Barbarians at the Gate

David and Jeremiah are back together again in Beijing. Recording from Palace Moser, the two get weirdly nostalgic and compare notes on what has changed in the 20+ years (Jeremiah) and 40+ years (David) since they first moved to China’s capital. They ask whether students coming to China today are getting the same experience as previous generations of study-abroad students or if it’s the curse of th...

Two older gentlemen with expanding waistlines, staggering daddy issues, and a shared love of firing military brass meet in DC this week. And right on cue, the pundits leap forward to pontificate on the most important issues facing Sino-US relations today: What is Xi Jinping’s title in English? Many bytes and keystrokes are spent in social media wars between those who insist that Xi Jinping be call...

Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976. Fifty years later, Jeremiah and David compare notes on a mostly quiet anniversary. Jeremiah reports that there were enough tributes to beat the over/under, but David argues that the Party would still prefer to keep things as ritualistic as possible. Mao is still dead. We will all bow. And moving on. David recalls how Mao was remembered in the 1980s, when Deng...

China’s last emperor (Puyi), his empress (Wanrong), and concubine (Wenxiu) spent two years sequestered in the Forbidden City before their expulsion in 1924. Around them were holdover dowagers, scheming eunuchs, corrupt officials, and two foreign teachers of English. Many people know Puyi’s tutor, Reginald Johnston, either from Johnston’s memoir, Twilight in the Forbidden City , or from Peter O’Too...

In this Barbarians at the Gate x China Books Review crossover, Jeremiah Jenne is joined by CBR Associate Editor Alexander Boyd to discuss the latest addition to the China Archives: W. Somerset Maugham's On a Chinese Screen (1922) , a collection of vignettes from Maugham's trip through China in the winter of 1919–1920. Maugham came to China and mostly found... the English. Missionaries who profess...

It’s the summer travel season, and one of the most popular sites here in Beijing is the Palace Museum at the Forbidden City. To talk about China’s most famous imperial palace, we are joined by Matthew Hu Xinyu, Trustee of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center (CHP) and founder of the Courtyard Institute. Matthew provides us with updates on renovated sections of the Palace Museum previous...

We are honored to have Professor Neysun Mahboubi, Director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations, a program that provides a platform for talented U.S.-based China scholars to contribute academically informed analysis on the most important issues in U.S.-China relations. Neysun recounts his experiences as a legal scholar in China during the 1990s Reform and Opening Up period, fo...

Should we view today’s powerful AI language tools as intellectual crutches or as incredibly useful assets? Can they be safely integrated into our existing toolkit for business and academia, or should we approach them with justified caution? And why is the Western world terrified of AI, whereas China is already incorporating it into all sectors of society? Spoiler alert: The West views AI as a poss...

The Politburo had given Mao Zedong’s personal physician Li Zhisui a direct order: prepare the Chairman’s body so that he can be on permanent display. Li was aghast. It was not what Mao had wanted, and besides, “How to pickle your country’s leader” wasn’t one of the courses he studied in medical school. But after the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s death meant a potential political sho...

On this episode, we sit down with the one and only Jesse Appell—Chinese TV stand-up comedian, blogger, lecturer, tea entrepreneur, and passionate bridge-builder for US–China cultural exchange. In his newly published book, Jesse shares the unlikely story of how a Fulbright Fellowship to study the traditional Chinese humor form “crosstalk” (xiangsheng) launched him from student to television star, w...

Mike Wester launched the first Burger Fest in Beijing 13 years ago as a scrappy response to the collapse of print ad revenue. Today, burger festivals run in third-tier cities across China, subsidized by local governments trying to drive foot traffic into half-empty malls. Hefei alone has four a year. In this episode, Jeremiah talks with Mike Wester, co-founder of True Run Media and publisher of th...

Warning: GEEKY CONTENT Hosting solo in this week’s episode, David takes a geeky deep dive into the digital revolution in Chinese language learning in conversation with Chinese language pedagogy expert Matt Coss. The Sisyphean task of learning to write hundreds of Chinese characters has long been the bête noire of Chinese language students. The explosion of digital devices and apps for processing C...

