Podcasts about Chengdu

Fluent Fiction - Mandarin Chinese: Rekindling Friendship in Chengdu's Tea House Atmosphere Find the full episode transcript, vocabulary words, and more:fluentfiction.com/zh/episode/2026-06-09-07-38-19-zh Story Transcript:Zh: 在成都的一个舒适的下午，李伟走进了一家古色古香的茶馆。En: On a comfortable afternoon in Chengdu, Li Wei walked into an antique-style tea house.Zh: 这个茶馆弥漫着茉莉花茶和乌龙茶的浓郁香味，让人感到温暖和放松。En: The tea house was filled with the rich aromas of jasmine tea and oolong tea, making people feel warm and relaxed.Zh: 墙壁上挂满了四川风景的传统画作，舒缓的音乐在耳边轻轻流淌。En: The walls were adorned with traditional paintings of Sichuan landscapes, and soothing music flowed gently in the background.Zh: 这是李伟回国后第一次走进这家茶馆。En: This was Li Wei's first time visiting this tea house since returning home.Zh: 他刚从国外返回成都，这座城市对他而言既熟悉又陌生。En: He had just returned to Chengdu from abroad, and the city felt both familiar and strange to him.Zh: 他犹豫地环顾四周，心中有些忐忑。En: He hesitantly looked around, feeling a bit uneasy inside.Zh: 他知道这是陈开的茶馆，一个老朋友，他和小梅曾经最喜欢来这里喝茶聊天。En: He knew that this was Chen's tea house, an old friend, and a place he used to frequent with Xiaomei for tea and chats.Zh: 李伟深吸一口气，走到柜台前。En: Taking a deep breath, Li Wei approached the counter.Zh: “你好，陈。”他的声音中带着一丝紧张。En: "Hello, Chen." There was a hint of nervousness in his voice.Zh: 陈抬头，立刻认出了他。En: Chen looked up and immediately recognized him.Zh: “李伟！好久不见！”陈的声音带着惊喜和热情。En: "Li Wei! Long time no see!" Chen's voice was filled with surprise and enthusiasm.Zh: “快坐，我去泡一壶好茶给你。”En: "Come, sit down, I'll brew you a good pot of tea."Zh: 他们找了个角落坐下，李伟环顾四周，回忆起儿时与朋友们坐在这里的时光。En: They found a corner to sit in, and Li Wei glanced around, recalling the times he spent with friends here as a child.Zh: 不久，小梅也推门而入。En: Soon, Xiaomei also walked in through the door.Zh: 她的笑容还是那么明亮，“李伟！欢迎回家！”En: Her smile was just as bright as ever, "Li Wei! Welcome home!"Zh: 几个人坐在一起，初时有些拘谨。En: The group sat together, feeling a bit reserved at first.Zh: 李伟担心太多事情已经改变，他们可能再也无法像从前那般亲密。En: Li Wei worried that too much had changed and that they might never be as close as they once were.Zh: 但随着一杯杯温热的茶水，谈话渐渐畅快。En: But as they sipped cup after cup of warm tea, their conversation gradually became more relaxed.Zh: 小梅笑着提起他们小时候端午节一起包粽子的趣事，En: Xiaomei laughed as she brought up the fun they had making zongzi together during the Dragon Boat Festival when they were younger.Zh: “你还记得吗？李伟你总是把粽叶弄破，糯米全漏出来。”En: "Do you remember? Li Wei, you always tore the zongzi leaves, and all the sticky rice would spill out."Zh: 李伟也忍不住笑了，这些珍贵的回忆让他感到温暖。En: Li Wei couldn't help but laugh, these precious memories made him feel warm inside.Zh: 笑声充满了整个茶馆，仿佛把时间倒回到了过去，那份纯粹的友谊依然存在。En: Laughter filled the entire tea house, as if time had turned back to the past, and the pure friendship still existed.Zh: “我们今年一起去看龙舟赛吧！”小梅提议。En: "Let's go watch the dragon boat race together this year!" Xiaomei suggested.Zh: 李伟点头，他感觉自己终于找到了归属感，“好啊，一定。”En: Li Wei nodded, feeling he finally found a sense of belonging, "Sure, definitely."Zh: 故事结束时，他们愉快地离开茶馆，李伟内心的忐忑被久违的温暖所取代。En: As the story ends, they happily left the tea house, with Li Wei's initial unease replaced by a long-lost warmth.Zh: 他明白，无论世界怎么变化，真正的友谊始终跨越时间和距离，永远温暖如初。En: He understood that no matter how the world changes, true friendship always transcends time and distance, remaining as warm as ever. Vocabulary Words:comfortable: 舒适的antiques: 古色古香的aromas: 香味adorned: 挂满hesitantly: 犹豫地frequent: 最喜欢quintessential: 传统approached: 走到hint: 一丝nervousness: 紧张recognized: 认出enthusiasm: 热情glanced: 环顾recalling: 回忆起reserved: 拘谨uneasy: 忐忑transcends: 跨越soothing: 舒缓的decorate: 装饰hesitate: 犹豫initial: 初时reminisced: 怀旧precious: 珍贵的embrace: 拥抱transience: 短暂splendor: 辉煌hospitality: 款待immemorial: 古老的nostalgic: 怀旧的intimacy: 亲密

