Barbarians at the Gate

In this episode, Jeremiah and David talk about the foreign experience of travel in China, drawing upon their personal experiences over the years as explorers, educators, and tour guides. The two trade accounts of the rapid expansion of China’s travel industry in decades after Reform and Opening, the occasional brushes with anti-foreign sentiment, and the exploding domestic luxury travel market as the economy booms and overseas travel has been restricted. The discussion also turns to the new post-Covid-19 reality of quarantines, vaccination records, and issues with the ubiquitous health-record apps that have become mandatory additions to everyone’s mobile phone. The podcast concludes with cautious prognostications about the upcoming Olympics, vaccination passports, and the future of foreigners traveling, studying, and working in China. David also recommends the excellent new documentary about jazz and jazz-age Shanghai by Marketus Presswood, Yellow Jazz, Black Music now streaming on Vimeo.

In this episode (taped on the eve of June 4th), Jeremiah and David examine the zeitgeist of China in the 1980s through the lens of the historic 1988 documentary River Elegy《河殇》. The six-part documentary was a scathing critique of Chinese traditional culture and political philosophy, portraying hallowed icons such as the Great Wall and the Yellow River as morally repugnant symbols of barbarism and cultural self-deception. The TV series also touched upon previously taboo topics such as Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The documentary was highly controversial at the time yet was widely disseminated in State media such as the People's Daily, giving rise to an astonishingly frank public debate about the fate of China and the need for economic and political liberalization. The documentary was banned after 1989 but remains a cultural time capsule of the decade's relatively open political discourse. The podcast discussion examines the contentious intellectual currents of the 1980s and poses some counterfactual questions about how China's reforms might have progressed if the free-thinking trajectory of River Elegy had continued to exert an influence. Link to a segment of River Elegy on YouTube Moser, David, "Thoughts on River Elegy, June 1988-June 2011" (2011). The China Beat Blog Archive 2008-2012. 904.  

In this episode, we host Ruth Poulsen, Director of Curriculum and Assessment at the International School of Beijing and author of a recent article in The American Educator entitled "What's the Line between Culture Shock and Racism?" Ruth is a long-term ex-pat, having spent much of her childhood and adult life in various countries in the Middle East and Asia. In the interview, Ruth shares her cross-cultural insights gained from her years working with teachers and students living abroad and offers some strategies for coping with cultural shock, cultural misunderstandings, and negative stereotypes. Those new to the podcast might want to check out an earlier episode with Lenora Chu, which examined cross-cultural differences in the Chinese and American education systems.

On the show this week, Jeremiah and David dialogue about one of their long-term common missions: educating American study abroad students about the complex culture and politics of China. With the rise of the PRC as an economic power, it has always been vitally important to get American scholars to this country to gain first-hand experience with the language and culture. Yet, It has always been a challenge to establish and maintain study abroad programs in China. For decades there had always been a significant disparity between the number of Chinese students in the US vs. American students in China, but now with rising US-China tensions and the onslaught of Covid-19, the China study abroad student has become somewhat of an endangered species. The pre-Covid number of Chinese students in the US studying for undergraduate and graduate degrees had increased to about 370,000 by 2019. By contrast, the number of American students studying in China, after a brief spike prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, had declined to a mere 11,000 in the 2017-18 school year. Jeremiah and David reminisce about their experience teaching US students in Beijing, discuss the geopolitical importance of fostering a China-savvy cohort of American scholars entering the US workforce, and explore possible strategies and models for building China study programs in the post-Covid world. Jeremiah on Twitter David on Twitter David Moser, A Fearful Asymmetry: Covid-19 and America’s Information Deficit with China 8.7.3

In today's episode, Jeremiah and David meet up with legendary Canadian TV personality, comedian, and cultural ambassador Mark Rowswell, better known to generations of Chinese audiences as Dashan. On the eve of the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala, "the most-watched TV show in the world," Mark briefly recounts his experiences on the show, its importance as a cultural mainstay of the traditional New Year's holiday, and the evolution of the program from the early days of Chinese television to the current Internet age. Mark also takes us through the development of comedy in China, from Qing dynasty joke books, the origins and evolution of the verbal humor from xiangsheng or "crosstalk," the rise of sketch comedy, and now, in the 21st century, the growing popularity of tuokouxiu, Chinese stand-up comedy. A recurring theme in the discussion is Chinese humor's struggle to remain funny and relevant in a tightly controlled media environment. DashanTV Youtube Channel Dashan on the web And, as promised, Mark and David's performance at the 1999 CCTV Spring Festival Gala 8.5.7

