Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Michael J. Mazarr, author of the book  Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy , which examines the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Mike is a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation and a former professor at the National War College, and he warns of certain parallels between what happened 20 ye...

We've got a special bonus episode this week on the protests over the weekend of November 26th-27th in multiple cities around China. Joining Kaiser and Jeremy are old friends David Moser and Jeremiah Jenne, co-hosts of the Barbarians at the Gate podcast, who have 50 years in Beijing between them. David Moser is a linguist, academic administrator, and accomplished jazz pianist and composer. Jeremiah...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser & Jeremy welcome Yuan Yang, a reporter for the  Financial Times  who was until recently covering technology in Beijing. Now based in London, her beat is China-Europe relations, and on this episode she discusses German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's recent trip to China, and how Europe and European countries are navigating the fraught U.S.-China relationship. 6:0...

This week on Sinica, in lieu of the regular show we present a keynote address given by Evan Feigenbaum, VP for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at the recent East Asia Strategy Forum, held on November 1-2 in Ottawa, Canada. The forum is put on annually by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada — APF Canada — and by the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy. The Asia Pacific...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Anne-Marie Slaughter, a leading American public intellectual who serves as president of New America and was Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department during the first Obama administration. Anne-Marie talks about how collaboration on issues of global concern — pandemics, global warming, and more — requires the U.S. to deprioritize some aspects...

This week on Sinica, our friends at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs invited us for a live show taping before a small group. Kaiser is joined by Lizzi Lee, MIT-trained economist-turned-reporter who hosts the Chinese-language show "Wall Street Today" as well as The China Project's "Live with Lizzi Lee," both on Youtube; and by Damien Ma, who heads the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank Ma...

This week on Sinica, Evan Osnos, staff writer for  The New Yorker , joins hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn to talk about his new piece on one of the most puzzling figures to come out of China: Guo Wengui, a.k.a. Miles Kwok, who took what he learned about dealing with power and money in China and applied those lessons to the U.S., insinuating himself with leading figures of the American ri...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Susan Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific and Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center  at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD, about how the deliberately collective leadership of the Hu Jintao years set the stage for the over-concentration of power under Xi Jinping and created conditi...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Sue-Lin Wong, who until recently covered China for The Economist and hosted an eight-part podcast series all about Xi Jinping called The Prince. The podcast features interviews with a wide range of China-watchers, peers of Xi, dissidents, and many others who offer insights into what makes Xi tick. 3:38 – Reason behind naming the podcast “the Pri...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy were live in London with a very special guest: Carrie Gracie, whose career with the BBC spanned three decades as a China-based correspondent, news presenter, and China editor. She talks about her podcast series on the Bo Xilai scandal, her longitudinal documentary series on White Horse Village, and her struggle with the BBC to win equal pay for women. 6:02 –...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Minister Xu Xueyuan, Deputy Chief of Mission at the PRC Embassy in Washington, D.C. A few words about the process, in the interest of transparency: Minister Xu’s team did request questions in advance, and they were all accepted without alteration except to suggest that two questions, both related to public diplomacy efforts, be combined. Questions on subjects...

This week on Sinica, we kick off the new network show, the China-Global South Podcast, with a conversation with the show's hosts and co-founders of the China-Global South Project (formerly the China Africa Project), Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden. Kaiser chats with them about where the show is going, and common misconceptions about China's role in the Global South. 1:45 – Reasons for launching...

This week on Sinica,  Wall Street Journal  reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin join the program to discuss their new book Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control . From Urumqi to Uganda and from Hangzhou to the Bronx, the book explores every facet of technological surveillance from the technocratic mindset that birthed it to its spread, with Beijing's...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back University of Michigan political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang, who discusses a recent piece in the  Journal of Democracy  titled " How Resilient is the CCP? " The essay examines how China's bureaucracy remains surprisingly competent and even relatively autonomous despite Xi Jinping's highly personalistic style of rule. 3:51 – Summarizing debates on Ch...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back the Cornell political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss, who is back in Ithaca after a year spent as a CFR International Affairs Fellow working in the State Department's Office of Policy Planning. She talks about an important essay published in the latest edition of  Foreign Affairs , titled "The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Ze...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome back Tom Orlik, Bloomberg's chief economist and author of the book  China: The Bubble that Never Pops . Ahead of the release of the new, updated edition of his book, we ask him about all that has changed in the two-and-a-half years since the publication of the first edition — and whether the real estate crisis, the Common Prosperity a...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy welcome Leroy Chiao, a NASA astronaut who flew three shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station for over six months. Leroy is also very knowledgeable about China's space program and was the first American astronaut to visit the Astronaut Center of China outside of Beijing. He discusses the abortive history of Sino-American spa...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Ali Wyne, senior analyst at the Eurasia Group's global macro geopolitics practice and author of the brand new book  America's Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition . Ali's book calls on American policymakers to craft a strategy that is guided by confidence and a clear vision...

In a week dominated by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, Kaiser welcomes John Culver, who served as national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2017 and as a CIA analyst focusing on China for 35 years. John offers his perspective on Pelosi's trip and provides important context with a discussion of the last Taiwan Straits Crisis, in 1995-96 — a crisis touched off by Le...

This week on Sinica, we offer listeners a sneak preview of one of the new shows coming soon to the Sinica Network: Café & Seda, or Coffee and Silk. While this episode is in English, the podcast will be mostly in Spanish — our first non-English show. The host is Parsifal D'Sola, who is Executive Director of the ABF China Latin America Research Center and a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlan...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Silvia Lindtner of the University of Michigan about her book  Prototype Nation . In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss how China's maker movement inspired the Party leadership to encourage tech entrepreneurship, how Shenzhen rose to such prominence in technology production, the fetishization of the  shanzhai  movement, and mu...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Triolo, Senior VP for China and Technology Policy Lead at Dentons Global Advisors ASG, formerly and probably better known still as Albright Stonebridge Group. Paul provides an in-depth overview of today’s semiconductor landscape, from export control issues, to the unstable equilibrium between U.S., China, and Taiwan’s industries. He walks us through the...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Villanova University historian Andrew Liu. Andy published an excellent essay in n+1 magazine in April that captured how the eclipse of the "wet-market" theory of COVID origins and its replacement by the "lab-leak" theory illustrates how an old racial form — "Orientalism," which sees countries of Asia as backward, dirty, and barbarous — gave way to what's been...

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jing Tsu, John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature at Yale University, about her wonderful new book  Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern . Jing talks about her role as culture commentator for NBC during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, about how the written Chinese...

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Shelley Rigger of Davidson College returns to the show to talk Taiwan. She's joined by Simona Grano, a sinologist and Taiwan specialist at the University of Zürich. They talk about President Joe Biden's recent "gaffes" that call into question the longstanding, unofficial U.S. policy of "strategic ambiguity," talk about how Taiwan has been impacted by the Ukraine Wa...