The Little Red Podcast

China's reaching not just for the stars, but also for the deepest ocean depths.  It's even parked its deepwater submersible in the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the world's oceans, and planted flags on the ocean bed.  This month, Graeme and Louisa are joined by China Ocean Institute CEO Tabitha Mallory and Tiffany Ma, the senior director of Bower Group Asia, to talk about how the Great Game is playing out on our seabeds.  Image: Caulophryne pelagica [Angler Fish] D. Shale, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia CommonsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a new series of episodes, we’re examining how China is pushing the boundaries of science and territory. First up, China’s space program, the envy of space scientists worldwide for seemingly bottomless pots of funding from government, and increasingly, venture capital.  China's space programme, with a space telescope that is constantly being upgraded and its uber-for-satellites, is no longer just cloning Soviet tech. To explore the ecology of China’s space sector and ask what’s driving their massive space spend, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at the Australian National University and Blaine Curcio, the co-host of Dongfang Hour, a podcast about China and space, and co-founder of Orbital Gateway Counselling.    Image: c/-  Jamie Gilbert and Brad Tucker (ANU), View from a balloon at 32km (105,000 ft.), 2019.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a few short months, Chinese officials have gone from COVID cover-up to competing over who has the highest number of infections. After urbanites flocked back to the countryside for lunar New Year, the Party that ran the world’s strictest prevention regime now presides over the world’s largest and most ambitious experiment in herd immunity. To explore how this dramatic change unfolded, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Governing Health in Contemporary China and Vivian Wu, co-founder of the Mighty Voice media studio, who has worked at a host of media organizations including BBC Chinese and Initium.  Image: Abandoned Isolation House in Shenzhen with Dynamic Zero Slogan, c/- Wikimedia CommonsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Finally, China’s sloughing off the Zero Covid policy it’s embraced for three years. This followed a spasm of discontent, with people taking to the streets to demonstrate against Zero Covid, in protests that quickly spilled over to demand democracy and Xi Jinping's resignation. Beijing’s adaptive authoritarianism is in full sight, as the state eases Covid controls and reverses three years of rhetoric on the dangers of the virus. To ask whether the protests were a flash in the pan, we’re joined by William Hurst, Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at Cambridge University, Chenchen Zhang from Durham University, producer and co-host of the Shicha Podcast and Zeyi Yang, China reporter at MIT Technology Review. Image: Vigil at Southwest Jiaotong University, c/- Wikimedia CommonsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Wall Street Journal reporters and authors of *Surveillance State*, join Aynne Kokas, a digital sovereignty expert from the University of Virginia. They delve into China's ambitious data control efforts, highlighting the role of American tech firms in aiding these strategies. The discussion examines the consequences of biodata collection, especially in Xinjiang, and the rampant surveillance techniques accelerated by COVID-19. The podcast also contrasts China's smart city initiatives with the regulatory challenges faced by Western democracies in managing surveillance and AI.

China's political event of the decade - its 20th Party Congress - will confirm Xi Jinping's third term as leader of the CCP and could even bestow on him the title of ‘chairman’. With an economy crippled by zero-COVID and global public opinion about China turning precipitously negative, it seems an age since China’s leaders promised a ‘peaceful rise’. Was this peaceful rise stymied by hardliners, or was it all an elaborate influence operation orchestrated by China's spies?  For two very different analyses of developments inside the black box of Chinese politics, we’re joined by Susan Shirk, Research Professor and Chair at the 21st Century China Centre at University of California, San Diego, whose much awaited new book is Overreach: How China Derailed its Peaceful Rise is just out, and Alex Joske, Senior Analyst at Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who’s just written a book called Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World. Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons. President George W. Bush is greeted by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping Sunday 10 August 2008. White House photo by Eric Draper. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Southeast Asian nation has historically been seen as China's first client state, with the Khmer Rouge's hardline interpretation of Maoism leading to the horror of the Killing Fields.  Four decades on, Cambodia still enjoys the best and the worst of what the People’s Republic can offer.   While aid from Beijing has built world-class infrastructure and provided clean drinking water to Cambodians, Chinese companies are also responsible for a tidal wave of scams, illegal casinos and even recent cases of human trafficking. China's building a military base at Ream on the Gulf of Thailand, only its second overseas base, amid public denials from Cambodian officials.  To delve into the history and complexity of China’s relationship with Cambodia, we’re joined by Matthew Galway of the Australian National University and the author of The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist movement 1949-1979, and Andrew Mertha, director of the SAIS China Global Research Center at John Hopkins University and the author of Brothers in Arms: Chinese aid to the Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979. Image: Prince Sihanouk visits China, November 1964. c/- Wikimedia Commons and People’s Daily.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chinese households under lockdown have lacked food, company, and access to medical care.  But they’ve had an almost endless supply of a traditional Chinese medicine treatment called Lianhua Qingwen, made by Yiling Pharmaceuticals. Chinese students abroad even have this drug delivered to their doorsteps in healthcare packages, and demand for it among diaspora communities has seen panic-buying and hugely inflated prices. In this episode, we explore why the Chinese state has invested huge sums in promoting such traditional remedies that have not been subject to rigorous clinical testing. To unpack the history and the politics, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Michael Stanley-Baker, historian of Chinese medicine and religion at Nanyang Technological University and Altman Yuzhu Peng, researcher of intercultural communications at the University of Warwick.     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s now been twenty-five years since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty with a pledge not to change Hong Kong’s way of life for fifty years. In actual fact, Beijing's stealth infiltration of Hong Kong began long before the territory's return, with United Front work targeting certain sectors of the population. In this episode, we delve deep into Hong Kong's history to pinpoint how Beijing used the cheongsam makers and policemen - among others - to infiltrate society.  Graeme is joined by Ho-fung Hung of Johns Hopkins University, author of City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule, Newsweek journalist Didi Kirsten Tatlow, and for the first time as a guest, Louisa Lim, whose book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong is now out.  Image: Black Bauhinia with wilted petals, c/- Jacky CTensd, Wikimedia Commons, 2019  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After two long months, Shanghai's brutal lockdown is over in name, but Xi Jinping is telling officials to ‘unswervingly adhere’ to Zero COVID, despite the costs. Shanghai’s lockdown brought chaos to global supply chains and torpedoed China’s once-sacred economic growth targets. It’s also taken a toll on the city’s residents; once the nation’s most privileged, they had a front row seat to the arbitrary nature of government decrees. To unpack what happens next, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jennifer Pak, the Shanghai-based correspondent for Marketplace and Victor Shih, political economist at the University of California, San Diego whose new book Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi is just out.   Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons. Hubei medical team aid Shanghai COVID-19 community testing on 4 April 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzrsLxGy9Gg  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.