The Little Red Podcast

On the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, has CCP Chairman Xi Jinping overreached? He's facing blowback everywhere from Hong Kong to Xinjiang amid an escalating trade war with the US. Even his signature infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, has run into trouble. Is the world entering a new cold war? We ask former Obama administration Asia advisor Ch...

The South Pacific nation of the Solomon Islands may be on the verge of switching diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China, which would leave only sixteen nations recognising Taiwan.  When Manasseh Sogavare was appointed prime minister of the Solomons for the fourth time in April, he vowed to review the country’s relations with Taiwan, even though he has been a longtime supporter...

As the news broke that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam had withdrawn the extradition bill that had sparked three months of unrest in Hong Kong, Little Red Podcast co-host Louisa Lim was moderating the event 'Be Water: Hong Kong vs China'. This panel event, featuring Hong Kong popstar and activist Denise Ho, Chinese artist Badiucao and author Clive Hamilton, was a discussion about resi...

As Hong Kong enters its eleventh week of turmoil, we hear voices on the ground.  From 15-year olds who can hardly remember how many times they have been teargassed to thirty-somethings ready to serve prison sentences, the consensus is that Hong Kong is playing out its endgame.  We also travel across the political divide, to hear from attendees at a pro-police rally who feel their voices...

By 2020, less than half a year from now, a social credit scheme will cover people and companies across China, “allowing the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” It’s long been assumed the Chinese state would take the lead, but favored companies will doubtless profit from a database that will house every citizen’s tax records,...

Our third Hong Kong emergency episode comes in the wake of the storming of the territory's Legislative Council on the 22nd anniversary of its return to mainland China. Louisa reports from the floor of the Legco chamber as it is occupied and vandalized by hundreds of demonstrators, all risking hefty jail terms. With Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam still refusing to scrap the extradition bill...

We’re bringing you a second emergency podcast from Hong Kong, which has seen more record protests over the weekend. According to organisers, two million people—nearly one-third of Hong Kong residents—marched on Sunday, despite the Hong Kong government’s promise to shelve its unpopular extradition bill.  With public faith in its institutions shattered and a pattern...

We bring you an emergency podcast from Hong Kong, one day after extraordinary police violence saw 79 people injured by baton charges, rubber bullets and over 150 rounds of tear gas. This dark turn comes only a few days after one million Hong Kongers—one in seven residents—took to the streets to protest proposed legal amendments that would allow citizens to be extradited to mainland Chi...

Tuesday June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the deadly crackdown ordered by Deng Xiaoping, which killed hundreds – maybe thousands – of people in Beijing and Chengdu. While the campaign to erase all memory of the event continues, explosive new information has emerged in the lead up to the anniversary.  It reveals new details about resistance to the crackdown among the military and how the Communi...

With Chinese citizens’ lives increasingly coded into data streams, the question of who owns this data and how it gets used is largely up to private companies. They control massive volumes of personal information and are tasked by Xi Jinping with everything from astroturfing public opinion to monitoring one-to-one chat in real time. As these companies expand beyond China’s borders, thei...

Hate mail, death threats and shadowy surveillance are facts of life for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists, five years after the Umbrella movement brought a million people onto the streets calling for greater democracy.   Since then, 48 legal cases have been brought against 32 different activists, often on colonial-era public order offences.  Louisa and Graeme are j...

The Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping has emerged from the annual parliamentary meetings facing a rough year ahead.  China's economy is growing at its slowest in nearly three decades, amid a massive trade war and spiralling local debt, with rumblings of discontent from delegates about everything from the Belt and Road Initiative to Made in China 2025.  Louisa and Graeme are joi...

The Pacific is seeing a flurry of diplomatic activity: Australia is ‘stepping up’, New Zealand has ordered a ‘Pacific reset’ and even Great Britain is reopening missions in its former Pacific colonies. The reason for their sudden interest is simple: China. If Beijing comes good on $4 billion in aid pledges, it could overtake Canberra as the largest donor to the Pacific. Often missed in this new Gr...

