Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo
  • 4.9（10則評分）
  • 政治
  • 隔週更新

A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.

  1. 1 天前

    Yi-Ling Liu on The Wall Dancers: China's Internet, Its Creative Spirits, and the Art of the Possible

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Yi-Ling Liu, journalist, former China editor at Rest of World, and author of the new book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Yi-Ling's book traces the arc of Chinese online life through five protagonists — a rapper, a gay rights entrepreneur, a feminist activist, a science fiction writer, and an internet censor — each navigating the creative and constrictive forces of the Chinese internet in their own way. The result is a deeply reported, novelistic account of what it felt like to live, create, and push back in one of the most surveilled and dynamic digital environments on earth. We discuss the book's central metaphor of "dancing in shackles," the early utopian glow of Chinese netizen culture, the parallel fates of hip hop and science fiction under the state's alternating embrace and constraint, and the eerie convergence between the Chinese internet and our own. 0:06 — "Wall dancers" as a metaphor: what it captures that "dissident" or "netizen" doesn't 0:09 — Why 网民 (wǎngmín) took root in China as a concept of digital citizenship 0:13 — The early Chinese internet: more open than we remember, but not as free as the myth suggests 0:15 — Ma Baoli: closeted cop to CEO of China's largest gay dating app, and the Gay Talese reporting strategy 0:20 — Lan Yu, Beijing Story, and the film that became a coming-out moment for a generation of queer men 0:22 — Pragmatism at the heart of the dance: how individuals and the state negotiated the internet together 0:28 — Lu Pin and Feminist Voices: from "playing boundary ball" to sudden exile 0:35 — Stanley Chen Qiufan and the state's attempt to co-opt science fiction for nationalist ends 0:43 — The generational split in Chinese sci-fi: Liu Cixin's cosmic scale vs. the near-future unease of Chen Qiufan and Hao Jingfang 0:46 — Hip hop's arc: from underground scenes in Chengdu and Beijing to The Rap of China and sudden constraint 0:51 — Eric Liu, the Weibo censor: humanizing the firewall from the inside 0:55 — Common prosperity, Wang Huning, and the moral panic behind the crackdown on "effeminate" culture 0:59 — Techno-utopianism in retrospect: was the emancipatory internet always a fantasy? 1:03 — The convergence of the Chinese and American internets: Weibo and Twitter, TikTok and Oracle 1:07 — What it means to be free: how the book expanded Yi-Ling's sense of what freedoms people actually want Paying it forward: Zeyi Yang, technology reporter at WIRED, and co-author (with Louise Matsakis) of the excellent tech x China newsletter Made in China Recommendations: Yi-Ling: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai; Machine Decision is Not Final, an anthology of essays on Chinese AI compiled by scholars affiliated with NYU Shanghai. Kaiser: The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History by Odd Arne Westad (forthcoming); Essays from Pallavi Aiyar's Substack The Global Jigsaw, particularly "How Has China Succeeded in Making People Mind their Manners" and "Why I Would Rather Be Born Chinese than Indian Today." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 18 分鐘

  2. 2月18日

    Kyle Chan on the Great Reversal in Global Technology Flows

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Kyle Chan, a fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, previously a postdoc at Princeton, and author of the outstanding High-Capacity Newsletter on Substack. Kyle has emerged as one of the sharpest and most empirically grounded voices on U.S.-China technology relations, and he holds the all-time record for the most namechecks on Sinica’s “Paying it forward” segment. We use his recent Financial Times op-ed on “The Great Reversal” in global technology flows and his longer High-Capacity essay on re-coupling as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging conversation about where China now sits at the global technological frontier, why the dominant decoupling narrative misses powerful structural forces pulling the two economies back together, and what all of this means for innovation, choke points, and the global tech ecosystem. 4:35 – How Kyle became Kyle Chan: from Chicago School economics to development, railways, and systems thinking  12:50 – The Great Reversal: China at the technological frontier, from megawatt EV charging to LFP batteries  17:59 – The electro-industrial tech stack and China’s overlapping, mutually reinforcing tech ecosystems  22:40 – Industrial strategy and time horizons: patience, persistence, and the long arc of China’s auto industry  33:45 – Re-coupling under pressure: Waymo and Zeekr, Unitree robots, and the structural forces binding the two economies  40:22 – The gravity model: can political distance overwhelm technological mass?  47:01 – What China still wants from the U.S.: Cursor, GitHub, talent, and the AI brain drain  51:52 – Weaponized interdependence and the danger of securitizing everything  57:30 – Firm-level adaptation: HeyGen, Manus, and the playbook for de-sinification  1:02:58 – The view from the middle: Gulf states, Southeast Asia, and India as geopolitical arbitrageurs  1:10:18 – Engineering resilience: what policymakers are getting wrong about the systems they’re building Paying it forward: Katrina Northrop; Grace Shao and her AI Proem newsletter Recommendations: Kyle: Wired Magazine’s Made in China newsletter (by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis); The Wire China  Kaiser: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 21 分鐘

