Chinese Whispers

Michael Gove and Madeline Grant launch Quite right!, The Spectator ’s new podcast promising sanity and common sense in an increasingly unhinged world. This week, they talk about Labour’s deputy drama, discuss whether Britain is sliding into a revolutionary mood a la France and investigate the claim in a new book that Margaret Thatcher was autistic. To hear the full episode, search Quite right! whe...

As Chinese Whispers comes to an end, here is a compilation of some of the best discussions Cindy Yu has had across the podcast to understand modern China and President Xi. On this episode you can hear from: journalist Bill Hayton on what it means to be Chinese (1:10); writer and actor Mark Kitto and author Alex Ash on being foreign in China (13:07); professor of international history Elizabeth Ing...

** Chinese Whispers is coming to an end. Later this year, Cindy Yu will be joining The Times and The Sunday Times to write a regular column on China. To stay abreast of her latest work, subscribe to her free Substack at chinesewhispers.substack.com ** The term ‘old friend of the Chinese people’ might seem a colloquial, almost sentimental, phrase to appear in official diplomatic language, but in th...

** Chinese Whispers is coming to an end. Later this year, Cindy Yu will be joining The Times and The Sunday Times to write a regular column on China. To stay abreast of her latest work, subscribe to her free Substack at chinesewhispers.substack.com ** It’s easy to forget that, as recently as the start of this century, the US was China’s biggest ally. Washington saw Beijing as a necessary bulwark a...

Walking around Taipei a couple of years ago, I spotted a familiar sight – a bronze statue of a moustachioed man, cane in his right hand, left leg striding forward. The man is Sun Yat-sen, considered modern China’s founding father. I recognised the statue because a larger version of it stands in the city centre of Nanjing, the mainland Chinese city that I was born and raised in. That one figure can...

Just before the end of 2024, Chinese state media Xinhua slipped out an announcement – the long discussed mega-dam in Medog County, Tibet, has been greenlit. When built, it will generate three times more energy than China’s Three Gorges dam, currently the largest in the world. The Xinhua write-up gave few other details, but the news has caused reverberations across Asia as the river on which the da...

Beginning in the first Trump presidency and expanded under Joe Biden, the US has taken a strategy of technologically containing China through restricting its access to cutting edge semiconductors. As Chinese Whispers has looked at before , these chips form the backbone of rapid advances in AI, telecoms, smartphones, weaponry and more. Washington’s aim was clear: to widen the technological gap betw...

** Chinese Whispers is nominated in the Political Podcast Awards 2025. Vote for it to win the People's Choice category here ** When Chinese spy scandals break, like the latest involving Prince Andrew and his Chinese business associate, one organisation often comes up – the United Front. Mao Zedong had dubbed it one of the Chinese Communist Party’s three ‘magic weapons’. So what is this mysterious...

** Chinese Whispers is nominated in the Political Podcast Awards 2025. Vote for it to win the People's Choice category here ** Among the casualties of Donald Trump’s trade war with China in his first presidency was the telecoms giant Huawei. Founded by former military engineer Ren Zhengfei, the company is a world-leading manufacturer of everything from telecoms equipment to smartphones. But it fel...

Why do so many Chinese people choose such curious English names? You must have come across this phenomenon – whether they are names from a past century, or surnames, nouns or even adjectives used as first names, or words that aren’t real at all. I have a particular interest in this because my English name – Cindy – isn’t exactly in vogue these days. You might think this is a bit of a trivial quest...

More than a year after Xi Jinping purged two senior generals in the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force unit, China’s investigation into its military seems to be ongoing, with more scalps taken. In recent weeks, Miao Hua, another senior general who had been a member of the Central Military Commission, has been suspended; while reports abound that the country’s current defence minister, Dong Jun,...

The Darien Gap is a 60 mile stretch of jungle that hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over South America trek through in order to reach the US-Mexico border. From there, they enter America in search of better lives. These are usually migrants from Venezuela, or Colombia or Panama. But in recent years, a new group of people have appeared at the border, having paid people smugglers and hacke...

