Sinocism Podcast

Bill Bishop
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Sinocism Podcast

A podcast from Bill Bishop, author of the Sinocism newsletter, in which we talk to experts from around the world to help us all get smarter about China. Topics discussed include politics, foreign relations, business, finance, culture, history and markets. Nearly 300,000 investors, policymakers, executives, analysts, diplomats, journalists, scholars and others read Sinocism for valuable insights into China. sinocism.com

Episodes

  1. OCT 12

    Substack Election Dialogues: China and the US election

    Thanks to everyone who tuned in live to my Friday discussion with Christopher Johnson on China and the US election. Our talk was part of the ongoing Substack Election Dialogues. Chris is President and CEO of China Strategies Group. He served for nearly two decades in the United States Government’s intelligence and foreign affairs communities. In addition to his work advising multinational corporations on their business and commercial strategies in China and greater East Asia, his insights on the Chinese leadership and on Beijing’s economic, commercial, foreign and security policies are regularly sought by senior Administration, Congressional, military, and foreign government officials. Chris also serves as a Senior Fellow on Chinese Politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis. The live videos are first available in the Substack app, and that is also where you can find me most days on Notes and in the Sinocism chat: I hope you enjoy this discussion, let me know if you think I should do more. Thanks This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sinocism.com/subscribe

    56 min

  2. 05/09/2023

    Sinocism Podcast: Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights on the rise of the China vehicle industry

    In this episode of the Sinocism Podcast Bill speaks with Tu Le, Founder and Managing Director of Sino Auto Insights. Tu recently attended the Shanghai Auto Show. We discuss the rise of China EVs both inside China and increasingly in other countries, and especially of BYD, why the legacy foreign auto manufacturers are struggling and will continue to struggle in China, and how “China EV Inc” will win share in many overseas markets. We also discuss Tesla’s positioning in the PRC and some if its challenges ahead, especially from BYD, both inside the PRC and in other markets around the world. Links: Sino Auto Insights Sino Auto Insights newsletter Doug DeMuro reviews the BYD Han: The BYD Song L: Transcript: [00:00:00] Bill: Welcome back to the Sinocism podcast. Today we're very lucky to have Tu Le to talk about the PRC auto industry. Tu is the founder and managing director of Sino Auto Insights. Tu recently relocated to Detroit after many years in Beijing. Tu and his team at Sino Auto Insights do advisory and market research work for companies and investors who want to understand the PRC auto industry and especially the rise of Made in China EVs. He also writes an excellent weekly newsletter and does a podcast and occasional or weekly, I think, , Twitter spaces. I will put links to those in the show notes. Tu, welcome and thanks for joining the podcast. Great to see you again. [00:00:36] Tu Le: Bill first. , thanks for having me. Last time we saw each other, I think we were at Central Park having a coffee at Jamaica Blue. That quite a few years ago. [00:00:47] Bill: Tu and I are old friends from, from Beijing. , so, and, and it's, it's good to see you and, , nice to have you, , back in the US and Detroit. , Detroit is home, right. But it's also a great place to be if you're working on the auto industry. [00:00:59] Tu Le: Yeah. It's kind of ground zero for what's happening in the EV and mobility space. So, so it's, it's a great time to be back. [00:01:05] Bill: I've been really wanting to get you on the podcast for a while and I got finally motivated to do so after reading, what you were talking about from the Shanghai Auto Show, which you were, you, you just came back from China, I think, like a week ago, right? You're there for Tu or three weeks, , and nice to be able to travel again, right? [00:01:21] Tu Le: Oh, man. It was, , it was kind of, , surreal because the last time I traveled internationally from China, we were just, we had bags packed and everything, so a little bit different. [00:01:35] Bill: Yeah, no, much, much better. , and I think, you know, the Shanghai Auto Show clearly rocked a lot of people's worlds, and so Tu is going help us understand what's going on, and that's why, you know. So I wanna start though, first with, if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in China, working in the audio industry and, and what your firm does. [00:01:54] Tu Le: Okay, sure. So,  as you'd mentioned, I grew up in Detroit, actually in Pontiac, Michigan.. In my entire family, all eight of us have worked. In the automotive space, along with our significant others. And, my first job, actually out of undergrad at Michigan State University was working at GM where the recently canceled Bolt is manufactured. [00:02:16] Tu Le: After grad school I moved to Silicon Valley, worked there for about six, seven years., and I met a girl and chased her over to Beijing actually. So I quit my Silicon Valley job and what I thought was going be a three or four year commitment ended up being 13 years.  I had moved to Shanghai, took a job with Ford in Lujiazui actually for about a year, and then moved back to Beijing due to some family stuff going on. [00:02:46] Tu Le: And, then I started freelance consulting and worked at a couple of Chinese e e e-commerce startups in Beijing. And then I got pulled over to do some freelance consulting because one of my, friends. Had found out that I had some automotive backgrou

