Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, Kendra Schaefer, a partner specializing in technology at China-focused consultancy Trivium, and Jeremy Daum, Senior Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center. discuss the new draft regulations published in April by the Cyberspace Administration of China that will, when passed, govern generative AI in China. Will it choke off innovation, or cr...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Andrew Stokols, a Ph. D. researcher at MIT who has been studying the “techno-natural utopia” that the Chinese government is now building a hundred kilometers southwest of Beijing: Xiong’an. Andrew breaks down why he sees it as an urban manifestation of the fundamental ideas embodied in Xi Jinping’s ideological vision for China. 02:02 - Xiong’an New Area as a...

This week on Sinica, an Earth Day special: Kaiser chats with Marilyn Waite, managing director of the Climate Finance Fund; Alex Wang, a UCLA law professor who specializes in China climate and environmental law; and Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist at Villanova University who served as the Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. This episode was...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Jeremy and I chat with Mike Chinoy, the legendary award-winning TV newsman who helmed CNN in Beijing for many critical years. Mike talks about the video documentary series and accompanying book  Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic , for which he interviewed about 130 journalists whose careers spanned an 80-year pe...

This week on Sinica, Kishore Mahbubani, who served as Singapore's UN Ambassador and has written extensively on ASEAN and the U.S.-China rift, returns to the show to discuss his recent essay in  Foreign Affairs , and to advocate for the pragmatic approach that's held ASEAN together for over five decades of continuous peace and growing prosperity. 4:36 – Kishore talks about Macron’s state visit...

This week on Sinica, something different: Kaiser asks over a dozen scholars of various facets of China studies to talk about their work and make some recommendations! You'll hear from a variety of scholars, from MA students to tenured professors, talking about a bewildering range of fascinating work they're doing. Enjoy! 3:00 – Kristin Shi-Kupfer — recommendations: this essay (in Chinese) by Teng...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Chris Marquis, a professor at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, and formerly at Cornell’s business school, about the book he co-authored with Kunyuan Qiao,  Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise.  In it, they examine how even in China's private sector, socialization into the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party am...

This week, a bonus episode to keep you caught up on the week's biggest China story: Xi Jinping's two days of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Maria Repnikova, a Latvian-born native Russian speaker who is also fluent in Chinese and who teaches Chinese politics and communications at Georgia State University, joins the show again to talk about what each side hoped for, what each side g...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes Tuvia Gering of Israel's Institute of National Security Studies, where he focuses on China's relations with Israel and other countries of the Middle East. Tuvia breaks down the agreement to normalize relations between Riyadh and Tehran, which Beijing brokered during secret talks that were only revealed, along with the fruit they bore, on March 10. 6:05 – How wa...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes Taisu Zhang, professor of law at Yale University, who discusses his recent work on the expansion of the administrative state down to the subdistrict and neighborhood level — changes that are far-reaching, and likely permanent. They also discuss a recent essay in Foreign Affairs i n which Taisu argued that Beijing is shifting away from "performance legitimacy" a...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Lulu Chen, who has reported on tech in China for over a decade and is the author of the book  Influence Empire: The Inside Story of Tencent and China's Tech Ambition .  It's a fascinating look at not only Tencent but at the overall internet sector in China, focusing on the travails and the triumphs of some of the most consequential Chinese internet...

A second full episode this week for you Sinica listeners! Jude Blanchette joins to talk about the House Select Committee on United States Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, and all that is wrong with it, from its framing of the CCP as an "existential threat" to its focus on the CCP, and how all of this adds up to an embarrassing moral panic that distracts from the serious issues the U.S...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy speak with Henry Sanderson, a former AP and Bloomberg reporter who was based in China for many years, about his book  Volt Rush :  The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green  — a book that reminds us of the very ugly fact that the metals that are needed to make electric vehicle batteries need to be dug out of the earth, and processed in way...

It's been one year now since Vladimir Putin launched his assault on Ukraine, and China has sought to maintain the same difficult, awkward straddle across a difficult year. Did Beijing's efforts to project the impression that it had distanced itself from Russia in the wake of the Party Congress mean anything? And how should the U.S. manage its expectations of what China can or will do? Evan Feigenb...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Raffaello Pantucci, co-author of the 2022 book  Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire , which examines China's presence in Central Asia. Based on extensive travel and interviews undertaken both before and after the tragic murder of his co-author, Alexandros Petersen, in 2014, the book is a highly readable if difficult to categorize melange of analysis and...

This week, we've got a short show focused on the Chinese balloon that became the obsessive focus of American attention from Thursday through Sunday, February 5, when an F-22 shot it out of the sky off of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Gerard DiPippo, a senior fellow with the Economics Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, joins to discuss the incident and its potentia...

This week on Sinica, our live recording from the Rizzoli Bookstore in the Flatiron district of Manhattan with the legendary Ian Johnson, who has covered China for a host of publications spanning 35 years. Ian, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, offers his analysis of media coverage, shares some pet peeves in the way China is reported, and offers a sneak peek at some of...

When the National Bureau of Statistics recently revealed that China's population had shrunk in 2022 for the first time in 60 years, conventional wisdom predicted that China was headed for catastrophe, as its workforce shrank, its pension coffers dried up, and its healthcare system grew overtaxed. Not so fast, says Bert Hofman, who spent 22 years in Asia with the World Bank, focused chiefly on Chin...

This week on Sinica, we welcome back Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. Debbi spent October 2022 through early January 2023 in Shanghai and Beijing, experiencing quarantine, testing, and lockdown at firsthand — and witnessing the protests and the sudden reopening. As a close observer of public health issues, she lends valuable perspective to what h...

This week on Sinica, we're proud to introduce you to Susan St. Denis, who joined The China Project full-time recently after running the China Vibe Official TikTok channel for The China Project for the last several months. Kaiser and Susan talk about what people are getting wrong about TikTok, the challenges of presenting complex issues in this medium, and much more! 1:01 – Introducing The China Pr...

This week on Sinica, we proudly present Episode 1 of the newest season of Strangers in China: Lockdown Part 1: A day in the life. The 2022 Shanghai lockdown came to Clay’s neighborhood early and caught him off-guard. Struggling with his mental health, Clay documents how lockdown works on a granular level giving listeners an audio tour of his neighborhood as it plunges into the uncertainty of all t...

We proudly present Episode 1 of the new season of  Strangers in China,  part of the Sinica Network from The China Project. In this season, host Clay Baldo provides an intimate look at the lockdown in Shanghai, from the foreboding that preceded it through the harrowing days of the lockdown itself. Be sure to subscribe to the show, too! Just look up Strangers in China in your podcast app o...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Rebecca Kuang (who writes under the name R.F. Kuang), the author of the best-selling historical fantasy novel  Babel.  Set in the 1830s in England, the novel’s Chinese-born protagonist sets out to prevent a war with China over the opium trade. It’s a novel about the industrial revolution, labor activism, revolution, and — surprisingly — language, et...

This week on Sinica, Jude Blanchette (Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) and Ryan Hass (Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institute) join Kaiser to discuss their new essay in  Foreign Affairs , " The Taiwan Long Game: Why the Best Solution Is No Solution .” 3:05 – Reconceptualizing Taiwan as “a strategic problem with a defens...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Diana Choyleva and Dinny McMahon, who recently published a report for the Wilson Center on China's efforts to internationalize the Renminbi, its currency. Diana Choyleva is chief economist and founder of Enodo Economics, an independent macroeconomic forecasting consultancy she set up in 2016. Dinny McMahon is a former  Wall Street Journal  r...