As millions of Chinese students feverishly prepare for the national college entrance examination, or gaokao, this weekend, parents across the country are turning to products symbolizing good fortune, fueling a surge in sales of flowers, pastries, clothing and other related merchandise.本周末全国数百万考生全力备战高考之际，各地家长纷纷选购寓意吉祥的好物，带动鲜花、糕点、服饰等相关商品销量暴涨。While the students are focusing on last-minute revisions, their parents are busy preparing "good luck" items as a way of offering encouragement and emotional support.考生抓紧考前最后时间查漏补缺，家长们则忙着置办各类祈福好物，以此为孩子鼓劲、送上心理慰藉。Among the most popular purchases are qipao, the traditional Chinese dress, which sounds similar to the phrase qikai desheng, meaning "to win from the outset". Florists are reporting strong demand for sunflowers, the Chinese name of which is associated with the idiom yiju duokui, or "winning first place in one stroke".旗袍是热门选购单品，因谐音“旗开得胜”备受青睐；向日葵同样订单火爆，其名称暗含“一举夺魁”的美好寓意，花店销量一路走高。"Success in the exam ultimately depends on the student's abilities. As parents, we simply want to offer our children our best wishes and some extra encouragement," said Zhang, a parent of a high school senior.高三考生家长张先生表示：“考试成败终究靠孩子自身实力，作为父母，我们只是想送上美好期许，多给孩子一份鼓励。”According to the owner of a qipao shop in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, sales have risen sharply in recent weeks. Many mothers wear the outfit while accompanying their children to the examination centers. Customers are buying qipao specifically for the gaokao season, the owner told Fengmian News, a Sichuan-based media outlet. "Some even placed orders more than a month in advance."据四川本地媒体封面新闻报道，成都一位旗袍店店主介绍，近几周门店销量大幅攀升。不少妈妈会身着旗袍送考，大批顾客专门为高考选购旗袍，部分消费者甚至提前一个多月预订。Online retailers have also reported a surge in demand. One qipao store said that sales increased fivefold over the past week, with modernized versions of the traditional dress proving particularly popular.线上商家同样迎来订单热潮，一家旗袍网店称上周销量翻至原先五倍，改良新式旗袍最受消费者追捧。Also much sought after are sunflowers, which have become the season's top-selling floral product. Flower shops in several cities reported receiving orders for sunflower bouquets from parents and entire graduating classes alike.向日葵成为当季爆款鲜花，多地花店接到不少家长和毕业班集体预订的向日葵花束订单。Not to be left behind, pastry makers are also cashing in on the trend. Dingsheng gao, a traditional rice cake, the name of which literally means "certain victory", has become a seasonal bestseller. Bakery chains and retailers such as Beijing Daoxiangcun and Freshippo Bakery have launched special exam-themed gift boxes to cater to the huge demand.糕点商家也顺势抢抓商机，寓意“定胜”的传统定胜糕热销。北京稻香村、盒马烘焙等连锁糕点品牌纷纷推出高考限定礼盒，满足市场需求。Meanwhile, zongzi-shaped plush pendants inspired by the Dragon Boat Festival, which carry a pun associated with academic success, have become popular gifts for students.端午元素的粽子造型毛绒挂饰凭借谐音升学的美好彩头，成为热门考生礼品。Many handmade zongzi key chains featuring messages such as "admitted to a top university" have sold thousands of units on e-commerce platforms.印有“金榜题名”等字样的手工粽子钥匙扣，在各大电商平台销量破千。According to e-commerce platform JD, sales of stationery carrying phrases such as "pass every exam" have tripled compared with April, while searches for exam-related stationery products have increased nearly sevenfold.京东平台数据显示，印有“逢考必过”等祝福语的文具销量较4月增长两倍，高考相关文具搜索量暴涨近六倍。Industry observers said that the popularity of such products reflects parents' desire to support their children during a stressful period in their lives, rather than a belief in superstitions.业内分析人士表示，祈福商品热销并非源于迷信，而是家长在备考关键期想要陪伴、助力孩子的情感体现。However, they also cautioned parents not to create additional pressure for students through elaborate pre-exam preparations.但专家提醒家长，不必过度置办各类祈福用品，避免无形中给考生增添心理负担。Ultimately, the gaokao is an examination, an observer said, adding that what really matters is helping students stay calm and confident.业内人士称，高考只是一场考试，帮孩子稳住心态、保持自信才是重中之重。Sometimes, the observer said, the best support comes after the exam — a meal together, a trip, or simply letting children know they are loved regardless of the outcome.专家表示，最好的陪伴往往在考后：一顿团圆饭、一次短途出游，或是告诉孩子，无论成绩如何，家人的爱始终不变。plush /plʌʃ/毛绒的pendant /ˈpendənt/挂饰，吊坠pun /pʌn/谐音梗，双关语triple /ˈtrɪpl/（使）增至三倍sevenfold /ˈsevənfəʊld/七倍地superstition /ˌsuːpəˈstɪʃn/迷信