    57 min

  3. 05/02/2023

    An excerpt from Tania Branigan's Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

    It is my pleasure to be able to run an excerpt from Tania Branigan’s excellent new book “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution”. Tania has also kindly recorded herself reading this chapter, so you can listen to it if you prefer. Tania writes editorials for the Guardian and spent seven years as its China correspondent, reporting on politics, the economy, and social changes. we overlapped in Beijing and became friends. We also recorded a podcast about the book which you can listen to here. You can purchase the book on bookshop.org or on Amazon. The audio edition will be available from Tantor starting 7/11/23 wherever audiobooks are sold. Begin excerpt: Chapter 5 Chongqing saw some of the era’s fiercest fighting, with the rift between Red Guards descending into warfare. The Kuomintang had made it their capital while battling the Japanese occupation, and it was home to multiple munitions plants; when armed struggles broke out in 1967, the military backed one side and helped its fighters seize what they needed. The factions battled with grenades, machine guns, napalm, tanks and ships upon the river – everything except planes, a resident recalled. They executed in cold blood too: even the injured, even the pregnant. Tens of thousands fled the city and at least twelve hundred people died, though the true toll was probably much higher. Some were caught in the violence by chance, like the eight-year-old killed by a ricocheting bullet as he played on the street. The others were not so much older, and you could blame chance there too, even if they saw themselves as soldiers. They never thought it would be so serious, that people would die, that so many would die. By the time they saw their friends fall they’d been battling for hours. They were numb; none of it seemed possible. Had it really happened at all? Shapingba Park held the proof. More than five hundred of the victims, mostly teenagers, were buried here, at a Red Guard cemetery hidden on one edge of the site, behind a grove of trees. It was the only Cultural Revolution site in the country to be recognised as a national heritage spot. But a mossy wall surrounded the plot and the public were not allowed in any more. I had come before, and stared through the chained gates. Though the cemetery was only half a century old, it reminded me of the Civil War graveyards I had seen in the American South, crumbling and overgrown. Luxuriant greenery crawled over marble monuments, immense and once stark white but now lichened and grey. Stone torches topped great pillars and obelisks, carved with red stars and Maoist slogans and the number 815. It was the rebel faction the dead had belonged to, named for a critical date in its inception in 1966. ‘People began to die on 1 July 1967. On the tenth, I was put in charge of the bodies,’ Zheng Zhisheng recalled. He ran a chemicals business in the city, but back then he had been a student, and they had called him the Corpse Master. He was peering through thick tortoiseshell glasses that still bore the maker’s sticker. Two more dusty pairs lay on his desk, jumbled with books, newspapers, a giant magnifying glass and two lidded porcelain cups. He delved for a photograph. ‘This is October 1967. Twenty-seven people – twenty-seven corpses.’ Most of the faces were turned away from the camera. One mouth gaped so wide it could swallow the viewer. ‘I had seen dead bodies when I was young. But I’d never had to handle them. I was a model student, and the faction leader thought I was a helpful person and not afraid of hard work. And also,’ he added, after a moment’s thought, ‘I’d opposed him at the beginning. So he thought of me and put me in charge. I was forced to do it. I put make-up, and an armband, and a Mao badge, on each one. At the start I was afraid of the dirty work. I had to wash the dead bodies and I used soap to wash my hands all the time. Afterwards I didn’t mind about that. The second

