Barbarians at the Gate

What do we know about Chinese nationalism? Do nationalistic sentiments manifest differently among different demographic groups, as is often the case in Western democratic countries? What kinds of global situations can provoke bouts of nationalism? And to what extent does grassroots nationalism influence China’s foreign policy? We explore these questions with this week’s guest, Peter Gries, Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Manchester, and the Lee Kai Hung Chair of the Manchester China Institute.  “Nationalism, Social Influences, and Chinese Foreign Policy” in China and the World. Shambaugh, D. (ed.). Oxford University Press, 2021.China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy, University of California Press, 2004.Peter Hessler. "A Teacher in China Learns the Limits of Free Expression," The New Yorker, May 16, 2022

No sooner had Jeremiah’s lockdown experience come to an end when Shanghai announced plans to shut down the entire city as cases of the Omicron variant skyrocketed. Now entering its third week, Shanghai’s historic citywide lockdown has imposed unprecedented restrictions and sacrifices on its 25 million people.Among the hapless homebound residents was our longtime friend and colleague, Andrew Field, who – unfortunately for him -- had plenty of free time to talk with us about his experiences during these turbulent few weeks. Andrew reports from the nearby suburb of Kunshan on the mood of residents in and around Shanghai (spoiler: it’s foul), the administrative and policy fiascos of the city government, and his ways of coping during the shutdown (Andrew has left us a special musical treat at the end of the episode).Andrew Field is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Duke Kunshan University and the author of three books, including Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics 1919-1954. Andy is also a documentary filmmaker, having produced several films exploring China’s underground rock scene and the world of Shanghai jazz. We’ve wanted to get Andrew on the podcast for some time and will definitely invite him back on soon to discuss other topics – hopefully maskless and in the same room. Andrew Field’s blog Shanghai Sojournshttp://shanghaisojourns.net/ Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics 1919-1954http://cup.columbia.edu/book/shanghais-dancing-world/9789629964481 Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (with James Farrer)https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo20298865.html Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernisthttps://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo37857676.html  

 As China launches the most stringent lockdowns since the first Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan two years ago, Jeremiah enters his second week in lockdown mode in his Beijing apartment. David and Jeremiah exchange personal accounts and analyses of their own experiences under China’s official “Zero Covid” directive. Topics include the inconsistent and sometimes baffling lockdown protocols, incessant PCR testing, and administrative policy snafus as municipal governments, district authorities, neighborhood committees, and residential property management companies cooperate or clash to implement the constantly-evolving top-down Covid-19 mandates. We are also joined once again on the podcast by Zhang Yajun, former journalist and communications specialist co-host of the WǑMEN PODCAST, an English podcast featuring Chinese people’s daily lives from a female perspective. Yajun shares her insights into the increasing sense of frustration of Chinese people under the Covid-19 restrictions, the anxieties and complaints that reverberate in social media, the gaps and breaches in the monitoring and control system, and class differences in the level of hardship and sacrifice experienced under lockdown restrictions. For additional background information, check out these social media posts: Jeremiah’s Twitter feed account of his lockdown experience.(Done as an epic fantasy of orcs, ogres, goblins, and trolls) Shane Learning’s Twitter account of his quarantine experience in Shanghai

As Covid-19 gradually recedes and China resumes domestic travel, we are pleased to interview Mo Yajun about her book Touring China: A History of Travel Culture, 1912-1949, a fascinating history of the development of China’s travel industry during the Republican period. Professor Mo recounts how early tourism guides and photographic travel journals enabled Chinese people to expand the concept of quanguo 全国 ”the nation as a whole,” providing the public with an enhanced mental image of the vast scope and diversity of their “national space.” We also hear the story of Chen Guangfu, the father of China’s modern travel industry. He founded the China Travel Service during the tumultuous warlord period, partially responding to the hegemony of foreign travel services, which treated Chinese tourists as second-class citizens. Other topics covered include the issue of class in the tourism environment of semi-colonial China, cultural clashes with well-funded foreign researchers who traveled to historical sites such as the Dunhuang caves to study – and often purloin -- cultural relics, and the effect of the new technology of the personal camera on the perception, promotion and imagining of China’s historical sites.