This week, Barbarians at the Gate offers another Beijing-themed podcast. Jeremiah and David talk with writer and long-time Beijing resident Jonathan Chatwin, author of the widely-acclaimed book Long Peace Street. The book is Jonathan's account of a two-day walk along Beijing's Chang'anjie (literally "Long Peace Street"), a trek of 30 kilometers traversing the capital from west to east, representing a "geographical core sample" of Beijing's history, politics, culture, architecture, and urban development. Jonathan walks us (pun intended) through some of the familiar sites of the Chinese capital, unearthing little-known historical details and recounting the ongoing tension between preserving the city's traditional landmarks and constructing a 21st-century urban space. Our discussion also touches on the Chinese government's bold "Jing-Jin-Ji" project to expand Beijing municipality into a megacity of nearly 130 million people. 8.5.5

In this episode, Jeremiah and David talk with Matthew Hu, former Managing Directory of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, Co-founder of the Beijing Courtyard Institute, and a longtime activist for the preservation and restoration of historic Beijing architecture and historical landmarks. This episode is definitely for lovers of old Beijing and hutong aficionados, as we take a deep historical dive into the ongoing struggle to maintain and preserve Beijing's historic architecture and cultural sites against the wrecking ball of urban modernization. Matthew covers topics such as the preservationist Liang Sicheng's abandoned vision for the Old City and the city wall, the botched renovation schemes for areas such as Qianmen and Dashilanr, the waves of demolition and evictions in the hutong neighborhoods of Dongcheng and Xicheng, as well as the ongoing municipal project to renovate and revitalize the city's abandoned industrial sites, such as the Shougang Iron and Steel Works, into Olympic venues. 8.5.5

Yuanmingyuan, the "Garden of Perfect Brightness," commonly referred to as the Old Summer Palace, was a Qing Dynasty imperial residence comprised of hundreds of buildings, halls, gardens, temples, artificial lakes, and landscapes, covering a land area five times that of the Forbidden City, and eight times the size of Vatican City. This expansive compound, once referred to by Victor Hugo as "one of the wonders of the world," now exists only as a sprawl of scattered ruins on the northern outskirts of Beijing, having been thoroughly burned and looted by French and British over three days in October of 1860, in the aftermath of the Second Opium War. The razed remnants of the glorious gardens have been left in place by the Chinese government as an outdoor museum of China's "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of the foreign powers. On the 160th anniversary of the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, Jeremiah and David discuss the political and cultural clashes that led to the action, the significance of the incident for China's national self-image, and the government's attempts to repatriate the massive amounts of looted artifacts found scattered among the museums of Europe and the West. The conversation also explores the changing symbolic significance of the ruins in the context of a rejuvenated and economically powerful China. 8.5.2

In this episode, Jeremiah and David catch up with writer, editor, and journalist Alec Ash, to discuss the new US edition of his 2016 book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China. Alec’s book is an intimate portrait of six diverse members of China’s “post-80s” generation, tracing their lives’ trajectory in the context of China’s turbulent and unpredictable economic modernization process. Orville Schell called the book “…a fascinating mosaic that gives us a wonderfully vivid sense of what it’s like to grow up today in the People’s Republic of China.” With the themes of the book as a jumping-off point, the topic broadens in historical scope, exploring communalities and contrasts in earlier youth movements such as the May 4th movement, the Tiananmen Square movement, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, and the current resurgence of nationalism among the “post-2000’s” generation. Alec’s articles have appeared in publications such as The Economist, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. He is Managing Editor of the China Channel at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Articles mentioned in the podcast: Peter Hessler, "How China Controlled the Coronavirus: Teaching and Learning in Sichuan during the Pandemic," The New Yorker, August 10, 2020 Geremie R. Barmé, "The Good Caucasian of Sichuan & Kumbaya China," China Heritage, September 1, 2020 8.4.3

Following on the previous BATG episode about the Chinese education system, in this installment, Jeremiah and David are pleased to continue this discussion with award-winning journalist and author Lenora Chu. Lenora is the author of Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School and the Global Race to Achieve, a melding of memoir and journalism that brings to light the enormous cultural differences between the Chinese and American education systems. In recounting the sometimes traumatic adjustments of her young son to the academic environment of an elite Shanghai elementary school, Chu explores the complex web of social conditioning and parental cooperation that results in the high-achieving “little soldiers” in the Chinese system and weighs the advantages and disadvantages of the East and West educational models. The conversation also touches on the gaokao, the controversial college entrance exam, the supposed “creativity gap” in the Chinese model, and the similarities in the phenomenon of “helicopter parents” in the two cultures. As a commentator, Chu has appeared on NPR, CBS, BBC, and the CBC, and her articles and op-eds have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Cut, and Business Insider, among others. 8.1.2