China has been engulfed by a controversy that strikes at the very heart of the nation—forget the South China Sea, rampant human rights abuses, even a looming economic crash. Last month food critic Chua Lam, otherwise known as the Food God, called for the end to the PRC’s most beloved dining craze: hot pot. The backlash has been immense, with enraged Weibo users calling for Chua Lam’s abolition. To...

China is becoming a more unequal place for women, in 2018 slipping for a fifth consecutive year in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap index.  Chairman Mao may have proclaimed that women can hold up half the sky, but the Communist party under Xi Jinping holds a far narrower view of female roles, cracking down on feminist activists and backing traditional values.  The imp...

The Vatican and China have signed a deeply controversial agreement on the appointment of bishops, ending the cold war that has frozen ties since 1950.  That deep freeze led to schisms between the official and underground churches, with some clergy persecuted for decades and the church refusing to recognise Beijing's handpicked bishops.  But the new agreement has divided the faithful yet again, wit...

"Domestically I don't think the Uighur culture will survive." China now acknowledges the existence of mass indoctrination camps in Xinjiang - which it calls 'vocational training centres' - after months of denial. Its latest propaganda campaign showcases Uighurs inside the camps thanking the Party for teaching them skills and saving them from Islamic extremism. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme ar...

The language used by the Chinese state in Xinjiang pathologises Islam, seeing it as an "ideological virus" which needs eradication by transformation through education.  In recent days, China has publicly justified the mass internment of Uighurs as necessary in its struggle against the "three evils" of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.  In part 1, Louisa and Graeme heard test...

‘We seem to be normal, but we are not.’ A United Nations human rights panel says it has credible reports that more than a million Uighurs are being held in reeducation camps in the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang. As evidence emerges of massive human rights violations from satellite photos, procurement bids and state-run news reports, the voices that have not yet been heard are those of...

“Use your spies for every kind of business.” This 2500 year-old stratagem from Sun Zi's Art of War still informs Beijing’s modern day approach towards intelligence gathering. Today China’s espionage industrial complex appears to be taking spying mainstream by blurring the boundaries between spying, interference and influence projection. To explore the shadowy realm of Chine...

China today is Black Mirror through the Looking Glass. A national video surveillance network is promised in just two years, while new technologies are being rolled out at speed on the frontier of China’s surveillance regime, in Xinjiang, ranging from iris scans to phone surveillance apps. Simultaneously the Chinese state is building a nationwide social credit system, to be launched in 2020, which...

There’s no escaping China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It’s been written into China’s constitution, and more than 70 countries from Pakistan to Papua New Guinea have signed up.  But what is it? A modern-era Marshall Plan, a geopolitical bid for China to build a new international power bloc, a new model for Chinese colonialism, or an all-encompassing bumper sticker for Chinese-brokered development p...

China's recent impressive economic growth has been built largely on massive debt. According to some estimates, in just over a decade China has managed to rack up debt in excess of 300% of its GDP, effectively placing a ticking time-bomb under the world economy. Is China heading for a financial crisis, and if so when? In this episode, Graeme and Louisa are joined by Dinny MacMahon, the author of Ch...

On 12 May 2008, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit Wenchuan in Sichuan, claiming more than 85,000 lives, many of them schoolchildren whose classrooms collapsed. It was a paradoxical moment of great tragedy and great hope, with a new sense of openness and civil society emerging in the quake's immediate aftermath. A decade on, its legacy has proved much darker including Great Leap Forward style urbanisa...

Universities in Australia have an addiction: overseas student fees. Nearly half of overseas students in Australia are from China, rising to 60% at some institutions. Against the backdrop of new legislation to counter foreign influence, we talk to Chinese students, who find themselves caught in a geopolitical battle—accused by some of acting as ‘spies’ and restricting intellectual freedom in Austra...