Do Chinese people know more about the US than Americans know about China? Is there an “information deficit” between average educated Americans and their Chinese counterparts? Educators working in US-China academic exchange programs have noticed a marked information asymmetry, a “China cluelessness” on the part of American students. At the same time, their Chinese peers enter into American studies with a substantial amount of cultural and historical background knowledge. How serious is this problem, what are its causes? And what are the implications for building greater cross-cultural understanding of China?  To address these issues, Jeremiah and David are fortunate to be joined on the podcast by Yajun Zhang, the co-host of the WǑ MEN PODCAST, an English podcast featuring Chinese people’s daily lives from a female perspective. As a former journalist and communication specialist, Yajun has crafted content to facilitate mutual understanding between Chinese and international audiences. Now, leading content and program design for one of the largest conferences in the world, she has witnessed how information asymmetry and decoupling between China and the world has grown over the past couple of years.The podcast discussion examines the causes of the information asymmetry, which include the status of English as the world’s lingua franca, America’s decades-long global soft power dominance, and the sheer numerical imbalance (e.g., 370,000 Chinese students studying at US universities in 2019, as compared to only 11,000 US students studying Chinese language and culture in 2017-18), all factors resulting in the educated Chinese populace having a more intuitive grasp of the complexities of American culture. The podcast also discusses the effects of the information deficit amidst the chaotic news wars during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, the importance of an informed electorate when American leaders formulate China policy, and the need to cultivate a supply of China-savvy policy-makers in areas such as diplomacy, military, trade.“A Fearful Asymmetry: Covid-19 and America’s Information Deficit with China”David MoserThe Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 18 | Issue 14 | Number 5 | Jul 15, 2020The WǑ MEN PODCAST co-hosted by Yajun Zhang, Jingjing Zhang, and Karoline Kan(Apple Podcasts)

On the cusp of the Chinese New Year and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Jeremiah and David record an Olympian episode of the podcast. The guest is Mark Dreyer, a veteran sports reporter, who has just released his new book, Sporting Superpower: An Insider’s View on China’s Quest to Be the Best. Mark has worked for Sky Sports, Fox Sports, AP Sports, and many other outlets and currently hosts the China Sports Insider Podcast. The conversation covers issues such as the historical importance of the 2008 Olympics, challenges of Covid-19 in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the Chinese model of recruiting and training Olympic athletes, the PR disasters of Chinese athletes due to lack of media savvy, the quest for a world-class Chinese soccer/football team, and the nexus of geopolitics, economics and soft power in China’s Olympic endeavors. Dreyer also recounts many fascinating and telling anecdotes from his many years of interviewing athletes and covering Chinese sporting events.Other books and clips mentioned:Susan Brownell (1995) Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's RepublicMao Zedong (1917) "A Study in Physical Education"Yao Ming, "You can't f------ stop me" Video

In this week’s episode, we talk with Jean Hoffmann Lewanda about her father Paul Hoffmann’s memoir, Witness to History: From Vienna to Shanghai: A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience, recently published by Earnshaw Books. Paul Hoffmann left Vienna at the age of 18 to escape the rise of Nazism, arrived in Shanghai in 1938, and became a part of the historic stream of Jewish refugees who found a haven in China during WWII. His memoirs describe the harsh living conditions in the Hongkou Ghetto during the Japanese occupation and the lifestyles of the multicultural, multinational community in Shanghai. Paul eked out a living teaching English and mathematics while obtaining a law degree from Aurora University (currently Fudan University). He worked for the American lawyer Norwood Allman (who was secretly the US spy chief in China). Paul remained in China during the communist takeover in 1949, managing the dissolution of his law firm, and witnessed firsthand the harassment, imprisonment, and expulsions to which the foreign community was subjected. After rediscovering her father’s memoirs, Jean Hoffmann Lewanda edited the text, weaving in the various photographs and documents Paul left behind. The result is Witness to History, a gripping and sometimes harrowing memoir of a man who was caught up in the tides of one of the most tumultuous periods in history and lived to tell the story.