    13 min

  4. 05/02/2023

    Sinocism Podcast: Tania Branigan on her book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

    Episode Notes: Tania Branigan and I discuss her excellent new book “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution”. Tania writes editorials for the Guardian and spent seven years as its China correspondent, reporting on politics, the economy, and social changes. We overlapped in Beijing and became friends. I have also published an excerpt from the book here. You can purchase the book on bookshop.org or on Amazon. The audio edition will be available from Tantor starting 7/11/23 wherever audiobooks are sold. Links: China's Cultural Revolution remembered by artist Xu Weixin - video | The Guardian 2012 - China's Cultural Revolution: portraits of accuser and accused | The Guardian Xilin Wang: Music by a Survivor | Hamburg International Music Festival - YouTube Wang Xilin ( 王西麟 ): Yunnan Tone Poem (1963) - YouTube Transcript: [00:00:00] Bill: Welcome back to the occasional Sinocism podcast. I know I've been absent for a while, and now that I do the Weekly Sharp China podcast, I've realized I like podcasting. So we'll be recording more Sinocism episodes with guests I think are really interesting. [00:00:11] Bill: Today. We are very lucky to have Tania Branigan to talk about her excellent new book Red Memory: The After Lives of China's Cultural Revolution. As Tania writes, it is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution. That is something I agree with wholeheartedly. So much so that I even wrote my grad school thesis on Mao badges. [00:00:30] Bill: I will also be running an excerpt from her book in the coming days, which is released in the UK already and will come out on May 9th in the United States. Tania writes editorials for the Guardian and spent seven years as its China correspondent reporting on politics, the economy, and social changes. [00:00:45] Bill: She lives in London. Welcome Tania, and congratulations on this great book.  [00:00:50] Tania: Thank you so much for having me on. [00:00:51] Bill: Oh, it's my pleasure. It's great to see you. It's been it's been a few years and I appreciate it. I got an advance read of the book last year and it [00:01:00] really is it really is, I think, an important book and an important contribution. [00:01:03] Bill: So can you, just for the listeners, can you just talk a bit about your background? So when you first started working in China and what you did when you were there.  [00:01:12] Tania: So I came out to China in 2008 just ahead of the Olympics, right at the start of what turned out to be an incredibly news packed year, as you may recall, right? [00:01:22] Tania: And I had never particularly wanted to be a foreign correspondent per se, but I just felt that China was the story of our time, really. Which is only proof to be truer perhaps as time has gone on. And because it's a pretty small bureau there were never more than two of us, max. And quite often there was one of me, I was covering absolutely everything. [00:01:44] Tania: So from natural disasters through to politics, through to culture, business even very occasionally when I couldn't help hit sport. But I became particularly fascinated by this topic and by [00:02:00] China's more recent history,  [00:02:02] Bill: one question on your time there. When you arrived, was it already past the Wenchuan earthquake? [00:02:07] Tania: No. And in fact that was one of the sort of formative moments, for me reporting on, yeah,  [00:02:15] Bill: it's 15 years next in two weeks. It's crazy.  [00:02:18] Tania: It's hard to believe it's gone past so fast. I still think about those parents who lost kids.  [00:02:24] Bill: And that, no, it's terrible. Terrible  [00:02:29] Bill: So what led you to this book? [00:02:33] Tania: You did actually, as I say in, as I say in the book, I probably wouldn't have written it without you. So I was obviously aware of the Cultural Revolution. I knew something about it. I'd read a little around it. But then it was just when I had that

    50 min
  5. Sinocism Podcast #5: 20th Party Congress and US-China Relations with Chris Johnson

    11/04/2022

    Sinocism Podcast #5: 20th Party Congress and US-China Relations with Chris Johnson

