The Little Red Podcast

In our third episode on beliefs and ideologies, we explore China’s newfound enthusiasm for psychiatry. Counselling was only registered as a profession in 2001 yet has seen a massive boom under Xi Jinping. The psy-boom is such that even party branch meetings are doing mindfulness exercises, and practitioners are trying to indigenise counselling practices. There’s plenty to work on; the 2022 China Mental Health Survey found seven percent of the population were suffering from depression, half of them schoolchildren. To explore what’s drawing China to the couch, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yiying Xiong, a counsellor and associate professor at John Hopkins University, Barclay Bram, an audio journalist at the Economist and fellow at the Asia Society, and medical anthropologist Hsuan-Ying Huang, from Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons, Sigmund Freud's Couch, London, 2004. Episode transcripts are available at: https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To welcome the Year of the Snake, we’re launching a new series looking at belief in China. Young Chinese people are increasingly turning to spirituality - even online manifestations of it - and feng shui, in this moment of high unemployment and economic stress. For a Party guided by materialism, this spike in spiritual interest presents a dilemma: how to regulate something you purport not to believe in. To discuss the state's use of spirituality from the Qing to now, we’re joined by Tristan Brown, a historian at MIT and author of Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China and Haoyang Zhai, a researcher at the University of Melbourne. Image: “May The Snake Be With You” c/- Juliette Baxter Episode transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China is in the grip of a gender war. While government officials are texting and even cold calling women to urge them have children, the fertility rate continues to drop. Better educated and often better paid their male peers, many urban Chinese women are simply choosing not to marry. To discuss the growing female backlash to the Party’s pro-natal policies, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Chloe Mofei Shen, lifestyle director of Elle China and Qiqi Huang, post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Macau. Image: “Marrying late has many advantages”, BG E15/716, Landsberger Collection, 1975. Show transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried form, a kilo from the right species goes for around $150,000 on the world market, double the price of a kilogram of cocaine. The most prized maw is found in one of the remotest corners of the planet, the Kikori Delta in southern Papua New Guinea, where the once ignored scaly croaker is being targeted on an industrial scale by Chinese fishing companies, transforming the lives of villagers—and the ecosystem. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism who reported on the fish maw trade for Nature magazine. Image: c/- Jo Chandler, Veraibari Village 2024. Jo’s fieldwork was supported in part by the Walkley Foundation Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Writers from Hong Kong face a Kafkaesque decision in the years since draconian security legislation was imposed on the city: to stay and be subject to intense censorship, or to write freely from exile.  In this episode, Louisa speaks to two award-winning authors who have chosen different paths.  Lau Yeewa is still living in Hong Kong; her book Tongueless, translated by Jennifer Feeley, won the 2024 Pen Translates award.   Gigi Leung Lee-chi is now based in Taiwan, and her book The Melancholy of Trees has just won Taiwan's Golden Tripod award.  Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons, Empty Bookshelves, 2014 Transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In our third episode on pig butchering scams, we explore the origins of the Chinese criminal syndicates that enslave people from at least 66 different countries. We examine the institutions supporting this appalling business, from the Thai military to cryptocurrencies, Burmese border guard forces to special economic zones. And the marks for these scam syndicates are not just Chinese lonely hearts—Western countries are now more profitable to scam than China. To ask what can be done to counter this trade, Graeme is joined by Jason Tower, director of the Burma Program at the United States Institute of Peace, and Greg Raymond from the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. Image: c/- Stefan Czimmek/DW, KK Park on the Myanmar-Thai borderSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Taiwan is ground zero for cognitive warfare, with the island subject to more disinformation than any other democracy. The targets are political candidates, media outlets, even boy bands. The threat is so serious that Taiwan's Ministry of Justice recently set up a Cognitive Warfare Research Center. To explore this war for Taiwanese minds, Louisa and Graeme are joined by independent writer Min Chao and journalist Brian Hioe from New Bloom Magazine. Image: Taiwan News Formosa TV, YouTube, 20 January 2024. Transcripts available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After our last episode on an online romance scam operating out of Palau we were contacted by Neo Lu, who was trafficked to work in an online scam camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border, the victim of a $US3 trillion global criminal industry. He joins Louisa and Graeme to offer jaw-dropping detail on life inside a scam centre, the mechanics of pig butchering, who benefits from this new form of slavery and how they launder their profits.  