Sinica Podcast

Sinica is back, and on this first post-China Project show, Kaiser chats with TCP’s ex-editor-in-chief and Sinica’s co-founder and former co-host, Jeremy Goldkorn. They chat about the Beijing that was, their theories as to why things changed as they did, and share some of their favorite precepts for understanding contemporary China. 03:15 – What’s new with Sinica in the post-TCP era 04:34 – Jeremy...

This week on Sinica, a live recording from New York on the eve of the 2023 NEXTChina Conference. Jeremy Goldkorn joins Kaiser as co-host, with guests Maria Repnikova of Georgia State University, who specializes in Chinese soft power in Africa and on Sino-Russian relations, and Eric Olander, co-founder of the China Global South Project and co-host of the excellent China Global South Podcast and Chi...

This week on Sinica, we're running an interview with Jeffrey Bader from early last year. We learned on Monday morning that Jeff had died, and we dedicate this interview to his memory. ___ This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jeff Bader, who served as senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the first years of the Obama presidency, until 2011. Now a senior fellow...

This week on Sinica, a live recording from October 10 in Chicago, Kaiser asks Chang-Tai Hsieh of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, Damien Ma of the Paulson Institute’s think tank MacroPolo, and our own Lizzi Lee, host of The Signal with Lizzi Lee, to right-size the peril that the Chinese economy now faces from slow consumer demand, high youth unemployment, a troubled real...

This week on the Sinica Podcast: a lecture by Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center's Kissinger Institute, delivered last year to D.C.-based Faith & Law at their Friday Forum. The lecture, titled "Is Our Foreign Policy Good? American Moral Absolutism and the China Challenge," is a powerful and thought-provoking talk. Kaiser follows up with a long conversation with Robert about the themes...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Jason McLure, a correspondent for a new investigative reporting outfit called  The Examination , and reporter Jude Chan, who writes for Initium Media. The two worked with two other reporters on a fascinating expose , funded by the Pulitzer Center, of China's tobacco monopoly, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (or China Tobacco), and how it has...

This week on Sinica, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1950 concert tour of China by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1973, Kaiser chats with Matías Tarnopolsky, the orchestra’s president and chief executive; Alison Friedman, executive and creative director of Carolina Performing Arts; and virtuoso guzheng player and composer Wu Fei about the legacy of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s China...

This week on Sinica, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist Ian Johnson, now a senior China fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins Kaiser to discuss his new book,  Sparks" China's Underground HIstorians and their Battle for the Future . Profiling both prominent and lesser-known individuals working to expose dark truths about some of the grimmest periods of the PRC's history, inc...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser speaks with Representative Rick Larsen of the Washington 2nd District, the co-founder and continuously serving Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan U.S.-China Working Group. Last month, he published a white paper outlining his recommendations for how the U.S. can more effectively compete. That paper and its recommendations are the focus of this week's show. 02:35 – The...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Karen Hao, a reporter recently with the  Wall Street Journal whose previous work with the MIT Technology Review  has been featured on Sinica; and by Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, who has been on the show many times just in the last three years. Both Karen and Deborah have written persuasively...

This week on Sinica, MIT professor Yasheng Huang joins Kaiser to talk about his brand new book The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why they Might Lead to its Decline . This ambitious and thought-provoking book is bound to stir up quite a bit of controversy. It’s a long conversation — but worth the listen! A complete transcript o...

Something different this week on Sinica: A selection of "This Week in China's History" columns by James Carter, all narrated by Kaiser with a little interstitial music by Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn). The columns: Not just a metaphor : Dragons of imperial China show us how people lived (1517) The ‘Empress of China’ and the beginning of U.S.-China trade (1784) The rise of Empress Dowager Cixi (186...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Lyle Goldstein, director for China engagement at the think tank Defense Priorities and previously a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 20 years. Lyle offers his perspectives on an extensive wargaming exercise focusing on a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan, conducted under the auspices of CSIS (the Center for Strategic and Inte...

This week on Sinica, Paul Triolo returns to the show to give us a rundown on what’s happening in the exciting arena of generative AI in China. The veteran China tech watcher, who is now Senior VP for China and Technology Policy Lead at Dentons Global Advisors ASG, is Just back from a trip to China during which he spoke with numerous companies working in the space, Paul offers a great overview of w...

This week on Sinica, with Kaiser on holiday we're running a terrific Twitter Spaces conversation convened by Neysun Mahboubi of UPenn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He's gathered a great group including Yawei Liu, whose U.S.-China Perception Monitor under the Carter Center is the co-sponsor for Neysun's series, as well as Anna Ashton of the Eurasia Group, Robert Daly of the Kissinge...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Margaret (Maggie) Lewis, professor of law at Seton Hall University and veteran Taiwan observer, and Paul Heer, former national intelligence officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) under the Obama administration. Both were members of the Council on Foreign Relations’s task force on U.S.-Taiwan policy, which produce...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Jeremy Daum, senior research scholar in law and senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Law Center. Jeremy has a well-deserved reputation as a debunker of myths and misperceptions about China. This time, he takes on the much-discussed “overseas police stations,” and examines how they are — and aren’t — related to China’s transnational repression. 01:03 – The...

This week on Sinica, UPenn legal scholar Neysun Mahboubi talks about his recently-concluded trip back to China — his first time back since the outbreak of the pandemic. Neysun talks about the importance of in-person, face-to-face scholarly exchange, and despite concerns over the more restrictive political space in China, sounds a hopeful note about what the restoration of in-person exchange m...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Elsa Kania, a Ph. D. candidate in Harvard University's Department of Government and adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security who researches China's military strategy, defense innovation, and emerging technologies. Elsa joins the show to discuss China’s push for Military-Civil Fusion, debunking some of the myths about the program that U.S....

With Secretary of State Antony Blinken's two days of meetings in Beijing just concluded, Kaiser spoke with Dennis Wilder, managing director for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, where he also serves as an assistant professor of practice in Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Service. Dennis was the National Security Council's director for China fr...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Keyu Jin, associate professor of economics at LSE, who talks about her new book, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism , a wide-ranging, ambitious, and accessible book that explains the unique Chinese political economy, emphasizing both its successes to date and how it must change to meet the challenges to come. 01:01 – An overview of the...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with David Ownby, the University of Montreal historian who runs the excellent  ReadingTheChinaDream.com  website — a trove of translations of writings by mainstream Chinese intellectuals. David talks about the website’s mission and about tells about his recent three-week trip to Beijing and Shanghai, in which he met with many of the people he transl...

With the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue kicking off in Singapore on Friday, June 2, Kaiser chats with the organizer’s managing director for Asia, James Crabtree, about the history, structure, and significance of this Asian answer to the Munich Security Conference, James, who joined the Institute for International Strategic Studies in 2018, offers a great sneak-peek and a curtain raiser on the three-day...

This week on Sinica, Harvard’s eminent sinologist William Kirby joins Kaiser to talk about his book  Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China ,   and to share his views on the state of higher education in China and the U.S， 03:12 – Wissenschaft and the German contribution to the creation of the modern research university 06:30 – The decreasing nu...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser is joined by The China Project's CEO Bob Guterma, who just so happens to have served at Chief Compliance Officer (and later Managing Director for Europe and the U.S.) for the expert network Capvision. Capvision, as listeners may well be aware, was the Shanghai-based company whose offices in China were raided by Chinese law enforcement, resulting in the deten...