The summit in Beijing produced a "constructive strategic stability" framework and a warming of tone between the two presidents. But heads of state can announce a multi-year horizon; somebody else has to operationalize it. Does the United States have the people — the linguists, the regional experts, the long-haul institution-builders — to do that work?This week, I chatted with two Texans answering that question from very different directions. David Firestein is the inaugural president and CEO of the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations in Houston. A career State Department officer who served four administrations and spent five years in Beijing, he's one of the few Americans concurrently affiliated with both a Republican and a Democratic presidential legacy institution. Eddie Conger is a retired Marine major and the founder and superintendent of International Leadership of Texas (IL Texas) — a public charter network of 26 campuses serving 26,000 K-12 students and now the largest K-12 Chinese language program in the country. In January, IL Texas became the first-ever K-12 recipient of the Bush China Foundation's George H.W. Bush Award for Educational Excellence in U.S.-China Relations, joining past honorees including Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger.The conversation tackles what David calls the Texas paradox: the same state that just forced its cities to dissolve their sister-city ties with China, that pioneered the closure of Confucius Institutes, and that has restricted Chinese land purchases is also where the country's deepest K-12 Mandarin pipeline is taking root — and where the most institutionally Texan China foundation has chosen to plant its flag. David and Eddie talk through engagement honestly (no straw-man Jeffersonian-democracy fantasies), the erroneous strategic assumptions undergirding U.S. China policy, what real national-language capacity would look like operationally, what they each saw in the Trump–Xi summit, and what 5,000 IL Texas graduates are already doing in the world.05:40 — Eddie's path: Marine infantryman to fifth-grade math teacher to the country's largest K-12 Mandarin program09:12 — David on when the Nixon-through-Obama engagement consensus broke (fall 2017) and how the lexicon shifted13:30 — Engagement honestly defined: what its architects actually believed vs. the Jeffersonian-democracy straw man18:30 — The Texas paradox: HB 128, sister cities, Confucius Institutes — and the country's biggest Mandarin program in the same state31:26 — Texas business, Tim Dunn, faith, and the gap between political rhetoric and where Texans actually are41:54 — The Defense Department safety/security story: when one Chinese word ate an entire bilateral agreement46:16 — David's six (or seven) erroneous strategic assumptions: China doesn't want to be us, and it has benefited more than anyone from the current order52:28 — What real national-language capacity would actually look like: NSLI, WALARA, and why the pipeline still runs through one Marine major in Texas01:06:07 — Reading the Beijing summit: the warmth, the "constructive strategic stability" framing, and whether Trump's Taiwan call could blow it all up01:17:10 — Where 5,000 IL Texas graduates are now — White House interns, service academies, doctors, entrepreneurs, and one high-schooler who pulled a stranger out of the surfPaying it ForwardEddie: Carlos Carrasco; Emily, who is heading to Taiwan this fall on a one-year high-school program; and another student bound for the University of Texas at Austin who will be sent to South Korea for a semester as a freshman — a rarity at UT. And he closes with Miles, a high-school senior and Marine scholarship recipient who, just weeks ago at a national competition in Florida, heard someone screaming for help in the ocean, called for a boogie board, and swam out to save a drowning swimmer while a crowd of adults stood on the beach. "Others before self," as Eddie puts it — the IL Texas mission statement made flesh.David:Frank Zhou, who just graduated from Harvard and chaired the Harvard College China Forum; Selina Gong, a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School involved in its annual China conference; and Dean Dai, a recent graduate of Columbia's SIPA who has been deeply involved in many of the most significant student-run China conferences in the country — and who, as it turns out, was one of the organizers of the University of Chicago U.S.-China Economy and Business Summit where Kaiser spoke earlier this month.Recommendations:Eddie: John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (Henry Holt, 2016)David: Stephen Roach, Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale, 2022)Kaiser: David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday, 2023)Also mentioned: Stephen R. Platt, The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II (Knopf, 2024) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Cerramos el mes de mayo con un nuevo episodio de TRIATLÓN con mayúsculas y un protagonista de excepción. Hablamos con el olímpico Antonio Serrat, uno de los referentes del triatlón español, que acaba de sumar un nuevo éxito internacional formando parte del equipo nacional que conquistó la medalla de oro en los relevos mixtos de la Copa del Mundo de Chengdu. Con el gallego repasamos una trayectoria marcada por la constancia y el trabajo diario, analizamos el gran momento que vive el triatlón español por relevos y ponemos la vista en los próximos retos de la temporada. Antonio nos cuenta cómo afronta su regreso a las Series Mundiales y sus sensaciones antes de Alghero, una cita clave que marca el inicio de un nuevo ciclo olímpico con Los Ángeles 2028 ya en el horizonte. Y a continuación viajamos hasta las competiciones por clubes para conocer a los grandes protagonistas de la Copa del Rey Suzuki y la Copa de la Reina Iberdrola de Triatlón. Primero conversamos con Adrián Vázquez, representante del Cidade de Lugo Fluvial, reciente campeón de la Copa del Rey Suzuki tras una actuación sobresaliente que vuelve a confirmar al club gallego como una de las grandes referencias del triatlón nacional. Y que lograba de nuevo la Copa tras muchos años intentando recuperar el trofeo que más se le resistía. Después es el turno de Celso Comesaña, el cerebro y valedor del Triatlón Delikia, que nos explica cómo el conjunto gallego logró conquistar la Copa de la Reina Iberdrola gracias a la fortaleza de un bloque consolidado y al talento de varias de las mejores triatletas del panorama nacional. Además de su trabajo en equipo junto al resto de sus técnicos y con los objetivos de base con sus equipos talentos. Con ambos protagonistas descubrimos la filosofía que ha convertido a sus clubes en referentes del triatlón español, repasamos las claves de sus victorias, los deportistas que hicieron posible estos éxitos y los objetivos que se marcan para el resto de una temporada que entra ahora en una fase decisiva con la Liga Nacional de Clubes de Triatlón y las principales competiciones internacionales en el punto de mira. Tres protagonistas, tres historias de éxito y una misma pasión por nuestro deporte. Y con mucho acento gallego. ¡Arrancamos! #somostriatlon