There have been reports that some 11,000 North Korean troops are present in Russia and preparing to take part in the Russian invasion. While not acknowledged by either country, if true, this would mark a historic milestone: the first East Asian state to send troops to Europe since the Mongol Empire.  And yet, both countries’ most powerful neighbour and ally – China – has remained suspiciously quie...

** This episode of Chinese Whispers was recorded in front of a live audience as a part of the Battle of Ideas Festival 2024. ** Is China in decline? I was born in China in the 90s, and growing up it felt like the future was always going to be brighter. My parents were wealthier, more educated, better travelled than their parents, and it seemed assured that my generation would only have even better...

** On October 19, Cindy Yu and a panel of special guests will be recording a live Chinese Whispers at London's Battle of Ideas festival, talking the latest on China’s economic slowdown and asking – what are the social and political implications? Is China in decline? Chinese Whispers listeners can get a 20 per cent discount on the ticket price with the code WHISPERS24. Click here to find out more a...

** On October 19, Cindy Yu and a panel of special guests will be recording a live Chinese Whispers at London's Battle of Ideas festival, talking the latest on China’s economic slowdown and asking – what are the social and political implications? Is China in decline? Chinese Whispers listeners can get a 20 per cent discount on the ticket price with the code WHISPERS24. Click here to find out more a...

As a child, the New York Times journalist Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. But as he grew up, a second generation immigrant in the United States, Edward was hungry to find out more about his father and mother’s pasts in the People’s Republic of China. That hunger took him to study China at university and eventually to become the New York Times ’s Be...

The South China Sea has been an area of regular clashes and heightened tensions under the leadership of Xi Jinping. It seems that, every few months, Chinese naval or coastguard ships clash or almost clash with vessels from South East Asian nations like Vietnam and the Philippines. Only last week, a Chinese ship clashed with the Filipino coast guard in the Spratly Islands, with both sides levelling...

Trump is tough on China, but what really motivates his hawkishness? Does he care at all about China's human rights abuses? Or is he fundamentally a foreign policy disentangler, hoping to rein back America's overseas commitments? How much does the China policy of a second Trump presidency depend on which advisors the president surrounds himself with? On this episode of Chinese Whispers, The Spectat...

Whenever I go back to China, I try to eat as much as I can – delicious Chinese food that I can’t have outside of the country, whether childhood favourites or the latest food trends. But I’m often struck by my relatives and friends who turn their noses up at many of these delicious dishes – they commonly say ‘不敢吃’ – ‘I’m scared to eat it’. The Chinese middle class can now be very discerning abou...

‘Swifties’, as Taylor Swift’s fans are known across the world, are extremely dedicated to the cause, and often estimated to drive up local economies wherever they flock, and Chinese fans are no different. Swift didn’t perform in China on the latest global tour, but that didn’t stop more wealthy fans flying to Singapore to see her; or the less wealthy, going to cinemas in China to watch the Taylor...

The EU and US are turning up the pressure on Chinese made electric cars, as I discussed with my guest Finbarr Bermingham on the last episode .  On this episode, I want to take a closer look at how China has come to dominate the global electric car market. Chinese EVs make up 60 per cent of worldwide sales, and a third of global exports. Its leading brand, BYD, now regularly gives Tesla a run for i...

The EU and China are in the foothills of a trade war. After a seven month investigation, the European Commission has announced tariffs of up to 38 per cent on electric cars from China, citing that they’ve found ‘subsidies in every part of the supply chain’. In retaliation, China has ramped up its own investigations into imports from the EU. This, of course, comes after the US has announced its own...

In less than a month’s time, Britain may well have a new prime minister – and a different ruling party. Under 14 years of the Conservative party, the UK’s approach to China has swung from the sycophancy of the golden era to fear and loathing under Liz Truss, stabilising in the last couple of years to a compete but engage approach, all while public opinion on China has hardened following the Hong K...

Since 1978, China has changed beyond recognition thanks to its economic boom. 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty as GDP per capita has grown eighty times. Some 60 per cent of the country now live in cities and towns, compared to just 18 per cent before. But you know all this. What’s less talked about is what that does to the people and families who live through these changes. What...