Sinica Podcast

16+1, a new Chinese initiative, takes its name from 16 countries of Central and Eastern Europe plus China. It held a summit in November 2016 attended by Premier Li Keqiang and prime ministers or deputy prime ministers from the other member states. Earlier, President Xi Jinping had visited three countries in the region — Serbia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. What’s it all for? How have China’s overtures been received by the governments of Central and Eastern Europe? Many of them — like those of Poland and the Czech Republic — had, until recently, real difficulties in their relations with China. And how have the two powers flanking Central and Eastern Europe — Russia to the east and the EU to the west — reacted to China’s creation of 16+1? For answers to these questions and many more, Kaiser and Jeremy talked to Martin Hála, a China scholar who heads a project called AcaMedia, which is based in his native Prague. Recommendations: Jeremy: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Martin: Black Wind, White Snow, by Charles Clover, Eurasian integration: Caught between Russia and China, by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Kaiser: The “relative calculator” app on WeChat, which calculates the correct Chinese term for family relations. Search for 亲戚计算器 (qīnqi jìsuànqì) on WeChat.   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Earlier this month, Kaiser recorded a discussion in front of a live audience at the 1990 Institute in San Francisco with three luminaries of the China-watching scene: Yasheng Huang, MIT Sloan Professor of Chinese Economy and Business, John Pomfret, author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, and Andy Rothman, investment strategist at Matthews Asia. They got together to talk about how the presidency of Donald Trump will affect trade, politics, the international order, currency policies, and several other sides of the American relationship with China. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Chris Buckley is a highly regarded and very resourceful correspondent for The New York Times, who is based in Beijing. He has worked as a researcher and journalist in China since 1998, including a stint at Reuters, and is one of the few working China correspondents with a Ph.D. in China studies. Chris’s coverage has included politics, foreign policy, rural issues, human rights, the environment, and climate change. He also has an informative and sometimes very amusing Twitter account. In this podcast, recorded with a live audience in Beijing, Kaiser and Jeremy ask Chris about his tradecraft and sourcing of stories about elite Chinese politics, his views on Xi Jinping and the anti-corruption campaign, and what we can expect from the 19th Party Congress this fall. Chris also talks about the joys of journalism in a country that makes it very difficult to do. Recommendations: Jeremy: Interactive infographic about the Party’s “Leading Small Groups” produced by the Mercator Institute for China Studies, Great Wall Fresh - restaurant and wild Great Wall hiking. Chris: Intentions: Examining my peers in the Republic 心路-透视共和国同龄人 by Mi Hedu 米鹤都 (on Chinese Amazon store), All Sages Bookstore (in Chinese)万圣书屋 in Beijing Kaiser: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