Image: c/- Yihao Lu, Scamming equipment, Dongmei Camp, 2022 Episode transcripts are available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chinese triads have been making a Pacific play, notably in the tiny nation of Palau. There a notorious triad boss - nicknamed Broken Tooth - reinvented himself as a CCP-linked businessman trying to set up a 'gangster-themed' casino, while police busted a Chinese 'fraud factory'. In Palau, this scam scheme was linked to businessmen touting United Front credentials, who are also involved in local politics and media outlets. To examine the ties between Chinese gangsters and the Communist Party, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Aubrey Belford, the lead Pacific editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and freelance journalist Bernadette Carreon. Image: Downtown Koror, Palau's largest town. Image c/- Richard Brooks  Transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For our hundredth episode, there was only one choice in the Year of the Dragon. We tackle the scaly mythical beast, which now finds itself central to the Party's image.   We look at the political efficacy of the dragon for the CCP, which has recently launched a nationalistic rebranding campaign for the ‘loong' to distinguish it from evil Western dragons.  We explore the history of the dragon, its often-fraught relationship to power, and (once common) “official sightings” of dragons in government gazetteers. To get to grips with the most auspicious creature in China's pantheon, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Australian sinologist Linda Jaivin, author of The Monkey and the Dragon, historian James Carter from St. Joseph's University, and Annie Ren, a postdoctoral fellow of Chinese literature at the Australian National University.  Transcripts are available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/ Image: c/- Louisa Lim, Bendigo, 2024See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China's largesse in the Pacific is nothing if not visible. From mobile phone towers to gleaming stadiums and government buildings, Beijing's splashing out on those it sees as choosing “the right side of history.” In this episode, we explore Taiwan's future in the Pacific as it is deserted by its former diplomatic allies, lured by Beijing's goodies. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham, co-founder of the Melanesian News Network, and the University of California's Jessica Marinaccio, a former staffer in Tuvalu's Taiwanese embassy. Show transcripts can be found at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/ Image: Wikimedia Commons. “President Tsai and Tuvalu Prime Minister Sopoaga plant a coconut seedling, symbolizing the close friendship between Taiwan and Tuvalu.” (2017) Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan) | Government Website Open Information AnnouncementSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stand-up comedy looked set to be the next big thing on China's entertainment scene, with shows like Roast Convention drawing billions of views and comics scoring lucrative commercial endorsements. But comedy now finds itself in retreat.  A new wave of feminist comics is struggling with attacks from online trolls and a disapproving state.  To ask whether the regime–and China's men—can take a joke, Louisa and Graeme are joined by three stand up Chinese comedians: He Huang who's based here in Australia, and two members of the London-based 50 Shades of Feminism, Barbie and Elena. Transcript available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/the-feminists-have-stood-up-gender-and-comedy-in-china/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every generation in modern China has been richer and more ambitious than the one before—until Gen Z. With youth unemployment so high that the government has simply stopped reporting the figures, many are opting to lie flat, slump down dead, or even become full-time children. The Party frets that despite the best efforts of the propaganda organs to get them excited about a tech-driven utopian future, China's young people seem to have lost their work ethic. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Steven Sun Zhao, a Gen Z writer at Chaoyang Trap and Yaling Jiang, a proud millennial and the founder of Aperture China. A full transcript is available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/full-time-children-or-half-dead-chinas-gen-z-goes-to-ground/ Image: Woman in black jacket sitting on blue chair, c/- 绵 绵 on UnsplashSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The exponential trauma produced by the Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in China, yet has been foundational to a generation.  Now the Communist Party is using the experience of its leader Xi Jinping as one of the 17 million young people sent down to the countryside to reframe the movement as showcasing personal sacrifice in the interests of national success.  The party would like other aspects to be forgotten, such as the unimaginable violence in Chongqing or the petty brutality that set children onto their parents.  