The Little Red Podcast

Nationalism in China seems to have taken a feral turn, with Chinese netizens viciously turning on Olympic athletes, celebrities and even the über-nationalist  Global Times  for letting down the motherland. This month we’re talking about the evolution of Chinese nationalism and the factors driving the emergence of a new cadre of aggressive diplomats known as wolf warriors....

For our fifth anniversary, we’ve thrown the floor open to our audience.   This month we’re doing an Agony Aunt edition for China nerds. We've gathered your burning China questions and then hunted down the world’s leading experts in search of answers. From support for the government to statistical elasticity, from clothing habits to tea-drinking titillations right at the very top, we are parrying l...

China’s once untouchable tech billionaires suddenly find themselves in the unfamiliar position of being roughed up the state. Just at the time when the Party needs its homegrown tech firms to sell Xi Jinping’s new ‘lovable’ image of China, previously toothless regulators are issuing billion dollar fines and ordering companies to restructure—or else. To ask whether the...

For a Party chosen by history, the CCP spends a lot of money targeting foreign media outlets and governments. In this episode, a panel of researchers discusses why China—or any autocracy—cares what the world thinks of it, and how it tries to shape its global image. We ask whether the CCP’s media outreach and lobbying operations bear fruit, or are readily seen through as clumsy propaganda. This wee...

China is home to 661 million online gamers, easily the world’s biggest market. Cities like Shanghai now boast some of the world’s most talented game developers. Yet the Chinese government has long been uncomfortable with online games, fretting about Internet addiction and young people wasting their energies on ‘spiritual opium’, leaving their schoolbooks for seedy Internet...

China is now remoulding Hong Kong at speed.  Forty-seven Democratic politicians and activists have been arrested on national security charges for participating in last year’s primary polls, and only people Beijing deems ‘patriots’ allowed to run for office.  One prominent pro-Beijing figure has even warned that the electoral reforms risk ‘killing the patient&rsquo...

With the world’s attention focused on industrial-scale oppression in Xinjiang, developments in Tibet are passing beneath the radar.  But activists are warning of a full-spectrum assault on the Tibetan way of life, as Tibetan language teaching is outlawed and urbanisation campaigns relocate nomads from their ancestral pastures.  The CCP has underlined its determination to choose the next Dalai Lama...

This month we’re delving into boys’ love or BL fiction. From niche online novels to TV shows such as the Netflix fantasy epic The Untamed , their storylines revolve around male relationships with a tinge of sexual tension. But there’s a quirk. It’s not gay fiction; the stories are often written by women for women. This genre is incredibly popular in China, making BL fans an intimidating political...

China's five thousand years of history has become a fact, repeated ad nauseum by the state-run media and Chinese textbooks alike, but could it be a national myth?   In his recently published book, The Invention of China , Bill Hayton argues that “China” was cooked up by a small group of intellectuals who brought notions of sovereignty, citizenry and borders back from Europe j...

A quick glance at the headlines suggest that only one man seems to count in today’s China – the Chairman of Everything, as he’s been dubbed - Communist party leader President Xi Jinping. He’s helmed China’s reemergence as a world power through his aggressive foreign policy, while consolidating power at home. In this episode, we delve into his own princeling past, look...

Last year China's international state-run broadcaster, CGTN, spent millions opening a state-of-the-art London headquarters. Just one year on, it may already be scrambling for an exit strategy. CGTN may even lose its licence in the United Kingdom after the British regulator found it breached the broadcasting code. This episode we interview two people who have brought complaints against CGTN after i...

Even before they had seen its contents, Hong Kong's family-run firms - including two non-Chinese business empires that have shaped Hong Kong - were lining up to pledge support to the New National Security legislation.  Even in 2020, Hong Kong remains an oligopoly with a handful of wealthy conglomerates controlling vast swathes of Hong Kong's economy.  But these family-run firms no longer...

China-US ties are in a tailspin, spiralling ever deeper into an abyss. Just one short month has seen US sanctions on senior Chinese officials for atrocities against the Uyghurs, Hong Kong’s special status for trade and diplomacy revoked, and consulates closed in Houston and Chengdu respectively. There's even been talk of a travel ban on China's 92m Communist party members and their families....

