Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, Jeremy and Kaiser chat with Jackson Miller, a master’s candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s public policy program. Jackson’s research of illegal trade in Malagasy hardwood led him to discover the bizarre story of Gao Jose Ramaherison — an unemployed man from Liaoning, China, who parlayed his kung-fu skills into political prominence in Madagascar. Recommendations: Jeremy: Recommends that everyone should visit Madagascar, especially for its beautiful and diverse natural environment. He recommends Ile Sainte Marie, an island off the east coast of Madagascar. Jeremy also recommends visiting a bunch of islands near Madagascar before they are all underwater: Comoro Islands, to the northwest of Madagascar, along with Mauritius and the Seychelles. Jeremy also likes the weird Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch and his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. The Twitter account @artistbosch highlights particular parts of this and other paintings by Bosch in bite-sized pieces. Jackson: Joe Studwell’s Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Also, the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief, a fantastic weekly newsletter that gives you a rundown of the big stories from all across Africa every Sunday morning, as well as a schedule of events for tech conferences and more, plus music recommendations. Kaiser: Recommends taking up a new instrument in middle age. With Youtube, there’s no shortage of convenient ways to learn the basics — Kaiser picked up a used drum kit and has been bashing away at it for a while now.This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.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, we bring you part 3 of Kaiser and Jeremy’s interview with Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (see part 1 here, and part 2 here). In the final stretch of the conversation, Ambassador Freeman talks about U.S.-China military cooperation in the 1980s and discusses some aspects of that cooperation that might really surprise you. He also shares his unconventional take on the “three Ts” — Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen. Recommendations: Jeremy: Maka Angola, a website “dedicated to the struggle against corruption and to the defense of democracy in Angola,” which has recently been covering the scandals of Isabel dos Santos, the richest woman on the African continent. See this article from July 23 — Isabel dos Santos: The fall of Africa’s richest woman — and also a Financial Times lunch series piece from 2013 on dos Santos here (paywall). Chas: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, by Mary Beard, and a series of seven books on Julius Caesar — here is a link to the first one — by Colleen McCullough. Chas finds much about the collapse of the Roman republic and the rise to autocracy of Julius Caesar “relevant to our current situation.” Jeremy mentions that Mary Beard also edited a series called “Wonders of the World,” of which the entry on the Forbidden City by Geramie Barmé is “the single best thing to read” about the subject. Kaiser: AliExpress, the Alibaba site where you can buy a huge range of products directly from China for surprisingly cheap.This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, Kaiser and Jeremy continue their conversation with Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (see part 1 here), and focus on how he got interested in China, his fascination with the Chinese language, his early diplomatic career, his extraordinary experience as chief interpreter during Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, and his prescient predictions of how China would evolve after the normalization of relations with the U.S. Stay tuned for the third part of this interview, coming next week!This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Few living figures of U.S.-China relations are as legendary as Charles W. "Chas" Freeman, Jr., the chief interpreter for Richard Nixon’s world-changing 1972 visit to China, and a former top American diplomat in countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. On this, the first of a two-part Sinica interview, Chas Freeman discusses grand strategy — and the current “strategy deficit” — in U.S.-China relations, as well as technological innovation, nationalism, xenophobia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many other topics. Recommendations: While waiting for the next part of the interview, check out Ambassador Freeman’s book, Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, and also this extensive 1995 interview with Ambassador Freeman done by Charles Stewart Kennedy for The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, we’re very proud to present a new podcast in the Sinica network on SupChina. It’s called NüVoices, and it’s a show all about women in China, with a focus on women in media and the arts. It’s hosted by Alice Xin Liu, a translator originally from Beijing, who grew up in the U.K. before coming back to Beijing, and by Joanna Chiu, a Hong Kong Canadian journalist whom you’ve heard on Sinica a couple of times in the last year. Today's show is all about #MeToo and sexual harassment cases in China, and features Yuan Yang, a correspondent for the Financial Times in Beijing. We hope you like it, that it makes you think – and that you’ll subscribe (iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, RSS feed). And keep an ear out in the coming weeks as we introduce more great podcasts about various facets of China. 