaiser: The 2010 Chinese television series Three Kingdoms.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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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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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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