On June 30, Hong Kong will be subject to a new National Security Law. No one, not even Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, knows what will be in the bill, but details are slowly coming into focus. For critics, the legislation will create a ‘dual state’ that will undermine Hong Kong’s legal system and allow Beijing to target its opponents at will. For proponents, the bill will only...

For the first time since 1989 Hong Kongers are banned from holding their annual June Fourth vigil in Victoria Park. Despite this provocation, Hong Kong establishment figures—from vice chancellors to movie stars to religious figures—have been lining up to pledge their loyalty to China and their support for the proposed National Security Law that will be enacted in Beijing, bypassing the local legis...

The byzantine rules and procedures of multilateral institutions form the backdrop for China's global power play, following President Xi Jinping's 2018 call for China to “lead the reform of the global governance system with the concepts of fairness and justice.” As the US pulls back from its global obligations, there's increasing evidence that China is simply changing the rules inside t...

China's Covid diplomacy dispatching facemasks and respirators overseas is being hailed as the ultimate soft power play. But is this really soft power? To answer this question, we're joined by the man who coined the term, Joseph Nye, the former dean of Harvard Kennedy School of Government as well as Bates Gill, professor in the Department of Security Studies at Macquarie University, and Natasha Kas...

COVID-19 isn't just destroying economies, it's also reshaping the global order.  In less than a month, the novel coronavirus has moved from being China's Chernobyl to being an advertisement for China’s brand of governance. As Western governments, in particular the US, fail to grapple with this enormous public health challenge, China is presenting itself as the world’s saviour...

The “people's war” on COVID-19 has brought enforcers in hazmat suits onto the streets of Wuhan, where they're bundling ordinary citizens into vans, giving Han Chinese urbanites a taste of the kind of state violence that is normally reserved for dissidents and troublesome ethnic groups. In this episode, we discuss the changing nature of state violence in China, and how it manifests in the re-educat...

The coronavirus that has infected 70,000 people is being compared to China's Chernobyl in its political and economic fallout, but just how much of an inflection point will it be?  This crisis is threatening the previously unchallenged authority of President Xi Jinping. It could reshape domestic policy imperatives and embed techno-authoritarian tendencies at local levels.  It also has ramifications...

Judging by the news headlines China is ramping up its industrial espionage efforts: secret payments to high-profile scientists, massive hacks of foreign universities and clumsy attempts to steal trade secrets the old-fashioned way. Intelligence agencies in the US and Australia have both issued dire warnings about the existential dangers posed by this sort of activity, but how much of a risk does C...

In the Xi Jinping era, China is quietly embedding core socialist values into every aspect of life, including the judicial system.  When core socialist values were introduced in 2013, they sounded like one more slogan in the pantheon of forgettable party dogmas, but now they're gaining teeth.  In this episode we examine how core socialist values are recoding language, legitimising CCP rul...

When the Hong Kong film Ten Years (Sap nin) came out in 2015, it was pulled from cinemas after Chinese state-run media described it as a 'virus of the mind'. Once seen as dystopian with its scenes of mass protest and police brutality, it now looks prophetic in a world where 88% of the Hong Kong population has been exposed to teargas. In this episode, we explore post-election, post-dystopian Hong K...

With cinema takings in the United States at a 22-year low, Hollywood moguls are looking to an unlikely saviour: China. With box office revenues growing at 9 percent, Hollywood is scrambling to find the formula for movies that make the cut of China’s 34 approved films and appeal to Chinese audiences. For every surprise hit, like The Meg and Warcraft , there are flops like The Great Wall . Lik...

As China's leaders gathered in Beijing to survey troops, fireworks and their latest missiles, a different scene was unfolding in Hong Kong.  Police shot an 18-year old protestor in the chest and unleashed a staggering 1400 rounds of tear gas on the population.  The protests originally targeted the extradition bill and then grew into democratic protests, but now protestors increasingly identify as...