Sinica Early Access

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Paul French, the bestselling 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 t...

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...

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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/priv...

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. See Privacy Poli...

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. Joining us are Kevin Collier, a reporter for BuzzFeed who reported on the conference from Beijing, and Priscilla...

In this episode of the Sinica Podcast, taped live at the US-China Strong Foundation’s China Careers Summit in Washington, D.C., on May 31, Kaiser talks to former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs Kurt Campbell about his career, his critique of engagement, and the fascinating events that happened on his watch — including the extrication of blind activist lawyer Chen Gua...

This week’s show was recorded in Prague, where major developments in the continuing saga of a mysterious Chinese company called CEFC, with deep ties to the Czech president, Milos Zeman, unfolded during a recent visit by Kaiser. He spoke with Martin Hala of Charles University in Prague about the rise and fall of CEFC, and what this means not only for China’s efforts to expand its presence in Centra...

This week’s Sinica Podcast features Andrew Chubb, a fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program. Andrew writes extensively on Chinese foreign policy, especially topics related to maritime disputes in the South and East China seas, Chinese nationalism, and Chinese public opinion. Kaiser and Andrew discuss the question of how popular nationalism in China impacts and shapes China’s ma...

In this week’s episode of Sinica, Kaiser chats with Bonnie Glaser in a crossover show that will appear both on Sinica and on the ChinaPower Podcast from CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Bonnie is a well-known specialist on China’s security issues, and this week, we tour several locations where the Chinese military has evolving plans: the Korean Peninsula, Japan, the South...

This week on Sinica, we bring you the recording of when Jeremy and Kaiser chatted with film industry legend Janet Yang live at our SupChina Women’s Conference on May 14 in New York City. Janet talks about trends in Chinese film, how she survived as an Asian-American woman in the notoriously sexist Hollywood film industry, the deep cultural differences and surprising similarities between China and...

This week, it’s a crossover show! Zara and Hans from the terrific 996 Podcast with GGV Capital join Kaiser at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a live recording with Yasheng Huang, professor of economics and management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Yasheng — never known for his delicate pulling of punches — talks about trade, technology policy, and Chinese and Indian entrepreneurship. Th...

Today, we bring you a special live panel discussion from the 2018 Harvard College China Forum, on China's international relations. The panelists are: Jiang Changjian – Associate professor of International Studies, Fudan University; Host, “The Brain” (最强大脑 zuìqiángdànǎo) Ira Kasoff – Senior Counselor, APCO Worldwide; Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce Anthony Saich – Professor of Int...

This week's show was recorded on April 13 at the Yenching Global Symposium in Beijing. Kaiser and our old friend David Moser speak with Virginia Tan — co-founder and president of Lean In China, co-founder of She Loves Tech, and founding partner of Teja Ventures, all organizations working to empower women — about women and work in China. Be sure to check out the White Paper that Lean In China has r...

Hey Sinica Early Access listeners, We’ve got a special treat for you today: The debut episode of a new podcast in our network, which we’re including at the top of this week’s show. It’s called TechBuzz China by Pandaily, and it was created by our friends at the Pandaily, a new China-focused tech news website. We think you’ll love the hosts, Rui Ma and Yingying Lu, who both live in San Francisco an...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is live at the Princeton US-China Global Governance Forum, where he speaks with Gao Yutong (Tony Gao) about the wunderkind entrepreneur's experience as a Chinese student in the U.S. from age 16 to his present 23. Gao is the founder and CEO of Easy Transfer, which Chinese students use to pay their college tuition from Chinese bank accounts without all the hassle, paperwo...

This week's podcast was recorded live at The Bookworm in Beijing, which is why you'll notice the prolonged and decidedly rambunctious audience pop at the start of the show: No matter where Sinica goes, it'll always be most enthusiastically received in the city where it began. Beijing is the best. The entire episode is a hoot, as SupChina Asia managing editor Anthony Tao sat in for Kaiser and Jerem...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both professors at the University of British Columbia, about their translation of Zhang Yingyu's Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection. Anyone who has lived in China in recent decades will understand intuitively why a podcast ostensibly about current affairs in China would want to talk about a 16th century bo...

Mao Zedong famously described the relationship between China and North Korea as “like lips and teeth.” But the relationship hasn’t always been quite so cozy. This week on Sinica, Kaiser talks to two scholars of China and North Korea — Ma Zhao, Associate Professor of Modern History and Culture at Washington University in St. Louis, and John Delury, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei U...

This week Kaiser hosts solo as Jeremy is on holiday. Our guest is Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Chair of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, and the topic is the Chinese Communist Party’s relationship with history: How it controls historical inquiry, manipulates historical knowledge, and even erases historical remembrance. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/priva...

Some 350,000 students from China currently attend American universities. Many of them enjoy their experience and return to China with new friends, broadened horizons, and marketable skills. But for others, their experience of America is marred by social isolation, intense political pressure, and racism. On this week’s podcast, recorded live at the China Institute in New York, Kaiser and Jeremy cha...

China's President Xi Jinping has set a very ambitious goal: The total elimination of poverty in China by the year 2020. As that date fast approaches, we sit down with Gao Qin, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work, and Director of the China Center for Social Policy at Columbia University. Qin is author of an excellent book on the subject of social assistance in China published just last year...

On this week’s show, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Carl Minzner, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and specialist in Chinese law, about his new book End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival is Undermining its Rise. No mere litany of the ways in which China has grown illiberal in the time since the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989, the book explores the underlying reasons for China’s hardenin...