In the second part of our series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme discuss the legacies of the Cultural Revolution with sociologist Xu Bin from Emory University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the author of Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China and Guardian journalist Tania Branigan whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution came out in May. Show transcript: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/bombard-the-past-exhuming-the-cultural-revolution/ Image: Red Guard, June 1968. c/- Wikimedia Commons and China Pictorial  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Writing history in China has never been easy; China's first historian, Sima Qian, was forced to choose between execution and castration and imprisonment.  He chose the latter in order to finish his life's work, Records of the Grand Historian.  Now China's keepers of inconvenient truths are put under immense pressure by Xi Jinping's war on historical nihilism—viewpoints and memories that run counter to official Party history. Fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle against the state, China's underground historians often make huge sacrifices to keep alive histories that the Party would like to erase. In the first of a two-part series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Ian Johnson, whose book Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is out today. Image: Still from 夹边沟 The Ditch (2010), directed by Wang BingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just as satirical writers struggled in Trump's America, China's sci-fi writers are facing a challenge:  how do you write in a world where reality is more like science fiction than science fiction itself? Added to that are the perils of popularity, with everyone from Netflix to the Communist Party embracing Chinese science fiction. To explore China's metaverse of sci-fi, Loiusa and Graeme are joined by Emily Jin, a science fiction and fantasy translator who's also a PhD candidate at Yale and translator Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Beijing's recent ban on the export of two rare metals represents the latest front in the global battle to control chipmaking technology. Now there are fears China could block the export of rare earths, over which it has a stranglehold.   How close are we to that nuclear option? To find out, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Martijn Rasser, a former senior intelligence officer and analyst with the CIA, who is now the managing director of the Netherlands-based Datenna, and Jon Hykaway, the director and president of Stormcrow Capital in Toronto.      Image: c/- NASA. The Baiyon Ebo Rare Earths Mine, Inner Mongolia.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Zealand is in Beijing's good books, attracting state media praise as setting 'a good example' for other countries in its ties, as Prime Minister Chris Hipkins jets into China.  He's said his message is crystal clear: New Zealand is open for business.  But critics say the country's policy is muddled and ambiguous, despite Chinese encroachment.  Two ethnic Chinese MPs have been expelled over their links to Beijing, and a prominent New Zealand China academic was targeted with office break-ins. To unpack what the future holds for China-New Zealand relations, Louisa is joined in Auckland by writer and sociologist Tze Ming Mok and journalist Sam Sachdeva, author of The China Tightrope: Navigating New Zealand's relationship with a world superpower. Image: c/- Michal Klajban. Solidarity Grid by Mischa Kuball (Wuhan, China), Christchurch, New Zealand. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 InternationalSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the final episode exploring China's Strategic New Frontiers, we are investigating China's growing cyberpower ambitions. On the National Cyber Power index, Beijing is already the world's number two cyberpower, behind only the US. Its cyberdoctrine includes promoting cybersovereignty, constructing internet standards and infrastructure, and playing a bigger role in cyber governance bodies. To ask what this means for the future of the Internet, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Konstantinos Komaitis, a non-resident fellow at the Lisbon Institute and the Atlantic Council, as well as Julia Voo, cyber fellow leading a team at Harvard University's Belfer Institute who publish the National Cyber Power Index. Image: TeleGeography 2023 Submarine Cable Map (Asia Pacific)  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China appears to have restarted construction on its fifth Antarctic station for the first time since 2018. It's just one sign that Beijing is trying to increase its footprint in the world's coldest regions. It already calls itself a near-Arctic state and is planning for an ice-free shipping route across the top of the world. This month, to discuss the drivers behind China's polar ambitions, Graeme and Louisa are joined by Eyck Freyman of the Arctic Initiative at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Washington's Mia Bennett and Singapore Management University's Nengye Liu.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China's reaching not just for the stars, but also for the deepest ocean depths.  It's even parked its deepwater submersible in the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the world's oceans, and planted flags on the ocean bed.  This month, Graeme and Louisa are joined by China Ocean Institute CEO Tabitha Mallory and Tiffany Ma, the senior director of Bower Group Asia, to talk about how the Great Game is playing out on our seabeds.  