    Episode Notes: A discussion of the recently concluded 20th Party Congress and what to expect ahead in US China relations. I'm pleased to welcome back Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy China Strategies Group, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and former Senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the 7th Party Congress that Chris has analyzed professionally. Links: John Culver: How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Transcript: Bill: Welcome back to the very occasional Sinocism podcast. Today we are going to talk about the recently concluded 20th Party Congress and what to expect ahead in US China relations. I'm pleased to welcome back Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy China Strategies Group, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and former Senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the 7th Party Congress that Chris has analyzed professionally. So we have a lot of experience here to help us understand what just happened. Chris, welcome back and thanks for taking the time. Chris: My pleasure. Always fun to be with you, Bill. Bill: Great. Well, why don't we jump right in. I'd like to talk about what you see as the most important outcomes from the Congress starting with personnel. What do you make of the leadership team from the central committee to the Politburo to the Standing Committee and what does that say about. Chris: Yeah, well, I, think clearly Xi Jinping had a massive win, you know, with personnel. I think we see this particularly in the Politburo Standing Committee, right, where on the key portfolios that really matter to him in terms of controlling the key levers of power inside the system. So we're talking propaganda, obviously, Uh, we're talking party bureaucracy, military less so, but security services, you know, these, these sort of areas all up and down the ballot he did very well. So that's obviously very important. And I think obviously then the dropping of the so-called Communist Youth League faction oriented people in Li Keqiang and Wang Yang and, and Hu Chunhua being  kind of unceremoniously kicked off the Politburo, that tells us that. He's not in the mood to compromise with any other  interest group. I prefer to call them rather than factions. Um, so that sort of suggests to us that, you know, models that rely on that kind of an analysis are dead. It has been kind of interesting in my mind to see how quickly though that, you know, analysts who tend to follow that framework already talking about the, uh, factional elements within Xi's faction, right? So, you know, it's gonna be the Shanghai people versus the Zhijiang Army versus the Fujian people.  On Wang Huning Bill: people say there's a Tsinghua faction Chris: Right. The, the infamous, non infamous Tsinghua clique and, and and so on. But I think as we look more closely, I mean this is all kidding aside, if we look more closely at the individuals, what we see is obviously these people, you know, loyalty to Xi is, is sort of like necessary, but not necessarily sufficient in explaining who these people are. Also, I just always find it interesting, you know, somehow over. Wang Huning has become a Xi Jinping loyalist. I mean, obviously he plays an interesting role for Xj Jinping, but I don't think we should kid ourselves in noting that he's been kind of shunted aside Right by being pushed into the fourth position on the standing committee, which probably tells us that he will be going to oversee the Chinese People's Consultative Congress, which is, you know, kind of a do nothing body, you know, for the most part. And, um, you know, my sense has long been, One of Xi Jinping’s, I think a couple factors there with Wang Huning. Sinocism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. One is, you

    1 hr
  6. Sinocism Podcast #4: The Economist's David Rennie on online nationalism, discourse power, reporting from China, US-China relations

    02/10/2022

    Sinocism Podcast #4: The Economist's David Rennie on online nationalism, discourse power, reporting from China, US-China relations