By day, Andrew Dougherty is a macroeconomist who manages a China research team for Capital Group, one of the world’s largest actively managed mutual funds. By night, he is Big Daddy Dough, creator of an album of parody hip-hop songs that explain various facets of the contemporary Chinese political and economic situation, from fixed-asset investment to leadership succession. On a recent trip to Beijing, Kaiser and Jeremy sat down with Big Daddy Dough to listen to some of his songs and talk about the serious issues he describes in a lighthearted way in his music. You can listen to Big Daddy Dough’s album and watch his music videos on his website: The Red Print Album. Recommendations: Jeremy: China Heritage website. Andrew: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance. Kaiser: The Devil Made Me Do It, a hip-hop album by Paris.    See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jane Perlez has been a reporter at The New York Times since 1981. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for coverage of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She has reported on wars, diplomacy, and foreign policy from Somalia to Poland to Indonesia. Since moving to Beijing in 2012, she’s written about everything from China’s space program to the Dixie Mission — the group of Americans sent to Mao Zedong’s revolutionary base at Yan’an who hoped to establish good relations between the U.S. and the soon-to-be-victorious Chinese communists. Last year, she took over from Edward Wong (listen to his exit interview on Sinica here) to become the Times’s Beijing bureau chief. Much of Jane’s reporting has focused on China’s foreign policy, particularly its relations with the United States and its Asian neighbors. So she is the ideal interpreter for us as we try to understand Chinese foreign relations in a new age of uncertainty. Jeremy interviewed Jane in front of a live audience at the Beijing Bookworm for this podcast. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John Grobler is a Namibian investigative reporter who has devoted more than two years of his life to examining the complex webs of organized crime funneling rhino horn from Africa to east Asia. Shi Yi 石毅, a Chinese environmental reporter, worked with him and went undercover posing as a businessperson to meet and report on the young Chinese men who engage in this nefarious activity abroad. Jeremy chatted with both of them when he attended the Africa-China Journalists Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa in November 2016 (listen to his other conversations with African journalists on last week’s Sinica Podcast). Separately, Kaiser interviewed Nicole Elizabeth Barnes of Duke University, an expert on Chinese medicine. Nicole, John, and Shi Yi all discussed China’s role in the illegal rhino horn trade, debunking myths about its use as an aphrodisiac and explaining how upper class and status-conscious Chinese and Vietnamese are fueling demand for this and other rare natural products. All three recommended listeners to support WildAid, one of the foremost organizations campaigning against the poaching of elephants and black rhinos. John also recommends supporting Oxpeckers, an African environmental investigative reporting unit that supports his work in Namibia. Nicole further recommended supporting the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and marking World Rhino Day, September 22nd, on your calendar to raise awareness of the work CITIES and TRAFFIC do to monitor and crack down on illegal wildlife trade. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In November 2016, Sinica co-host Jeremy Goldkorn attended a conference in his native South Africa called the Africa-China Journalists Forum. The forum was convened to discuss the often-polarized media coverage of China’s involvement in Africa, and to consider how to accentuate the African perspective — rather than the Chinese or Western ones — on how China is changing lives in Africa. In addition to moderating the forum, Jeremy interviewed two organizers of the forum who are longtime observers of China in Africa: Barry Van Wyk and Bob Wekesa. Both are highly knowledgeable of journalism in Africa, and work for the Africa-China Reporting Project at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, where the forum was held. In this short episode, Barry and Bob explain the differences between Chinese, African, and Western journalists, the state of reporting on China-in-Africa issues, and the work that the Africa-China Reporting Project is doing to build a “human grassroots approach” to reporting such a large and controversial story. They also recommended several of their favorite stories that have come out of the project in its work to sponsor aspiring African and Chinese journalists: Nfor Kingsley Monde on China’s role driving deforestation in Cameroon, and on the flipside, Manyanye Paul Ikome on how China has contributed greatly to improving public health in that same country. Other stories on health care, such as this one by Fousseni Saibou. A few highlights from Chinese journalists: Chen Xiaochen on a sisal farm in Tanzania, and Yang Meng on the gold mines of Ghana. Fredrick Mugira on Uganda’s copper mines. Stories on the Standard Gauge Railway being built in Kenya and east Africa, such as this one by Allan Olingo.   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A top diplomat during the Clinton administration, author of the influential book China: Fragile Superpower: How China’s Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise, research professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, and co-author of a new high-level task force report on U.S.-China policy, Susan Shirk is one of the most sought-after voices on Chinese politics and U.S.-China relations. Today’s Sinica Podcast features an interview with Susan recorded live on January 30 during the Chinese New Year celebrations at the Long US-China Institute at UC Irvine. Susan talks about how China and its role in the world have dramatically changed in the last decade; how the country’s leaders have grown increasingly fragile and fearful of disloyalty even as their power has grown; and how those leaders likely share her trepidation that the Trump administration may recklessly “trash the entire relationship” between the two countries. Recommendations: Jeremy: His new hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, a wonderful place to visit, contrary to the misconceptions that many coastal Americans have about the South. Also Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Kaiser lives. Susan: The School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, which has a special focus on Asia and a strong group of China scholars. The China Focus blog, written by students at UC San Diego. The China 21 Podcast, produced by the 21st Century China Center. Kaiser: The Sellout, a satire novel by Paul Beatty, the first American author to win the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John Zhu, bridging Chinese and Western cultures, retells the Three Kingdoms story in accessible audio episodes. They discuss the enduring influence of the novel, making it accessible to Western audiences, clever strategies and deception in the Redcliffe section, future projects, China File, and the importance of the book and a strategy game.

Sidney Rittenberg is a labor activist from Charleston, South Carolina, who went to China as a translator for the U.S. Army in 1945 and stayed until 1980. In this episode, Sidney talks about the conditions he endured during his two periods of solitary confinement, Sino-American relations, the behavior of Russian advisers sent to China by the Soviet Union, and much more. Part one of our interview is here. You can read a Q&A with Sidney on SupChina here. You can buy Sidney’s books: an autobiography, The Man Who Stayed Behind, and Manage Your Mind: Set Yourself Free, on lessons he learned while in solitary confinement. The Revolutionary is a documentary film about his life (also available on Amazon). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.