What China Wants Sam Olsen, Stewart Paterson

This week on What China Wants, Sam and Stewart are joined by Josh Kurlantzick, Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, to discuss Beijing's media influence. Josh sets out his analysis of China’s attempt in recent years to become a global media and information superpower, and we discuss whether these efforts are working.

In recent weeks, the "two sessions" have taken place in China, at which President Xi's third term was confirmed by the nearly 3,000 delegates that constitute the National People's Congress. Due to the relative opaqueness of decision-making in Chinese politics, these important events in the political calendar are relatively unknown outside China. To help listeners understand more about them, and what their significance might be globally, this week on What China Wants, Sam and Stewart are joined by friend of the show, Professor Jinghan Zeng of Lancaster University.

This week on What China Wants, co-host Stewart Paterson is interviewed by Sam Olsen about the outlook for the Chinese economy. We discuss the post-covid outlook as well as the key challenges facing the economy and the Party leadership looking forward. 

In this episode of What China Wants, Sam and Stewart discuss the issue of human rights in China. To do so, they are joined by Benedict Rogers, Co-Founder of Hong Kong Watch and one  of Britain’s foremost and most knowledgeable campaigners on the subject. We discuss some of the key issues raised in his book, The China Nexus, including allegations of human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, organ-harvesting from prisoners of conscience, as well as some of the criticisms commonly levelled at critics of China's human rights record.

Links
Benedict Rogers - The China Nexus

This week, Sam and Stewart are joined by Charles Parton OBE, a former diplomat who is presently a specialist adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee at the UK Houses of Parliament and Associate Fellow of RUSI. Charlie spent 22 years of his 37 year diplomatic career working in or on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In this episode he discusses his latest paper on the importance of cellular Internet of Things (IoT) modules and the threat posed to UK supply chain security by the pervasiveness of Chinese cellular IoT modules in our systems and processes.

Links
The full paper is available here.

This week on What China Wants, Dr William Matthews, Director of Research at the Evenstar Institute, joins Sam and Stewart to discuss their latest research, "Southeast Asia's Emerging Geopolitical Order: China's Structural Influence and the Evolving Regional Balance of Power". The report quantifies and explains the evolution of China's Influence in Southeast Asia through the analysis of all ten ASEAN member states over the period 2011-2020. In this interview, William and Sam explain its key findings and policy recommendations for the UK and its allies.