Image: Caulophryne pelagica [Angler Fish] D. Shale, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia CommonsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a new series of episodes, we're examining how China is pushing the boundaries of science and territory. First up, China's space program, the envy of space scientists worldwide for seemingly bottomless pots of funding from government, and increasingly, venture capital.  China's space programme, with a space telescope that is constantly being upgraded and its uber-for-satellites, is no longer just cloning Soviet tech. To explore the ecology of China's space sector and ask what's driving their massive space spend, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at the Australian National University and Blaine Curcio, the co-host of Dongfang Hour, a podcast about China and space, and co-founder of Orbital Gateway Counselling.    Image: c/-  Jamie Gilbert and Brad Tucker (ANU), View from a balloon at 32km (105,000 ft.), 2019.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a few short months, Chinese officials have gone from COVID cover-up to competing over who has the highest number of infections. After urbanites flocked back to the countryside for lunar New Year, the Party that ran the world's strictest prevention regime now presides over the world's largest and most ambitious experiment in herd immunity. To explore how this dramatic change unfolded, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Governing Health in Contemporary China and Vivian Wu, co-founder of the Mighty Voice media studio, who has worked at a host of media organizations including BBC Chinese and Initium.  Image: Abandoned Isolation House in Shenzhen with Dynamic Zero Slogan, c/- Wikimedia CommonsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Finally, China's sloughing off the Zero Covid policy it's embraced for three years. This followed a spasm of discontent, with people taking to the streets to demonstrate against Zero Covid, in protests that quickly spilled over to demand democracy and Xi Jinping's resignation. Beijing's adaptive authoritarianism is in full sight, as the state eases Covid controls and reverses three years of rhetoric on the dangers of the virus. To ask whether the protests were a flash in the pan, we're joined by William Hurst, Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at Cambridge University, Chenchen Zhang from Durham University, producer and co-host of the Shicha Podcast and Zeyi Yang, China reporter at MIT Technology Review. Image: Vigil at Southwest Jiaotong University, c/- Wikimedia CommonsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Controlling data means controlling the future.” Those are not George Orwell's words, but instead were uttered in 2015 by Jack Ma, founder of tech company Alibaba. Though Ma has since been brought to heel by the Chinese state, the CCP is constantly expanding the way it harnesses data to bolster its techno-authoritarian rule.  Chinese companies now lead the world in AI and facial recognition technology, though they are helped by surprising allies in corporate America. To find out how Xi Jinping's project to command the future is panning out, we're joined by Josh Chin and Liza Lin from the Wall Street Journal, authors of Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control and Aynne Kokas, the CK Yen Professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China's political event of the decade - its 20th Party Congress - will confirm Xi Jinping's third term as leader of the CCP and could even bestow on him the title of ‘chairman'. With an economy crippled by zero-COVID and global public opinion about China turning precipitously negative, it seems an age since China's leaders promised a ‘peaceful rise'. Was this peaceful rise stymied by hardliners, or was it all an elaborate influence operation orchestrated by China's spies?  For two very different analyses of developments inside the black box of Chinese politics, we're joined by Susan Shirk, Research Professor and Chair at the 21st Century China Centre at University of California, San Diego, whose much awaited new book is Overreach: How China Derailed its Peaceful Rise is just out, and Alex Joske, Senior Analyst at Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who's just written a book called Spies and Lies: How China's Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World. Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons. President George W. Bush is greeted by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping Sunday 10 August 2008. White House photo by Eric Draper. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Southeast Asian nation has historically been seen as China's first client state, with the Khmer Rouge's hardline interpretation of Maoism leading to the horror of the Killing Fields.  Four decades on, Cambodia still enjoys the best and the worst of what the People's Republic can offer.   While aid from Beijing has built world-class infrastructure and provided clean drinking water to Cambodians, Chinese companies are also responsible for a tidal wave of scams, illegal casinos and even recent cases of human trafficking. China's building a military base at Ream on the Gulf of Thailand, only its second overseas base, amid public denials from Cambodian officials.  To delve into the history and complexity of China's relationship with Cambodia, we're joined by Matthew Galway of the Australian National University and the author of The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist movement 1949-1979, and Andrew Mertha, director of the SAIS China Global Research Center at John Hopkins University and the author of Brothers in Arms: Chinese aid to the Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979.   