    Episode Notes: This episode's guest is David Rennie, the Beijing bureau chief for The Economist and author of the weekly Chaguan column. Our topic is online discourse, nationalism, the intensifying contest for global discourse power and US-China relations. Excerpts: I spoke to some very serious NGO people who've been in China a long time, Chinese and foreigners who said that this was the worst time for NGOs since 1989, and the kind of mentions of espionage and national security was a very serious thing. So then I had to make a decision, was I going to try and speak to someone like Sai Lei. Clearly he is an extremely aggressive nationalist, some would call him a troll and there are risks involved in talking to someone like him. But I felt, I'm one of the few English language media still in China, if I'm going to add value, I need to speak to these people. I had a very interesting conversation with a CGTN commentator…He said, I can't tell you how many Western diplomats, or Western journalists they whine. And they moan. And they say, how aggressive China is now and how upset all this Wolf warrior stuff is and how China is doing itself damage. And he goes, we're not, it's working. You in the Western media, used to routinely say that the national people's Congress was a rubber stamp parliament. And because we went after you again and again, you see news organizations no longer as quick to use that. Because we went after you calling us a dictatorship, you're now slower to use that term because we went after you about human rights and how it has different meanings in different countries. We think it's having an effect… One of the things I think is a value of being here is you have these conversations where the fact that we in the West think that China is inevitably making a mistake by being much more aggressive. I don't think that's how a big part of the machine here sees it. I think they think it worked…. To simplify and exaggerate a bit, I think that China, and this is not just a guess, this is based on off the record conversations with some pretty senior Chinese figures, they believe that the Western world, but in particular, the United States is too ignorant and unimaginative and Western centric, and probably too racist to understand that China is going to succeed, that China is winning and that the West is in really decadent decline… I think that what they believe they are doing is delivering an educational dose of pain and I'm quoting a Chinese official with the word pain. And it is to shock us because we are too mule headed and thick to understand that China is winning and we are losing. And so they're going to keep delivering educational doses of pain until we get it… The fundamental message and I'm quoting a smart friend of mine in Beijing here is China's rise is inevitable. Resistance is futile… And if you accommodate us, we'll make it worth your while. It's the key message. And they think that some people are proving dimmer and slower and more reluctant to pick that message up and above all Americans and Anglo-Saxons. On US-China relations: The general trend of U.S. China relations. to be of optimistic about the trend of U.S. China relations I'd have to be more optimistic than I currently am about the state of U.S. Politics. And there's a kind of general observation, which is that I think that American democracy is in very bad shape right now. And I wish that some of the China hawks in Congress, particularly on the Republican side, who are also willing to imply, for example, that the 2020 election was stolen, that there was massive fraud every time they say that stuff, they're making an in-kind contribution to the budget of the Chinese propaganda department… You cannot be a patriotic American political leader and tell lies about the state of American democracy. And then say that you are concerned about China's rise… ..their message about Joe Biden is that he is weak and old and lacks control of Congress.

    55 min
  7. Sinocism Podcast #3: Chen Long on China's economy, Evergrande, Common Prosperity and the 6th Plenum

    11/05/2021

    Sinocism Podcast #3: Chen Long on China's economy, Evergrande, Common Prosperity and the 6th Plenum

    Episode Notes: Today's guest is Chen Long, co-founder and partner of Plenum, a research firm covering Chinese economy and politics. Prior to that, he was a China economist at Gavekal Dragonomics. Chen Long is a Beijinger, and graduated from Peking University. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you. 2:20 - I think the economy is a little bit like ice and fire, for now. There are certain areas certainly doing pretty poorly. Of course, everyone always talking about the property market, Evergrande, and basically every couple weeks we see a property developer default… 6:00 on the power generation problems - usually December is a peak of Chinese electricity consumption. I'm not sure the current supply of coal is not ... I mean, it's better than a month ago, but they probably have to do a little bit more. So I think it's still too early to say that we have totally overcome the end of the shortage. 13:07 on whether this time is different with the real estate market - a year after Beijing and many local governments introduced restrictive policies, finally, we had three months in a row of property sales volume falling by double digits, on a year on year basis. But this is just three months, right? If you look at the previous cycles, especially 2015, 16, we could have the down cycle for 15 months. But this is just three, right? So Beijing has not blinked yet, because it's only three months. 16:30 on Evergrande - I think there was a little bit of overreaction, especially when you see headlines linking Evergrande to Lehman Brothers, and this sort of thing. And I have to say that this is at least the third time I hear a Chinese Lehman moment in the last ten years. 35:50 on the 6th Plenum and likely historical resolution - The previous ones were all about resolutions on certain questions of the party's history. Right? And this one is not uncertain questions. There is no question. It is resolution on the party's accomplishments over the last 100 years, and the lessons. So I guess it's a big, big summary about what he has done. And, of course, this one I think will cement him as the core, right? And we have to follow whatever he thinks we should do so Links: The Plenum website. Transcript: Bill:Hi everyone. Today's guest is Chen Long, co-founder and partner of Plenum, a research firm covering Chinese economy and politics. Prior to that, he was a China economist at Gavekal Dragonomics. Chen Long is a Beijinger, and graduated from Peking University. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.Chen:Thank you, Bill. It's my honor to be your third guest.Bill:Oh, well, third time is the charm, I hope. And I hope things are well. And I hope things are well in Beijing. I have to say, I very much miss this time of year in Beijing. There is something really special about autumn in Beijing.Bill:So, to kick off, today, I think we want to talk about the state of economy, and various themes related to that, including common prosperity, and real estate, the sixth plenum that's coming up. But, to start out, could you just give a brief intro about yourself, and more specifically what Plenum does?Bill:Just for listeners, it's a high end research service. The website is at Plenum.ai. And it's really terrific. It's one of my top most favorite research services on China now. They're really sharp on economy and politics.Chen:Yeah. Thank you, Bill. I think, Bill, you have done basically all the marketing I need to do. So we are a pretty young firm. I mean, we were founded two years ago, almost exactly two years ago. And that's when we first started to publish reports. And we write on Chinese economy, policies, politics, geopolitics, other stuff. And we serve institutional clients. Some are financial institutions, some are non-financial corporations.Chen:And I think where we are a little bit different from others, is the team is basically entirely Chinese nationals. But, of course, we'll come from different backgrounds. A lot of people work in the