  3. 2月11日

    Brookings' Patricia Kim Takes Stock of Trump's Second-Term China Policy

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. One year into Donald Trump's second term, Pattie and her colleague Joyce Yang have published a comprehensive Brookings assessment titled "Making America Great Again? Evaluating Trump's China strategy at the one-year mark," which examines whether the administration's stated objectives on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependence, and global standing are actually being met. We discuss the paradox of Trump's China policy (which is surprising consistency in goals despite the absence of a formal strategy document), with its mixed results on economic rebalancing and supply chain security, the troubling deterioration in U.S.-China diplomatic and military channels, and why the administration's approach to allies and partners may be undermining its own objectives. Pattie brings analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence, cutting through a lot of noise to assess what's actually working, what isn't, and where the strategy is running up against reality. 4:45 – Does Trump have a China strategy? Consistency without a formal framework 8:15 – Assessing the economic rebalancing goals: reindustrialization and tariffs 15:30 – Technology competition: export controls and AI leadership 23:45 – Supply chain security and strategic dependence challenges 31:20 – The deterioration of diplomatic and military-to-military channels 39:50 – The ally and partner problem: how Trump's approach undermines his own goals 47:15 – Global standing and American credibility in the Trump era 52:30 – Paying it forward: The Lost in Translation series at Brookings Paying it forward: Lost in Translation Series (Brookings Global China Project) Recommendations: Pattie: To Dare Mighty Things by Michael O'Hanlon Kaiser: Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 5 分鐘

  4. 2月4日

    Uneasy Calm: Ryan Hass on Three Pathways for U.S.-China Relations Under Trump

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings and one of the most clear-eyed analysts of the U.S.-China relationship working today. Ryan was director for China at the NSC during the Obama Administration. As Donald Trump moves through his second year in office, the bilateral relationship has defied easy characterization. The once-dominant language of great power competition has receded, China hawks have been sidelined, and Trump’s personalistic approach—marked by praise for Xi Jinping and a willingness to bracket ideological disputes—represents a sharp departure from recent Washington orthodoxy. Ryan has just published an essay laying out three plausible pathways for the relationship under Trump: a soft landing, a hard split, or what he considers most likely—a period of uneasy calm in which both sides seek stability not out of trust, but out of mutual constraint. We discuss Trump’s apparent strategy, the vibe shift in American attitudes, Beijing’s choice between managing Trump versus managing uncertainty, the critical importance of Xi’s planned April visit, and whether we’re headed toward genuine stabilization or just buying time before the next collision. 5:24 – Trump’s approach: respect for Xi, military deterrence, and the rare earths constraint 8:03 – The vibe shift and Trump’s “reptilian feel” for American exhaustion with confrontation 10:52 – Three scenarios: soft landing, hard split, or uneasy calm through mutual constraint 16:30 – Beijing’s bet: managing Trump versus managing whoever comes next 26:46 – Economic interdependence and why decoupling is like “separating egg whites from a scrambled egg” 37:12 – The April visit as a critical test: pageantry, protests, and what both sides are watching for 42:18 – Taiwan as the most dangerous variable and where theory meets practice 46:58 – Lack of institutional guardrails and the risks of Trump’s personalistic foreign policy Paying it forward: Audrye Wong (USC) Recommendations: Ryan: The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert Suettinger Kaiser: The Last Cavalier (Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine) by Alexandre Dumas; Asia Society conversation with Lizzi Lee, Bert Hoffmann, and Gerard DiPippo on rebalancing China’s economy; Trivium China Podcast with Andrew Polk, Joe Peissel, Danny McMahon, and Cory Combs on capital expenditure headwinds See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 4 分鐘

  5. 1月28日

    Afra Wang on "The Morning Star of Lingao" (临高启明) and the Rise and Reckoning of China's "Industrial Party"