Image: Prince Sihanouk visits China, November 1964. c/- Wikimedia Commons and People's Daily.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chinese households under lockdown have lacked food, company, and access to medical care.  But they've had an almost endless supply of a traditional Chinese medicine treatment called Lianhua Qingwen, made by Yiling Pharmaceuticals. Chinese students abroad even have this drug delivered to their doorsteps in healthcare packages, and demand for it among diaspora communities has seen panic-buying and hugely inflated prices. In this episode, we explore why the Chinese state has invested huge sums in promoting such traditional remedies that have not been subject to rigorous clinical testing. To unpack the history and the politics, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Michael Stanley-Baker, historian of Chinese medicine and religion at Nanyang Technological University and Altman Yuzhu Peng, researcher of intercultural communications at the University of Warwick.     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's now been twenty-five years since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty with a pledge not to change Hong Kong's way of life for fifty years. In actual fact, Beijing's stealth infiltration of Hong Kong began long before the territory's return, with United Front work targeting certain sectors of the population. In this episode, we delve deep into Hong Kong's history to pinpoint how Beijing used the cheongsam makers and policemen - among others - to infiltrate society.  Graeme is joined by Ho-fung Hung of Johns Hopkins University, author of City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule, Newsweek journalist Didi Kirsten Tatlow, and for the first time as a guest, Louisa Lim, whose book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong is now out.  Image: Black Bauhinia with wilted petals, c/- Jacky CTensd, Wikimedia Commons, 2019  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After two long months, Shanghai's brutal lockdown is over in name, but Xi Jinping is telling officials to ‘unswervingly adhere’ to Zero COVID, despite the costs. Shanghai’s lockdown brought chaos to global supply chains and torpedoed China’s once-sacred economic growth targets. It’s also taken a toll on the city’s residents; once the nation’s most privileged, they had a front row seat to the arbitrary nature of government decrees. To unpack what happens next, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jennifer Pak, the Shanghai-based correspondent for Marketplace and Victor Shih, political economist at the University of California, San Diego whose new book Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi is just out. Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons. Hubei medical team aid Shanghai COVID-19 community testing on 4 April 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzrsLxGy9Gg See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For the past year, China has been in the grip of a crackdown on niangpao, or ‘sissy men’, with the People’s Daily warning that effeminate men are ‘corrupting a generation.’ It’s a movement that is having a chilling effect well beyond influencers having their social media accounts closed, with the Ministry of Education even issuing guidelines on how to ‘cultivate masculinity’ in boys from kindergarten onwards. To discuss what lies behind the masculinity crisis, Louisa and Graeme are joined by UNSW’s Kam Louie, the author of Chinese Masculinities in a Globalising World, Ting Guo, researcher of gender and politics at the University of Toronto and co-host of the podcast Shicha, and Xiaogang Wei, a filmmaker who is also a board member of the Beijing LGBTQ centre. Image: Screenshot of Feng Xiaoyi, c/- Neihin Ng, YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As Australia’s Defence Minister warns his nation to ‘prepare for war’ with China, there’s a growing feeling of inevitability about a future conflict between China and the United States. Against this rather bleak backdrop, we hear from one global figure who has had unusual access to China's leaders: Australia's former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The President and CEO of the Asia Society, he describes himself as a Sinologist at the tables of power. He's probably the only Mandarin-speaking world leader to have one-on-ones with Xi Jinping and hear Jiang Zemin's rendition of O Sole Mio at Sydney Opera House. Rudd is publishing a book called The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the United States and Xi Jinping’s China. This episode is a live recording of his Melbourne book launch, hosted by Louisa. In it, Rudd unpacks the logic of a future war, warns of Xi's biggest vulnerability and predicts a rocky few months ahead. This event was co-hosted by the Asia Society, the Wheeler Centre and RMIT Live. Image: Kevin Rudd and Louisa Lim at the Capitol Theatre c/- The Wheeler Centre, 2022See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How is Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine redrawing the geopolitical landscape? In this episode, we examine China’s interests in the conflict and explore the limits of their ‘no limits’ agreement with Russia. To ask whether the geopolitical balance is shifting in favour of an ‘axis of autocracies’, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Alexander Gabuev, senior fellow and Russian chair in the Asia-Pacific Programme at the Carnegie Moscow Centre and Maria Repnikova, assistant professor in global communication at Georgia State University.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