In this episode, Jeremiah and David talk with James Griffiths, Asia Correspondent for the Globe and Mail, about his new book Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language. This podcast can be considered the third installment of a trilogy of Barbarian at the Gate episodes that deal with the politics of language and dialects in China (see the links to the earlier podcasts below). Our previous guest Gina Anne Tam aptly sums up Griffiths’ research topic in her dustjacket review of the book: “Speak Not is a beautifully narrated and intensely smart global history of how languages are destroyed. From Hong Kong to Wales, Hawaii to South Africa, Griffiths artfully guides us through intimate stories of people fighting over decades, often in vain, to protect their linguistic heritage and identities, stories that, when taken together, reveal an oft-unexplored aspect of the ‘disasters wrought’ by colonialism, nationalism, and global inequality.” In addition to insights from the revitalization of Welsh, one of Griffiths’ native tongues, the podcast delves deeply into the recent plight of Cantonese in Hong Kong and the mainland minority languages of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Links to: “Mandarin Mayhem” April 10, 2020 “Mandarin Mayhem, Part II: Dialect and Nationalism in China” June 02, 2020  The Great Firewall of China “A residential school system in China is stripping Tibetan children of their languages and culture, report claims” The Globe and Mail  December 7, 2021David Moser, A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016)

In this episode, Jeremiah and David have a long-overdue discussion with historian and writer Maura Cunningham. Maura was Editor-in-Chief of the classic blog China Beat, a fellow at the Asia Society Center on US-China Relations, Program Officer at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and is now the Digital Media Manager for The Association of Asian Scholars (AAS) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Maura is also the co-author, with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, of the essential book China in the 21st Century: Everything You Need to Know, and the podcast conversation starts with a reconsideration of the book’s title: “What are the new China realities ‘everyone needs to know’ in the post-Covid, post-Xi Jinping era?” We compare notes with Maura about the current state of scholarly research on China, the aftermath of the pandemic on US-China academic exchange programs, and the problems of maintaining standards of academic freedom amidst the tightening of the Chinese information environment. Other topics include a reevaluation of the fundamental goals of China research and the prospects of increased Chinese language training and sinological research activity in China under increasing research limitations in the PRC.Greitens, S., & Truex, R. (2020). Repressive Experiences among China Scholars: New Evidence from Survey Data. The China Quarterly, 242, 349-375. doi:10.1017/S0305741019000365Will I Return to China?: A ChinaFile Conversation (June 21, 2021)Wasserstrom, J. N., & Cunningham, M. E. (2018). China in the 21st century: What Everyone Needs to Know.

This week Jeremiah and David catch up with an old friend, China history scholar Marketus Presswood., who has just released a documentary on jazz in China entitled Yellow Jazz, Black Music, available on Vimeo. Based on years of research and extensive interviews, the documentary traces the influx and development of jazz music in China, from the Shanghai ballrooms of the 1920s to a resurgence in the urban nightclubs of the Reform-and-Opening period, and finally to the art form's flourishing in a new globalized, high-tech China. Marketus provides a fascinating description of the lives of the African-American jazz musicians in Republican Era Shanghai, including the experiences of Langston Hughes, who visited the city in 1934 and interacting with the stars of the local jazz scene. We also discuss the difficulties of Chinese musicians in accessing and mastering the art form, the social and artistic impact of jazz on Chinese culture, and the possibilities of a new kind of "jazz with Chinese characteristics."Links to:Website for the film:www.yellowjazzblackmusic.comYellow Jazz, Black Music on Vimeo:  https://vimeo.com/ondemand/yellowjazzblackmusicThe Yellow Jazz Black Music Spotify music site:https://open.spotify.com/album/2oDjOu5dXCUm8atpkZfJ2WJeremiah on Langston Hughes in Shanghaihttps://www.jeremiahjenne.com/the-archives/2021/1/28/langston-hughes-in-shanghaiDavid on Jazz in Chinahttps://chinachannel.org/2018/07/20/chinese-jazz/Marketus on "Being Black in China" https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/07/on-being-black-in-china/277878/