Sinica Podcast

The recently-concluded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) meeting in Dakar, Senegal, generated surprisingly little international press coverage — except for a few stories that seized on what looked, at first blush, like a significant decrease in Beijing's overall investment commitment on the continent. If Beijing sees a concerted effort by the U.S. and Europe to diminish, tarnish, or counte...

This week, we bring you a selection of the best of our China Stories podcast. Launched in late January this year, it has published nearly 400 narrated pieces from the best English-language media outlets focused on China: Sixth Tone, Caixin Global, The Wire China, Protocol China, The World of Chinese, and Week in China — plus, of course, SupChina. The stories are read by Chinese-speaking narrators...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, we bring you Part 2 of a conversation with Lizzi Lee, an economist turned China analyst, and Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). In September, Lizzi and Jude joined Kaiser and Jeremy to discuss the wide-ranging set of regulatory moves by Beijing, touching on many disparate realms of Chinese life — from re...

Recent polls conducted by organizations like Gallup and Pew have shown a precipitous decline in U.S. public opinion toward China. But how do the Chinese feel about the U.S.? This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yawei Liu, senior China advisor at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and with Michael Cerny, associate editor of the Carter Center's China Perception Monitor, about a survey commissi...

This week on Sinica, a live show taped on November 11 at the fourth annual NEXTChina Conference at the China Institute in New York, featuring Peter Hessler. Pete returned to the U.S. from Chengdu over the summer after his contract at Sichuan University, where he was teaching journalism and freshman composition, was not renewed. His departure sparked speculation about government displeasure at his...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy discuss mental health in China with George Hu, a Shanghai-based clinical psychologist who serves as president of the Shanghai International Mental Health Association and leads the United Family Mental Health Network. George describes how American ideas of psychiatry and psychology have shaped the way Chinese mental health professionals understand mental welln...

A warm Sinica welcome to our newest network member, the China Sports Insider Podcast! If it's about sports and there's a China angle, our hosts Mark Dreyer — the China Sports Insider himself — and Haig Balian, the show's producer, will talk about it.  This week: fewer than a hundred days to go to the Beijing Olympics, and foreign athletes have been trickling in for test events. What's happeni...

This week on Sinica, we present a deep-dive into the worldview of China’s leading Party theorist, Wáng Hùníng 王沪宁. Wang — the only member of the Politburo Standing Committee who has not run a province or provincial-level municipality — is believed to have been the thinker behind ideas as central (and as ideologically distinct) as Jiāng Zémín’s 江泽民 signature “Three Represents,” which br...

This week on Sinica, we present a talk delivered on October 19 by Kaiser at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, as part of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations China Town Hall. In this 30-minute speech, Kaiser offers his views on Xí Jìnpíng's 习近平 "Red New Deal," discusses the many lenses through which China is viewed, and argues that the changes now afoot in China constitute...

This week on Sinica: Did the Trump-era tariffs have their intended effects? In other words, did they prompt companies to pull up stakes in China and re-shore jobs to the United States? Kaiser chats with two political scientists, Samantha Vortherms of UC Irvine and Jack Zhang, director of the University of Kansas’s Trade War Lab, about the paper they recently published with the intention of answeri...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Shelley Rigger, Brown professor of political science at Davidson College and author of the new book The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise . Shelley recounts Taiwan’s rise as an export-led powerhouse and one of the Asian Tigers, and explains the wave of Taiwanese SMEs (small and medium enterprises) that transformed China into...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Michael Davidson, a leading scholar on China’s environmental policy, who holds joint appointments at UC San Diego as an assistant professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. Michael unpacks recent announcements out of Beijing, including Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 decision to cease all funding for coal-fired power pl...

This week, Kaiser chats with Manfred Elfstrom, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Manfred’s new book, Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness , examines the state’s dynamic approach to handling labor actions — petitions, protests, strikes, and the like — and how it has...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser welcomes former Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Susan Thornton to discuss a recently published audit of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), the annual set of high-level meetings with Chinese officials that were convened during the Obama administration by the U.S. Departments of State and the Treasury. The aud...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Lizzi Lee (李其 Lǐ Qi), SupChina contributor and host of the excellent Chinese-language YouTube channel Wall Street Today, and Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), to talk about the spate of regulatory actions, new rules, and Party-led initiatives that, taken together, we at SupChina have starte...

Last month, the National Committee on United States-China Relations (NCUSCR) published a report for the Carnegie Corporation of New York titled “American International Relations and Security Programs Focused on China: A Survey of the Field.” This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the report’s lead author, Rosie Levine, and with Jan Berris, long-serving vice president of the NCUSCR, who celebrates...

If corruption is a drag on economic growth, why does China appear to have undergone some of its fastest growth during its periods of deepest corruption? This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yuen Yuen Ang, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan, about her book China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption , which sets out to explain this a...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with William (Bill) Overholt , senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a veteran China-watcher whose career has run the gamut from investment banking to academia to the leading think tanks. Bill recently weighed in on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision to place Esquel, a leading textile manufacturer headquartered in...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with the Columbia historian Adam Tooze, who returns to the program a year after his first appearance. A prolific writer and wide-ranging public intellectual, Adam was trained as a Germanist and has focused, in his writings, largely on economic history. His books include The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy , The Deluge: The Great W...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Peter Martin, a correspondent for Bloomberg based in Washington, D.C., about his book, China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy . This highly readable and informative book tells the story of China’s diplomatic corps from its creation ex nihilo under the guidance of Zhōu Ēnlái 周恩来 during the Communist Party’s years in Yan’an in...

This week on Sinica, we’re pleased to present a conversation with Ambassador Huáng Píng 黄屏, a veteran Chinese diplomat who has been consul general of China’s New York Consulate since November 2018. He formerly served as China’s ambassador to Zimbabwe, and as consul general of China’s Chicago Consulate. The interview, recorded on July 22, covers a range of topics in U.S.-China relations from huma...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Bill Bikales, who recently returned to the U.S. after 15 years in China as a developmental economist with the United Nations. In June, Bill published a paper titled “Reflections on Poverty Reduction in China” for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), raising important questions about China’s claims about poverty reduction but giving due cred...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Yiqing Xu , an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, about his work in applying modern methods in political science to the politics of contemporary China. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss qualitative vs. quantitative approaches and how the debate parallels the debate between the area studies approach to China and the dis...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Thomas Pepinsky and Jessica Chen Weiss , both professors of government at Cornell University, about their recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “ The Clash of Systems? Washington Should Avoid Ideological Competition With Beijing .” In that essay, they argue that, despite all the talk of Chinese authoritarianism as an existential threat to American democracy, Beiji...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Isabella Weber , assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate . Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, her book makes important contributions to our understanding of a critical period in China’s recent history: the decade of the 1980s, when...