    37 min
  8. Sinocism Podcast #2: Joanna Chiu on her new book China Unbound

    11/05/2021

    Sinocism Podcast #2: Joanna Chiu on her new book China Unbound

    Episode Notes: Today's guest is Joanna Chiu, a long-time journalist covering China from both inside and outside the country, co-founder and chair of the editorial collective 'NüVoices 女性之音', and the author of the new book "China Unbound." She now covers Canada-China issues for the Toronto Star. Joanna, welcome to the podcast. 4:20 on Huawei, Meng Wanzhou and the two Michaels - when the whole Huawei, Meng Wanzhou saga was unfolding, I got so many questions from not just Canadian journalists, but media around the world about what was going on. I think it's surprising to us because we've been in the China-watching bubble, but more broadly, what happened was very shocking for a lot of people all over the world 23:20 people like me and my family aren't fully accepted as Canadians or as Australians or as Americans, it's always like a hyphen, like Chinese-Canadian, Chinese-American. That just plays into what Beijing wants. When people of Chinese descent are taken as political prisoners or get calls from Chinese police saying, "Stop supporting Hong Kong on social media or stop doing this," these people get less attention. They're not taken seriously when they try to report what's happening because unfortunately a lot of people in the West have accepted the CCP's myth that we're still essentially Chinese 36:20 on Canada-China relations - in Canada, the mood after the Michaels returned and the Meng case was resolved is that they really want to go back to business as usual. To not have any kind of plan in place on how to prevent Canadian hostages from being taken in the future. The Prime Ministers office really steering this even though other parts of government was like, "We need some sort of plan, we need some sort of update to foreign policy in general." There's very little political will. Links: China Unbound on Amazon. Joanna Chiu’s website NüVoices 女性之音 Transcript: Bill:Hi everyone, today's guest is Joanna Chiu, a long-time journalist covering China from both inside and outside the country, co-founder and chair of the editorial collective 'NüVoices', and the author of the new book "China Unbound." She now covers Canada-China issues for the Toronto Star. Joanna, welcome to the podcast.Joanna:Thank you Bill, thanks for having me on your new podcast, very exciting.Bill:Thanks, yeah you are the second guest, and so I'm really happy to have this opportunity to speak with you. Before we dig into your book, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up where you are and doing what you do?Joanna:Okay. I guess my bio is that my family is one of the many who left Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests because my parents were worried about what would happen going forward. So growing up in Canada, I felt that China was actually part of my whole family story because what happened led to my family uprooting themselves. So I was always really interested in China and studied Chinese history and wanted to return to be a reporter to chronicle what was happening in the country, which I was so fascinated by.Joanna:So I started reporting on the ground in Hong Kong in 2012, covering all the things that happened there including the Occupy to pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. I moved to Beijing in 2014 and that's where I started covering basically everything in the whole country for European media outlets, including German, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, and AFP (Agence France-Presse). And I guess my career was a bit unique in that I also free-lanced for several stints. So I got to kind of get a sense of what many different jurisdictions and countries wanted to know about China in my time there writing for all sorts of outlets.Bill:Interesting and so I was there until 2015 and I think we overlapped for just about a year. When did you actually leave China to go back to Canada?Joanna:Yeah, I left China in late 2018. I wanted to stay for longer because even seven years on the ground I felt I barely got t