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Afra Wang, a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.AI. We're talking today about her recent WIRED piece on what might be China's most influential science fiction project you've never heard of: The Morning Star of Lingao (Língáo Qǐmíng 临高启明), a sprawling, crowdsourced novel about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming Dynasty Hainan. More than a thought experiment in alternate history, it's the ur-text of China's "Industrial Party" (gōngyè dǎng 工业党) — the loose intellectual movement that sees engineering capability as the true source of national power. We discuss what the novel reveals about how China thinks about failure, modernity, and salvation, and why, just as Americans are waking up to China's industrial might, the worldview that helped produce it may already be losing its grip. 5:27 – Being a cultural in-betweener: code-switching across moral and epistemic registers 10:25 – Double consciousness and converging aesthetic standards 12:05 – "The greatest Chinese science fiction" — an ironic title for a poorly written cult classic 14:18 – Bridging STEM and humanities: the KPI-coded language of tech optimization 16:08 – China's post-Industrial Party moment: from "try hard" to "lie flat" 17:01 – How widely known is Lingao? A cult Bible for China's techno-elite 19:11 – From crypto bros to DAO experiments: how Afra discovered the novel 21:25 – The canonical timeline: compiling chaos into collaborative fiction 23:06 – Guancha.cn (guānchá zhě wǎng 观察者网) and the Industrial Party's media ecosystem 26:05 – The Sentimental Party (Qínghuái Dǎng 情怀党): China's lost civic space 29:01 – The Wenzhou high-speed rail crash: the debate that defined the Industrial Party 33:19 – Controlled spoilers: colonizing Australia, the Maid Revolution, and tech trees 41:06 – Competence as salvation: obsessive attention to getting the details right 44:18 – The Needham question and the joy of transformation: from Robinson Crusoe to Primitive Technology 47:25 – "Never again": inherited historical vulnerability and the memory of chaos 49:20 – Wang Xiaodong, "China Is Unhappy," and the crystallization of Industrial Party ideology 51:33 – Gender and Lingao: a pre-feminist artifact and the rational case for equality 56:16 – Dan Wang's Breakneck and the "engineering state" framework 59:25 – New Quality Productive Forces (xīn zhì shēngchǎnlì 新质生产力): Industrial Party logic in CCP policy 1:03:43 – The reckoning: why Industrial Party intellectuals are losing their innocence 1:07:49 – What Lingao tells us about China today: the invisible infrastructure beneath the hot shower Paying it forward: The volunteer translators of The Morning Star of Lingao (English translation and GitHub resources) Xīn Xīn Rén Lèi / Pixel Perfect podcast (https://pixelperfect.typlog.io/) and the Bǎihuā (百花) podcasting community Recommendations: Afra: China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter, edited by Kerry Brown; The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu Kaiser: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 25 分鐘

  6. 1月21日

    The Highest Exam: Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin on China's Gaokao and What It Reveals About Chinese Society

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Jia Ruixue and Li Hongbin, coauthors of The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. We're talking about China's college entrance exam — dreaded and feared, with outsized ability to determine life outcomes, seen as deeply flawed yet also sacrosanct, something few Chinese want drastically altered or removed. Cards on table: I had very strong preconceptions about the gaokao. My wife and I planned our children's education to get them out of the Chinese system before it became increasingly oriented toward gaokao preparation. But this book really opened my eyes. Ruixue is professor of economics at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, researching how institutions like examination systems shape governance, elite selection, and state capacity. Hongbin is James Liang Chair at Stanford, focusing on education, labor markets, and institutional foundations of China's economic development. We explore why the gaokao represents far more than just a difficult test, the concrete incentives families face, why there are limited alternative routes for social mobility, how both authors' own experiences shaped their thinking, why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China, what happened when the exam system was suspended during the Cultural Revolution, why inequality has increased despite internet access to materials, why meaningful reform is so politically difficult, how education translated into productivity and GDP growth, the gap between skill formation and economic returns, how the system shapes governance and everyday life, and the moral dimensions of exam culture when Chinese families migrate to very different education systems like the U.S. 6:18 – What the gaokao actually represents beyond just being a difficult exam 11:54 – Why there are limited alternative pathways for social mobility 14:23 – How their own experiences as students shaped their thinking 18:46 – Why the gaokao is a political institution, not just educational policy 22:21 – Why exam-based elite selection has been so durable in China 28:30 – What happened in late Qing and Cultural Revolution when exams were suspended 33:26 – Has internet access to materials reduced inequality or has it persisted? 36:55 – Hongbin's direct experience trying to reform the gaokao—and why it failed 40:28 – How education improvement accounts for significant share of China's GDP growth 42:44 – The gap: college doesn't add measurable skills, but gaokao scores predict income 46:56 – How centralized approach affects talent allocation across fields 51:08 – The gaokao and GDP tournament for officials: similar tournament systems 54:26 – How ranking and evaluation systems shape workplace behavior and culture 58:12 – When exam culture meets U.S. education: understanding tensions around affirmative action 1:02:10 – Transparent rule-based evaluation vs. discretion and judgment: the fundamental tradeoff Recommendations: Ruixue: Piao Liang Peng You (film by Geng Jun); Stoner (a novel by John Williams) Hongbin: The Dictator's Handbook Kaiser: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field; Black Pill by Elle Reeve See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 16 分鐘

