The Little Red Podcast

China’s Communist Party’s rewriting of history doesn’t stop at their own borders, but has even reached as far as Wandiligong, a town of 453 people four hours north of Melbourne. It’s home to a memorial bridge to Chinese goldminers built with the assistance of the Australia China Friendship Society. The information panels use racist language for the Chinese such as “chinks and chows to be ridiculed and baited”, illustrating one example of how the CCP is exporting the notion of a century of humiliation to other countries. In this episode we ask whether various attempts to rewrite Chinese Australian history represent a coordinated campaign and to what end. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Karen Schamberger, vice President of the Young Historical Society, historian Louise Edwards from the University of New South Wales and Paul Macgregor, former curator at the Chinese Museum of Melbourne. Photo credit: Louisa LimSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The purge that followed the killings by PLA soldiers in and around Tiananmen Square three decades ago has continued into the present, even permeating Western academia.   A host of new sources, including leaked diaries by Chinese leaders, have emerged in recent years, but few Western scholars appear willing to break the taboo surrounding June 4.  The jailing this month of nine Hong Kongers, for as much as ten months, for taking part in a banned Tiananmen vigil indicates how the purge is spreading to Hong Kong, where police raided the Tiananmen Massacre museum, confiscating exhibits as evidence.   Against that backdrop, Louisa speaks to Simon Fraser University's Jeremy Brown, whose recent book June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and the Beijing Massacre reframes the events of 1989, shifting the focus from elites and students to ordinary people.   This is a recording of a live conversation that was hosted by Harvard University’s Fairbank Centre for Chinese Studies. Image: Tiananmen Square, c/- Nick Fewings on Unsplash. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nationalism in China seems to have taken a feral turn, with Chinese netizens viciously turning on Olympic athletes, celebrities and even the über-nationalist Global Times for letting down the motherland. This month we’re talking about the evolution of Chinese nationalism and the factors driving the emergence of a new cadre of aggressive diplomats known as wolf warriors. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Bloomberg journalist Peter Martin, who's just written China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy and Cornell University’s Jessica Chen Weiss, who’s also the China editor at the Washington Post and has written a book called Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations.   Image: Vladimir Putin with Wang Yi, website of the President of the Russian Federation, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 LicenseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For our fifth anniversary, we’ve thrown the floor open to our audience.   This month we’re doing an Agony Aunt edition for China nerds. We've gathered your burning China questions and then hunted down the world’s leading experts in search of answers. From support for the government to statistical elasticity, from clothing habits to tea-drinking titillations right at the very top, we are parrying listener questions. In search of answers, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Arunabh Ghosh and Anthony Saich from Harvard University, Antonia Finnane from the University of Melbourne, and Lawrence Zhang from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.   Image: Image of older women sitting outside with masks on, c/- Peijia Li on Unsplash.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China’s once untouchable tech billionaires suddenly find themselves in the unfamiliar position of being roughed up the state. Just at the time when the Party needs its homegrown tech firms to sell Xi Jinping’s new ‘lovable’ image of China, previously toothless regulators are issuing billion dollar fines and ordering companies to restructure—or else. To ask whether the state’s cozy relationships with companies like Alibaba and TenCent are on the rocks, we’re joined by Hong Kong University’s Angela Zhang, University of Leiden’s Rogier Creemers and John Lee from the Mercator Institute of Chinese Studies. This episode was recorded live as part of the ANU’s Digital Politics in the Asia Pacific seminar series. Image: Jack Ma c/- ピロシキ, flickr, October 10, 2011.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For a Party chosen by history, the CCP spends a lot of money targeting foreign media outlets and governments. In this episode, a panel of researchers discusses why China—or any autocracy—cares what the world thinks of it, and how it tries to shape its global image. We ask whether the CCP’s media outreach and lobbying operations bear fruit, or are readily seen through as clumsy propaganda. This week, Graeme is joined by Louisa and the Little Red Podcast’s researcher Julia Bergin, discuss a survey on China’s global media outreach that they've just conducted for the International Federation of Journalists, as well as political scientist Erin Baggott Carter from the University of South California, and Alex Dukalskis from University College Dublin who has just written a book called Making the World Safe for Dictatorship. Image: Night view of earth from space with lights, c/- Aashish Yadav on Unsplash.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China is home to 661 million online gamers, easily the world’s biggest market. Cities like Shanghai now boast some of the world’s most talented game developers. Yet the Chinese government has long been uncomfortable with online games, fretting about Internet addiction and young people wasting their energies on ‘spiritual opium’, leaving their schoolbooks for seedy Internet cafes. To explore how China is coping with the tension between molding productive citizens and cashing in on a hugely lucrative gaming industry, Louisa and Graeme are joined by game developer Allison Yang Jing, who writes about Chinese video games, Hugh Davies from RMIT, a video game curator, and Pace College’s Marcella Szablewicz, author of Mapping Digital Game Culture in China. Image: Game On, Hugh DaviesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China is now remoulding Hong Kong at speed.  Forty-seven Democratic politicians and activists have been arrested on national security charges for participating in last year’s primary polls, and only people Beijing deems ‘patriots’ allowed to run for office.  One prominent pro-Beijing figure has even warned that the electoral reforms risk ‘killing the patient’.  With the legislature muzzled, the authorities are turning their attention to the media, the arts and the education sector.  This month we're joined by a high-profile political exile, former Democratic party legislator Ted Hui, who's the first Hong Kong politician to flee to Australia, and former Democratic party chairperson, Emily Lau, who’s still in Hong Kong. Image c/- Flickr, Studio Incendo_DSC5956, 3 March 2021See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With the world’s attention focused on industrial-scale oppression in Xinjiang, developments in Tibet are passing beneath the radar.  But activists are warning of a full-spectrum assault on the Tibetan way of life, as Tibetan language teaching is outlawed and urbanisation campaigns relocate nomads from their ancestral pastures.  The CCP has underlined its determination to choose the next Dalai Lama, and Tibetans were recently urged by their Party Secretary to ‘reduce religious consumption’ to build a ‘new modern socialist Tibet’.  To hear about the sophisticated ‘rolling repression’ that characterises Chinese rule in Tibet, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Barbara Demick, author of Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, Benno Weiner, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University who has just published The Chinese Revolution on Tibetan Frontier and Tendor Dorjee, a Senior Researcher at the Tibet Action Institute. Image: Polata Palace in Tibet with a mirrored reflection on water, c/- Gang Hao on Unsplash.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This month we’re delving into boys’ love or BL fiction. From niche online novels to TV shows such as the Netflix fantasy epic The Untamed, their storylines revolve around male relationships with a tinge of sexual tension. But there’s a quirk. It’s not gay fiction; the stories are often written by women for women. This genre is incredibly popular in China, making BL fans an intimidating political and economic force, creating and destroying celebrities and the brands they endorse. To unravel the drama behind BL drama, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Hong Kong University’s Angie Baecker and boys’ love author Huanxiang Zhenghuanzhe 幻想症患者.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.