In this episode, we reconnect with an old friend of the podcast, Canadian performer Mark Rowswell—better known in China as Dashan, or “Big Mountain.” Mark reflects on his early career in China, where his remarkable fluency in Mandarin launched him from a young foreign newcomer into the world of xiangsheng (相声, crosstalk), and soon after into a highly sought-after TV host and cultural ambassador...

Lee Moore's new book challenges both Chinese state propaganda and Western pundits on Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy, and Hong Kong with 1400 endnotes, and a drinking game for beheadings. A historian who writes about Ming emperors getting stabbed in the balls, a drinking game for beheadings in Xinjiang, and why almost everything politicians say about Taiwan’s history is wrong. In this episod...

It’s another Barbarians at the Gate crossover with China Books Review. This month’s China Archives column covers Decadence Mandchoue by Edmund Backhouse, edited and annotated by Derek Sandhaus. CBR Associate Editor Alexander Boyd and I sat down to talk about all things Backhouse and try to parse one of Sinology’s more controversial memoirs. Backhouse was the son of a British baronet who dropped ou...

Welcome to a special episode of Barbarians at the Gate. David and Jeremiah are off this week preparing for Chinese New Year, but as a special gift to our listeners, we are cross-posting this bonus episode about the life and China travels of the American writer Emily "Mickey" Hahn. This episode is from By Their Own Compass, a podcast looking at historical travelers and past journeys co-hosted by Je...

It’s high season in Thailand. The weather is perfect. But look around the hotel lobbies and the night markets, and you’ll notice something missing: the tour buses. For the last decade, Thailand bet the house on Chinese mass tourism. Now, that wager is looking shaky. The numbers are down, and the reasons go deeper than just a sluggish post-COVID economy. On this episode, David dials in from Addis A...

Following a tumultuous 2025, we gallop into the Year of the Horse. Tradition says it should be a year of dynamism and progress, but which way is the stampede heading? To help us read the tea leaves, we welcome back our occasional co-host, Zhang Yajun. As a global strategist and former innovation lead at the World Economic Forum, Yajun has spent over 16 years translating complex shifts—from AI to c...

Champions Day in the city of Shanghai, November 1941. The world was at war, but the clubhouse at the Shanghai Race Club (now People's Park) was packed with owners and punters cheering on the pony. The funeral of Shanghai's richest widow, Liza Hardoon, was a spectacle that filled the streets of the International Settlement. Japanese occupiers and their Chinese collaborators came together in a bizar...

How does a teenage girl from Beijing’s hutongs end up ruling the world’s largest empire—without ever technically sitting on the throne? In this episode, Jeremiah traces the improbable ascent of Empress Dowager Cixi, who entered the Forbidden City as a minor concubine and departed as the most powerful woman in Chinese history. The story begins in imperial catastrophe: the Xianfeng Emperor dies in t...

In 1981, the Indian writer and poet Vikram Seth traveled from Nanjing, where he was studying literature, to his hometown of Delhi. Moving by train across China to Gansu, then hitchhiking southwest through Qinghai and Tibet, it was an itinerary that makes sense when a traveler has a surfeit of curiosity but a shortage of funds. Armed with half-decent Mandarin, a fistful of foreign exchange certific...

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 t...

It’s just two guys talking China's naval history. In this episode, David and Jeremiah dig into the story of Zheng He, the 15th-century admiral who took China's treasure fleets halfway around the world as Western Europe was just starting to figure out ocean navigation. Here's a Muslim eunuch who went from prisoner to running the emperor's treasure fleets. The man brought giraffes home as diplomatic...

Picture this: You’re 45 years old, halfway through writing the definitive history of your civilization. Writing this history is the family business, and you’ve made a promise to your dying father to finish his work no matter what, when your boss, who happens to be the Emperor of China, gives you a choice. You can be executed or, if that doesn’t work for your schedule, how about castration? Sima Qi...

In this encore episode of Barbarians at the Gate, first broadcast in March 2024, John Alekna talks about his fascinating new book Seeking News, Making China: Information Technology and the Emergence of Mass Society. In 20th-century China, the gradual importation and development of information technology had an enormous impact on the way news was disseminated and accessed by the general public. Whe...