America's elites love to talk about China's '5000 years of civilization', but such language - which could come straight from the pages of the China Daily - serves to amplify Beijing's talking points. In this way and due to their own business dealings with China, some American elites are helping Beijing grow more powerful. In his book, America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger, journalist Isaac Stone Fish zeroes in on the case of the former US secretary of State Henry Kissinger, casting him as an agent of Chinese influence. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme talk to Isaac about how the CCP exploits the blurred line between politics and business to capture US elites. Image: c/- Wikimedia commons. Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao, with Zhou Enlai behind them in Beijing, early 70s.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

By any metric, China's rural residents face massive disadvantages compared to their urban counterparts. More than half of rural teenagers are cognitively delayed, and longstanding policies restrict their mobility and access to vital services. China's peasants were one of Chairman Mao's favoured classes and the backbone of his Revolution, but what place is there for the half-a-billion rural dwellers in Xi Jinping's China? To discuss whether common prosperity can trickle down to the countryside, Louisa and Graeme are joined by sociologist Mindi Schneider from Wageningen University, and economist Scott Rozelle, the author of Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise. Image: Rural primary school in Anhui, c/- Graeme SmithSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As China's economy slows down, Xi Jinping's charting a new economic course that will redefine the country's future. From reining in tech giants to redistributing wealth in the name of “common prosperity”, the Party's economic policy is moving away from the Deng reform era. Economic analysts are sharply divided on what it portends for China and the world. This month, Louisa and Graeme hear two completely opposed takes on China's economic strategy, from Andy Rothman, an investment strategist at Matthews Asia, and Anne Stevenson-Yang, the co-founder of J Capital Research. Image: Caofeidian, Hubei Province. c/- Anne Stevenson-YangSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Become an instant expert on the new historical resolution issued by China's Communist Party for all your cocktail season smalltalk needs. It's only the third such move in the party's century-long history, and the first in forty years. This resolution introduces a new slogan: Xi Jinping's Two Establishments, signalling the Chairman of Everything's elevation to helmsman status. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme turn to two authorities on party history for elucidation: Patricia Thornton of the University of Oxford and Geremie Barmé, editor of China Heritage and the founding director of the Australian Centre on China in the World.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China’s Communist Party’s rewriting of history doesn’t stop at their own borders, but has even reached as far as Wandiligong, a town of 453 people four hours north of Melbourne. It’s home to a memorial bridge to Chinese goldminers built with the assistance of the Australia China Friendship Society. The information panels use racist language for the Chinese such as “chinks and chows to be ridiculed and baited”, illustrating one example of how the CCP is exporting the notion of a century of humiliation to other countries. In this episode we ask whether various attempts to rewrite Chinese Australian history represent a coordinated campaign and to what end. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Karen Schamberger, vice President of the Young Historical Society, historian Louise Edwards from the University of New South Wales and Paul Macgregor, former curator at the Chinese Museum of Melbourne.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The purge that followed the killings by PLA soldiers in and around Tiananmen Square three decades ago has continued into the present, even permeating Western academia. A host of new sources, including leaked diaries by Chinese leaders, have emerged in recent years, but few Western scholars appear willing to break the taboo surrounding June 4. The jailing this month of nine Hong Kongers, for as much as ten months, for taking part in a banned Tiananmen vigil indicates how the purge is spreading to Hong Kong, where police raided the Tiananmen Massacre museum, confiscating exhibits as evidence. Against that backdrop, Louisa speaks to Simon Fraser University's Jeremy Brown, whose recent book June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and the Beijing Massacre reframes the events of 1989, shifting the focus from elites and students to ordinary people. This is a recording of a live conversation that was hosted by Harvard University’s Fairbank Centre for Chinese Studies. Image credit: Holly AngellSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Bloomberg journalist Peter Martin, who's just written China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy and Cornell University’s Jessica Chen Weiss, who’s also the China editor at the Washington Post and has written a book called Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. Image: Vladimir Putin with Wang Yi, website of the President of the Russian Federation, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 LicenseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 listener questions. In search of answers, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Arunabh Ghosh and Anthony Saich from Harvard University, Antonia Finnane from the University of Melbourne, and Lawrence Zhang from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Image: c/- Seb DantaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 state’s cozy relationships with companies like Alibaba and TenCent are on the rocks, we’re joined by Hong Kong University’s Angela Zhang, University of Leiden’s Rogier Creemers and John Lee from the Mercator Institute of Chinese Studies. This episode was recorded live as part of the ANU’s Digital Politics in the Asia Pacific seminar series. Image: Jack Ma c/- ピロシキ, flickr, October 10, 2011.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 week, Graeme is joined by Louisa and the Little Red Podcast’s researcher Julia Bergin, discuss a survey on China’s global media outreach that they've just conducted for the International Federation of Journalists, as well as political scientist Erin Baggott Carter from the University of South California, and Alex Dukalskis from University College Dublin who has just written a book called Making the World Safe for Dictatorship.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 cafes. To explore how China is coping with the tension between molding productive citizens and cashing in on a hugely lucrative gaming industry, Louisa and Graeme are joined by game developer Allison Yang Jing, who writes about Chinese video games, Hugh Davies from RMIT, a video game curator, and Pace College’s Marcella Szablewicz, author of Mapping Digital Game Culture in China. Image: Game On, Hugh DaviesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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’. With the legislature muzzled, the authorities are turning their attention to the media, the arts and the education sector. This month we're joined by a high-profile political exile, former Democratic party legislator Ted Hui, who's the first Hong Kong politician to flee to Australia, and former Democratic party chairperson, Emily Lau, who’s still in Hong Kong. Image c/- Flickr, Studio Incendo_DSC5956, 3 March 2021See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, and Tibetans were recently urged by their Party Secretary to ‘reduce religious consumption’ to build a ‘new modern socialist Tibet’. To hear about the sophisticated ‘rolling repression’ that characterises Chinese rule in Tibet, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Barbara Demick, author of Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, Benno Weiner, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University who has just published The Chinese Revolution on Tibetan Frontier and Tendor Dorjee, a Senior Researcher at the Tibet Action Institute. Image credit: Tashi Tsering at Labrang Monastery, ÓUte WallenbökSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 and economic force, creating and destroying celebrities and the brands they endorse. To unravel the drama behind BL drama, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Hong Kong University’s Angie Baecker and boys’ love author Huanxiang Zhenghuanzhe 幻想症患者. Image: The Untamed, WikipediaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 just over 100 years ago, using a 'pick-and-mix' approach to history to invent their own past. But how does this interpretation sit against China's long historiographical tradition? In this episode, Hayton, a former BBC journalist now with the Asia program at Chatham House, tests his claims with Esther Klein, a senior lecturer in Chinese intellectual history at the Australian National University. Image: Yellow Emperor, Xinzheng. Wikimedia Commons 2017See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, looking at his relationship with his father, former Vice Premier Xi Zhongxun, and how his family background has influenced his political philosophy. To discuss how Xi’s revolutionary past is shaping China’s future, we’re joined by the Chinawatchers' Chinawatchers, Frederick Teiwes from the University of Sydney and Joseph Torigian from American University in Washington DC. Image: Xi Jinping, Xi Yuanping and Xi Zhongxun in 1958, Wikipedia CommonsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 it broadcast their forced confessions: Peter Dahlin from Safeguard Defenders and private investigator Peter Humphrey. Along with Sarah Cook of Freedom House, they join Louisa and Graeme to discuss whether China's global media ambitions are being stopped in their tracks. Image: Peter Humphrey's TV appearance, c/- Alexey Garmash, Safeguard DefendersSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 have the luxury of remaining silent about Chinese politics. To look at two of these commercial dynasties and their role in creating Hong Kong as Asia's global city, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Robert Bickers who has written China Bound: A History of John Swire & Sons and Its World, and Jonathan Kaufman, former Wall Street Journal correspondent who examines the Sassoons and the Kadoories in the Last Kings of Shanghai: the Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China. Photo credit: Wikiswire.com, B&S Shanghai Staff 1883. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 License.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.