Sinica Podcast

The dominant narrative in the U.S. about China’s relationship with the small northeastern neighbor is relentlessly one-sided. For decades, American officials have referenced Mao Zedong’s famous (though slightly mistranslated) description that North Korea and China are as close as “lips and teeth.” This perception has continued to recent times, such as when President Donald Trump insisted in July l...

“Can a society which has not...come to terms with its own past go on to have a successful future, or do the sins of the past somehow...come back to haunt it and reexpress themselves in some mutant form?” This is a question that the seasoned historian and scholar of China, Orville Schell, has been thinking and publishing academic articles about in recent years, and is now writing a book on. Schell...

This week, our featured topic is Chinese students overseas. There are about 800,000 of them, and according to China’s Ministry of Education, nearly 80 percent choose to return to China soon after finishing their education. This group is referred to as “sea turtles” (海龟; a pun on 海归 hǎiguī, meaning “to return from overseas”) for their ambitious swim to and from faraway shores. Historically, ove...

There is no question that China has seen a miracle of poverty reduction. According to the World Bank, since the economic reforms that started in 1978, economic growth in China has “lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty.” Chinese state media regularly reminds us that the country has about 50 million people left in poverty, particularly in rural areas, but not to worry: President Xi Jin...

This week, we have an inadvertently timely podcast on China’s authoritarian revival. Mere days before the episode’s recording, Chinese President Xi Jinping set the stage to extend his power to rule China indefinitely. As Carl Minzner, professor of law at Fordham University, explains, the abolition of term limits for Xi was only the latest — and easiest for non-China specialists to understand — of...

"Having read hundreds and hundreds of these cases, I have decided that I'm never going to drive in China." That is what Benjamin Liebman, the director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University, concluded after his extensive review of laws relating to traffic violations in Hubei Province. Geoffrey Sant, a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney, notes that traffic accidents in...

  “We hear, in the media and in comments by politicians, a lot of very glib statements that oversimplify China, that suggest all of China is one thing or one way,” says Michael Szonyi, a professor of Chinese history and director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. China, of course, is as complicated as — if not more complicated than — any other country, and misunderst...

Outside observers typically view China’s media as utterly shackled by the bonds of censorship, unable to critique the government or speak truth to power in any meaningful sense. In part, this is true — censorship and other pressures do create “no-go” zones for journalists in China, as well as gray zones that sometimes rapidly turn red. But Maria Repnikova, a professor at Georgia State University,...

China, as we say at the beginning of each Sinica Podcast episode, is a nation that is reshaping the world. But what does that reshaping really look like, and how does — and should — the world react to China’s role in globalization? Few are better placed to answer these questions than Kishore Mahbubani, a veteran former diplomat from Singapore who recently ended a stint as dean of the Lee Kuan Yew...

Associated Press (AP) reporter Gerry Shih was hard at work in 2017 writing a remarkable series of articles on China’s Uyghur Muslim minority. By traveling not just to China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where 10 to 15 million Uyghurs live, but also to Syria, where some have fled and taken up arms with militant groups, he sought to answer the most politicized and consequential questions abou...

Yukon Huang thinks that China’s economy is extremely unconventional. Unsurprisingly, then, that nearly all the conventional economic wisdom we hear about this economy — particularly the two hugely popular poles of opinion that treat it as either an unstoppable force or a crisis-in-waiting — is wrong. So goes the contrarian take of the former World Bank Director for China and Russia, who is now Sen...

This week on Sinica, we bring you a special preview of a new podcast called 996 Podcast with GGV Capital, which we are very excited to co-produce. Subscribe to the 996 Podcast here on iTunes, and here on Stitcher.  GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Jerry Yang, the founder and former CEO of Yahoo, who orchestrated arguably the best deal in tech history: In 2005, he arranged for Yahoo...

China is a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) technology. If you had said that even five years ago — or in many circles, as recently as three years ago — you might have been laughed out of the room. But around the spring of 2015, a recognition of China’s progress in AI began to spread widely. As private companies have invested billions in research and the government has made it a top pri...

Jiayang Fan is a staff writer at the New Yorker who writes on many topics, but in the past year, has penned several one-of-a-kind pieces on Chinese society. She has been on Sinica before to discuss why so many Chinese people admire Donald Trump. Her most recent piece for the magazine is titled “China’s selfie obsession,” and is a fascinating look at a company called Meitu (美图 měitú; “beautiful p...

Stephen Roach is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at the Yale School of Management. He was formerly the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm’s chief economist, positions of immense influence on Wall Street. His longtime study of globalization has led to many books, most recently Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China...

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, which began with the fall of the capital of the Republic of China on December 13, 1937. Few events in modern Chinese history have a historical valence comparable with the Nanjing Massacre. The wholesale slaughter of Chinese soldiers and civilians, the notorious “killing contests,” and, of course, the h...

NOTE: If you haven’t read the book and are allergic to spoilers, please be aware that the interesting surprises of Scott’s story are discussed in this podcast.   Scott Tong is a reporter for American Public Media’s Marketplace, and from 2006 to 2010, he helped found and run the radio program’s Shanghai bureau. During that time, he also experienced a lot of culture shock — his Chinese-American upbr...

Leta Hong Fincher is the author of the book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China and the upcoming book Betraying Big Brother: The Rise of China's Feminist Resistance, and a regular commentator on the state of feminism and gender discrimination in China today. She joins Jeremy and Kaiser to discuss sexism and sexual harassment in China and why, she says, the government is co...

Everyone knows, or at least recognizes, the image of the Flying Tigers (飞虎队 fēihǔduì). The shark-faced noses of these American airmen’s planes streaked across the skies of China, as they racked up an impressive string of successes in defending China from Japanese forces from 1941 to 1942. They are so recognizable, in fact, that their story has obscured the equally fascinating stories of other A...

Jane Perlez is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times, and her own reporting focuses on China's foreign policy, in particular its relations with the United States and China’s Asian neighbors. She was previously on Sinica in March 2017 to discuss Chinese foreign relations in a new age of uncertainty. In this episode of Sinica, she discusses Donald Trump’s visit to Bei...

The South China Morning Post has been up to big things recently — and faced big doubts from those who worry about its editorial independence as Hong Kong’s paper of record. In late 2015, it was announced that the paper would be acquired by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, bringing the paper both a huge infusion of cash and a wave of questions about whether the new owners would maintain the SCMP’s...

Today we welcome back to the show two regular Sinica guests, Bill Bishop and Jude Blanchette, to discuss the outcomes of the 19th Party Congress, which wrapped up on October 24 in Beijing. Bill Bishop authors the Sinocism newsletter, an essential resource for serious followers of China policy, and he is regularly quoted in a variety of major news outlets reporting on China. He has been on Sinica m...

Lina Benabdallah is an assistant professor of political science at Wake Forest University in North Carolina who recently completed a Ph. D. focusing on South-South cooperation. Much of her research was on the ties between China and countries in Africa. She sat down with Kaiser and Jeremy for a live podcast at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to discuss the state of China-Africa relations and...

When American journalist Lenora Chu moved to Shanghai, she faced tough choices about where and how to educate her kindergarten-age son. She chose an elite state-run school down the street, but soon found that its authoritarian teaching style offended many of her sensibilities of how to nurture a child. At the same time, she found herself appreciating the discipline and mathematical ability that th...

In April 1992, China implemented a law that, for the first time, allowed families from other countries to adopt Chinese children. Since then, around 120,000 Chinese have been adopted abroad, with 80,000 finding a home in the United States. But when adoptions started in that first year, only 206 came to America. Rae Winborn is one of that first wave of adoptees, brought over at just nine months old...