Sinica Podcast

Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discusses faulty assumptions about Chinese politics. Topics include: 'collapsism' and China's political system, the shortcomings of engagement with China, Xi besieged fallacy, hidden reformer fallacy.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Julie Klinger, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware’s Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, about rare earths — a family of 17 elements that are essential to the function of modern industry and are indispensable in everyday technology. Julie debunks many of the myths surrounding China and rare earths, and lays out her ideas about why, despite the relative ubiquity of mineable rare earth deposits, China has dominated production of these vitally important minerals for decades. 3:00: Debunking conventional wisdom on China and rare earths9:55: What are rare earths and how important are they21:30: How China’s near-monopoly on rare earths came to be32:49: Mining and environmental degradation45:32: China’s decision to slow down rare earth production and its consequencesRecommendations:Julie: Going outside for the sake of going outside, and The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life, by Jamie Lorimer.Kaiser: “The chip choke point,” by Tim De Chant, in The Wire China (listen to the article on China Stories). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Wall Street Journal correspondent Te-Ping Chen to talk about her just-released collection of short fiction, Land of Big Numbers: Stories. Featuring 10 short stories all set in China or featuring Chinese characters, it showcases both the author’s keen eye for detailed observation and her imaginative powers and offers an unfailingly empathetic look at China from a wide range of disparate angles. Te-Ping even reads a passage from one short story, “Lulu,” which was previously published in The New Yorker.10:51: A real-life inspiration for her fiction28:30: A reading from “Lulu”37:10: The cultural disconnect between China and the U.S.43:16: Te-Ping’s writing and publishing processRecommendations:Te-Ping: A short story collection titled What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah, and My Country and My People, from a collection of essays from the 1930s by Lín Yǔtáng 林语堂.Kaiser: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with three of the guests in a remarkable room on the drop-in voice chat app Clubhouse, which ran for 14 hours on Saturday, February 6. The room, called “Is there a concentration camp in Xinjiang?,” brought thousands of listeners from China and around the world to talk about the ongoing extralegal internment of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. We spoke with the Han Chinese filmmaker who started the room (and wishes to remain anonymous); one of the main moderators, the journalist Muyi Xiao of the New York Times; and Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur attorney in the U.S. whose brother, a successful tech entrepreneur, has been put in the camps and has been incommunicado for three years.Recommendations:Jeremy: The Ministry for the Future: A Novel, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Rayhan: The Queen’s Gambit, available on Netflix.Muyi: A type of Wuhan hot dry noodle: 想念武汉热干面 (xiǎngniàn wǔhàn règānmiàn), available for purchase on Yamibuy. L: The 2012 film No, directed by Pablo Larraín.Kaiser: The book Land of Big Numbers: Stories, by Te-Ping Chen. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks with Dan Wang, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, who also contributes a regular opinion column to Bloomberg. Combining firsthand knowledge of China’s tech sector with broad erudition and a humanist’s perspective, Dan offers a unique take on China’s innovation ecosystem, the country’s efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in technology, and the role of economic growth, fundamental optimism, and inspiration in China’s rise as a tech power.13:53: The outsize importance of economic growth25:02: An overemphasis on digital technology33:55: Reciprocity and technological codependence 49:12: Technology is more than just tools and patentsRecommendations:Dan: The works of Marcel Proust, and the ham and mushrooms of Yunnan Province. Kaiser: The Netflix series Flavorful Origins and Great State: China and the World, by Timothy Brook.Read Dan's 2020 annual letter: http://danwang.co/2020-letter/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Heer about the conundrum of Taiwan — one of the thorniest and most fraught issues confronting the new Biden foreign policy team as it navigates the U.S.-China relationship. Paul is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and studies Chinese and East Asian issues. He served as the national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015, and was previously a senior analyst at the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence in its China Issue Group. In December 2020, Paul published two articles about Taiwan policy in The National Interest: “The Strategic Dilemma of Taiwan’s Democracy” and “The Inconvenient Truth About Taiwan’s Place in the World.” This episode’s conversation centers on the diagnosis and recommendations made in those two pieces.6:48: The democratic David versus the authoritarian Goliath17:47: Taiwan reunification in the Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 era36:55: The U.S. position on Taiwan40:22: The future of one country, two systemsRecommendations:Paul: The works of Charles Dickens. Kaiser: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes.Subscribe to China Stories here, the newest podcast in the Sinica Podcast Network. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the three authors of a new policy paper from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a relatively new D.C.-based think tank that advocates restraint in U.S. foreign policy. Michael D. Swaine, Jessica J. Lee, and Rachel Esplin Odell authored the report Toward an Inclusive & Balanced Regional Order: A New U.S. Strategy in East Asia, which was published by the Quincy Institute on January 11. In this longer-than-usual episode, they detail their recommendations for how they believe the Biden-Harris administration should approach the region, especially China.12:17: Sinophobia and Cold War mentalities23:33: The most pressing issues in East Asia42:59: Limited disentanglement in U.S.-China technology52:07: The role of U.S. forces in Japan and South Korea1:05:30: Taiwan’s “porcupine strategy” Recommendations:Rachel: Women in Color, an album by Raye Zaragoza, and The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Jessica: Lengthy puzzles as a way to provide some respite from laptops and cell phones.Michael: Continuing the trend of non-screen-related activities, Michael recommends taking up oil painting. Kaiser: Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, by Barton Gellman.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

By the end of 2019, Chinese courts had uploaded some 80 million court cases to a massive, centralized database — a gold mine not only for people working in the legal professions in China, but also for researchers interested in what the court decisions can tell us about Chinese jurisprudence, criminal and civil procedures, and Chinese society more broadly. This week on Sinica, we present a show recorded back in December 2019 — prelapsarian days, before shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions, and remote podcasting. Kaiser speaks with Rachel Stern, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and in the UC Berkeley political science department, and with Ben Liebman, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University. Both scholars have worked extensively with the database, and share their insights into why the Chinese government has pushed courts to upload cases to the database, and how it might transform the way that courts work in China.7:19: What’s in the database, and how it’s unique to China28:00: Pushing back against the techno-dystopian narrative34:12: Creating a marketplace for legal implications41:21: The limitations of artificial intelligence  Recommendations:Rachel: A collection of translated essays written by Chinese intellectuals, titled Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China; Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China, by Karoline Kan; and the NüVoices podcast.Ben: The works of artist Stuart Robertson. Kaiser: The popular Chinese talk show Informal Talks (非正式会谈 fēi zhèng shì huì tán), available to watch on YouTube. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 tensions6:59: Can the American political center hold? 12:10: What can be deduced from Biden’s personnel choices28:34: How the Biden election has changed Beijing’s political calculus38:36: Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and a Biden administrationRecommendations:Ryan: Anything written by John le Carré. Kaiser: Ed Yong, a writer for The Atlantic, especially his recent piece How science beat the virus.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Why have so many prominent critical and dissident intellectuals from China come out vocally in support of Donald Trump? This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy set out to answer that question, and are joined by journalist Ian Johnson of the New York Times and by Lin Yao, a political scientist now earning a law degree at Yale, who writes frequently on Chinese intellectuals and U.S. politics.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.