    47 min
  9. Sinocism Podcast #1: Chris Johnson on US-China relations, Xi Jinping and the 6th Plenum

    11/05/2021

    Sinocism Podcast #1: Chris Johnson on US-China relations, Xi Jinping and the 6th Plenum

    Episode Notes: Today, we're going to talk about US-China relations, the upcoming Sixth Plenum , Xi Jinping, and what we might expect for the next year heading into the 2022 20th Party Congress among other topics. I'm really pleased that our first guest for the Sinocism Podcast is Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy China strategies Group, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic International Studies and former senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. 4:45 on US-China relations - I think their assessment is that it's working. In other words, by maintaining that sort of very strict line, they've gotten Madam Meng of Huawei fame home. They've gotten the trade discussions going again. They've got the US saying, "Well, we might lengthen the timeline for you to implement phase one." In other words, it's working from their perspective. 13:30 on the 6th Plenum - The first I think is that, it would represent, I think the net evolution in what I call Xi Jinping's further development of his leadership supremacy. And, I use those terms very deliberately because often times, the shorthand we see in describing this as references to Xi's consolidation of power. Well, in my mind that took place very early on in his tenure. 30:00 on the economy and heading towards the 2022 20th Party Congress - Equally important in my mind is how little the leadership and the economic technocrats seem to be rattled by that fact. In other words, we're not seeing the stimulus wave. We're not seeing monetary policy adjustments in a significant way. There's a lot of study as she goes. And, that could change. We've got the central economic work conference, obviously in December, which will give us a sense of how they're thinking about next year. But like so many other things, I think we as watchers and the investment community and others, we're slow to sometimes break with old narratives. One of which is you must welcome a party Congress with very high growth. And every signal coming out of the leadership is that, they're not playing that game anymore. I think that's fairly strong. 37:00 On US-China relations - I think if you're a senior US policymaker, your working assumption has to be that China's more likely to get it right than to get it wrong, even if they only get it 30% right or 40%, something like that…Chris Johnson:Xi is here and will be here for the foreseeable future. And therefore there won't be any change in the policies largely that he's articulated. Links: More about Chris Johnson and his China Strategies Group here. Transcript: Bill Bishop:Today, we're going to talk about US-China relations, the upcoming Sixth Plenum , Xi Jinping, and what we might expect for the next year heading into the 2022 20th Party Congress among other topics. I'm really pleased that our first guest for the Sinocism Podcast is Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy, China strategies Group, senior fellow at the center for strategic international studies and former senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Welcome, Chris.Chris Johnson:Great to be here, Bill.Bill Bishop:Chris, welcome. I think today, what I really like to start out with is just an overview where you see the state of US-China relations and how the new administration, I mean it's 10 months now or thereabouts, but how the new administration is doing and how the Xi Jinping administration is reacting.Chris Johnson:Great. Yeah. Well, it's obviously a unique time in US-China relations. I guess, if I had to characterize it in a phrase, I would say, things are a bit of a mess. I think, if we start, it's useful to start at a sort of high order level and then work our way down in terms of thinking about the relationship. So I think at the highest order, one of the things that strikes me is that arguably for the first time, since normalization of relations, really, we're in this strange position where I think both countries, both leaders and perhaps increasingly, even both peoples, aren't o

    38 min
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67 Ratings

About

A podcast from Bill Bishop, author of the Sinocism newsletter, in which we talk to experts from around the world to help us all get smarter about China. Topics discussed include politics, foreign relations, business, finance, culture, history and markets. Nearly 300,000 investors, policymakers, executives, analysts, diplomats, journalists, scholars and others read Sinocism for valuable insights into China. sinocism.com

Information

  • Creator
    Bill Bishop
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2024
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Sinocism LLC
  • Show Website
    Sinocism Podcast

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