New China Literacy

How do we learn to ask better questions about China, both inside and outside academia? And how much of what we think we know about a country depends on where we happen to stand? In this episode of New China Literacy , I sit down with Kaize Zhu (朱凱澤) , a PhD candidate in international relations at the City University of Hong Kong, whose personal journey has taken him across more than sixty count...

For decades, the job of explaining China to the world belonged to a specific kind of person: the foreign correspondent, the visiting scholar, the expat adviser reading Chinese publication from the outside in. That model is aging out. What is replacing it is harder to name, and this episode is a portrait of it. My guest is Siyao Chen , a graduate of China Foreign Affairs University and the London S...

A few years ago, the sociologist Yingyi Ma asked hundreds of Chinese undergraduates in the United States what they had crossed an ocean to find. The same phrase kept coming back: critical thinking. One student called it the crown jewel of an American education. This episode approaches that question from the other end. Yuki Yu Wei , as currently a geopolitical analyst, spent two years inside a Chin...

We held our own Gen-Z version of the US-China summit. The week before this conversation was recorded, my guest, a 老外 (laowai) sat for an interview with a major Chinese outlet for a piece on US-China youth exchange. He told the reporter what he actually thinks about why American students hesitate to come to China — academic freedom, reciprocal field access, wrongful detention risk, broader uncert...

A common assumption among English-language readers of China is that Chinese journalism is what the state allows it to be. The model is straightforward: instructions come down, journalists comply or work around the edges, and what survives is what the system permits. This model is not wrong. It is, however, incomplete in ways that matter for anyone trying to understand how Chinese audiences actuall...

For those who have been reading the “Studying IR in China” series, this is its natural extension — same project, different medium. What works on the page as analysis now gets the texture that only voice can carry: the hesitations, the disagreements, the moments where three people who grew up inside the same system realize their experiences diverge in ways that matter. Three of us sat down for our...