  7. 1月14日

    Daniel Bessner on American Primacy, Cold War Liberalism, and the China Challenge

    This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniel Bessner, the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and co-host of the American Prestige Podcast. If you follow U.S.-China relations even casually, you can’t avoid hearing that we’re in a new Cold War — it’s become a rhetorical reflex in D.C., shaping budgets, foreign policy debates, media narratives, and how ordinary Americans think about China. But what does it actually mean to call something a Cold War? To think clearly about the present, I find it helps to go to the past, not for simple analogies but to understand the intellectual and ideological machinery that produced and now sustains a Cold War mentality. Danny has written widely about the architecture of American power, the rise of the national security state, and the constellation of thinkers he calls Cold War liberals who helped define the ideological landscape of U.S. foreign policy. We explore how Cold War liberalism reshaped American political life, how the U.S. came to see its global dominance as natural and morally necessary, why the question of whose fault the Cold War was remains urgent in an age of renewed great power rivalry, the rise of China and anxiety of American decline, and what it would take to imagine a U.S.-China relationship that doesn’t fall back into old patterns of moral binaries, ideological panic, and militarized competition. 6:20 – Danny’s background: from Iraq War politicization to studying defense intellectuals 11:00 – Cold War liberalism: the constellation of ideas that shaped U.S. foreign policy 16:14 – How these ideas became structurally embedded in security institutions 22:02 – The Democratic Party’s destruction of the genuine left in the late 1940s 27:53 – Whose fault was the Cold War? Stalin’s sphere of influence logic vs. American universalism 31:07 – Are we facing a similar decision with China today? 34:23 – The anxiety of loss: how decline anxiety distorts interpretation of China’s rise 37:54 – The new Cold War narrative: material realities vs. psychological legacies 41:21 – Clearest parallels between the first Cold War and emerging U.S.-China confrontation 44:33 – What would a pluralistic order in Asia actually look like? 47:42 – Coexistence rather than zero-sum rivalry: what does it mean in practice? 50:57 – What genuine restraint requires: accepting limits of American power 54:14 – The moral imperative pushback: you can’t have good empire without bad empire 56:35 – Imperialist realism: Americans don’t think we’re good, but can’t imagine another world Paying it forward: The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Responsible Statecraft publication; The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman Recommendations: Danny: Nirvana and the history of Seattle punk/indie music (forthcoming podcast project) Kaiser: Hello China Tech Substack by Poe Zhao (hellotechchina.com) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 4 分鐘

  8. 1月8日

    Eric Olander: After the Maduro Capture — Assessing China's Real Exposure in Venezuela

    This week on Sinica, in a joint episode with the China-Global South Podcast, I speak with Eric Olander, host of the China Global South Podcast and founder/editor-in-chief of the China-Global South Project. In the early hours of January 3rd, U.S. forces carried out a coordinated operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, followed by their rendition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. The operation unfolded quickly, with minimal kinetic escalation, but has raised far-reaching questions about international law, hemispheric security, and the Trump administration's willingness to use force in the Western Hemisphere. Just before the raid, China's Special Envoy for Latin America, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Maduro in Caracas. Commentary linking Trump's action to China has ranged widely—claims about spheres of influence, arguments this was all about oil or rare earths, and pronouncements about what this means for Taiwan. Eric helps us think through China's actual stake in Venezuela, how deeply Beijing understands Latin America, what this episode does and does not change about China's role in the region and the global South more broadly, China's immediate reaction and concrete exposure on the ground, how it manages political risk when partner regimes collapse, and what Chinese military planners may be studying as they assess how this operation unfolded. 5:18 – How Beijing is reading this episode: official messaging versus elite thinking 7:40 – The Taiwan comparisons on Chinese social media and why they don't work 11:09 – How deep is China's actual expertise on Latin America? 14:56 – Comparing U.S. and Chinese benches of Latin America expertise 18:02 – Are we back to spheres of influence? Why that framing doesn't work 20:09 – Where is China most exposed in Venezuela: oil, loans, personnel? 23:41 – The resource-for-infrastructure model and why it failed 28:27 – The political assets: China as defender of sovereignty and multilateralism 36:25 – Will this push left-leaning governments closer to Beijing? 40:07 – The "China impotence" narrative and what doing something would actually mean 46:26 – What Chinese military planners are actually studying 51:46 – The Qiu Xiaoqi meeting: strategic failure or intelligence delivery? 58:40 – What actually changes and what doesn't: looking ahead Paying it forward: Alonso Illueca, nonresident fellow for Latin America and the Caribbean at the China Global South Project Recommendations: Eric: "China's Long Economic War" by Zongyuan Zoe Liu (Foreign Affairs) Kaiser: The Venetian Heretic by Christian Cameron See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1 小時 10 分鐘
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簡介

A weekly discussion of current affairs in China with journalists, writers, academics, policymakers, business people and anyone with something compelling to say about the country that's reshaping the world. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo.

資訊

  • 創作者
    Kaiser Kuo
  • 活躍年代
    2016年 - 2026年
  • 集數
    537
  • 年齡分級
    兒少適宜
  • 節目網站
    Sinica Podcast

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