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 the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Paul French, the best-selling author of Midnight in Peking. Paul has just written an outstanding new book called City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, in which he tells a captivating story of two foreigners rising to prominence through conducting shady business in the underworld of Shanghai in the 1930s — a chaotic yet fascinating period, when the city was still known as the Paris of the Orient, leading up to the bleak realities of the war with Japan. Recommendations: Paul: A Killing Winter and A Spring Betrayal, two crime novels written by British author Tom Callaghan. Also, Hidden Man, a new movie directed by Chinese award-winning filmmaker Jiang Wen 姜文. Kaiser: The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert O. Paxton. Jeremy: Jo Nesbø, Norway’s best-selling crime writer, whose notable books include The Snowman, The Thirst, and The Redbreast. 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 David Brophy, senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney and a prominent scholar on Xinjiang, and with Andrew Chubb, a post-doc fellow this year at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, about the response to China’s alleged influence operations in Australia. David and Andrew were both signatories to one of two “dueling open letters” addressing the issue; the one they signed warned of the dangers of overreaction. Recommendations: Jeremy: Bruce Lee: A Life, by Matthew Polly. David: Two pieces on China’s re-education camps for muslims in Xinjiang: “New Evidence for China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang,” by Adrian Zenz, and Rian Thum’s follow up piece in the New York Times. Andrew: The Asia Power Index, by the Lowy Institute. It allows you to interact and play around with the ratings and measures that go into the somewhat arbitrary calculation of power and influence, and includes interesting metrics such as a “Google rating” of just the raw number of Google searches for the country, and the extent of visa-free entry agreements. Kaiser: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Paperback, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, an excellent example among the many books that attempt to explain the mindset of the kind of people who voted for Trump. 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 the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Matthew Kohrman, associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University, about his work on China’s tobacco industry – and why China isn’t doing more to curb smoking. His new book on the subject is titled Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives. Recommendations: Matthew: Jia Zhangke, a Guy From Fenyang. In this documentary, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accompanies the prolific Chinese director Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 on a walk down memory lane, as he revisits his hometown and other locations used in creating his ever-growing body of work. You can stream it on Netflix. Kaiser: Cigarette Citadels Map, an interactive project that aims to locate all factories producing cigarettes worldwide and expose information about their practices. And Calypso, David Sedaris's new story collection. Jeremy: Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world greener and healthier by planting trees. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hydropower dams are a source of debate in the environmental and international relations communities alike. China has made use of hydropower in the past to supplement its reliance on coal and other energy forms, and in total the country has 40 percent of the world’s large hydro dams. While the power from electricity-producing dams is relatively clean, the construction and placement of the massive pieces of infrastructure has long-term ecological consequences and severe impacts for communities downstream. This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Stephanie Jensen-Cormier, China Program Director for the NGO International Rivers, about the consequences of China’s aggressive building of large dams and other issues related to rivers in China – and to Chinese involvement in international dam building projects. She shares bad news, but also some surprisingly good news. Recommendations: Stephanie: River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India's Future, a book by Richard Mallet that discusses the Ganges’ cultural and economic importance. She also recommends Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Laureate who started the Green Belt movement. Kaiser: The audiobook for David Tod Roy’s translation of The Plum in the Golden Vase. The narrator, George Backman, has a perfect voice for the story, and performs it with decent Chinese pronunciation. Jeremy: Mortality, Christopher Hitchens’ last book. Jeremy insists that despite the bleak subject matter, it is a good, short, and enjoyable read. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week’s episode of the Sinica Podcast, taped live in New York at the law offices of Dorsey and Whitney on June 19, Kaiser and Jeremy chat about DEF CON, the world’s premier hacker convention, which was — to the surprise of many — held in Beijing this May, and sponsored by Baidu. They also discuss U.S-China cyber relations throughout the years, including some of the finer emerging contours that define this relationship. Joining us are Kevin Collier, a reporter for BuzzFeed who reported on the conference from Beijing, and Priscilla Moriuchi, a 12-year veteran of the National Security Agency (NSA) who is now head of nation-state threat security at Recorded Future. Recommendations: Jeremy: Arab Tyrant Manual, a podcast hosted by Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash that discuss authoritarianism and freedom in the Middle East. Priscilla: Crimetown, a podcast about organized crime and political corruption in Providence, RI in the 80’s and 90’s that is sure to please fans of Serial and S-Town alike. Kevin: Tyler Childers, an authentic country musician who “cut his teeth” in Kevin’s Kentucky hometown. Kaiser: Free Salamander Exhibit, an experimental metal band that Kaiser says has “crazy chops.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.