We're joined by Jia (you may know them as @JiaAnimalSelfies), a Pittsburgh creator with roots in Chengdu, Sichuan, and a deep love for the kind of food that doesn't apologize for being specific. Jia shares their family's path from China to Pittsburgh, including stories shaped by the Cultural Revolution, immigration, and the restaurant work that helped make education possible. We talk about what “secret menu” really means, why it exists, and how to explore it without treating culture like a dare. For anyone chasing authentic Sichuan cuisine in Pittsburgh, Jia defines what mala actually is, how to prep your stomach before hot pot, and how sesame oil and soy milk fit into the tradition. Jia drops a smart Squirrel Hill hack for finding QR-code promos and ordering off-menu through delivery apps, plus local recommendations including dry hot pot at Little Corner Grill House and late-night options when the shift ends after midnight. If you like Pittsburgh food podcasts, Asian American stories, and real tips you can use tonight, hit play and come hungry. Subscribe to The Pittsburgh Dish, share this with a friend who always orders the same thing, and leave a review so more people can find the show.Support the show

China's remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world's second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts. American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China's profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China's rapid urban development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

China's remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world's second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts. American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China's profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China's rapid urban development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

China's remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world's second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts. American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China's profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China's rapid urban development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China's remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world's second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts. American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China's profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China's rapid urban development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

China's remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world's second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts. American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China's profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China's rapid urban development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China's remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world's second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts. American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China's profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China's rapid urban development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric Olander on how the Global South is reading the Beijing summitsThis week I'm joined again by Eric Olander, founder of the China Global South Project, which runs the most indispensable English-language operation going for understanding China's engagement with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.I came in with a plan: map, region by region, how the capitals of the Global South were reading the back-to-back Trump and Putin visits to Beijing — relief at a steadier U.S.-China modus vivendi, or foreboding at a G2 condominium squeezing shut their room to maneuver. Eric dismantled the premise within ten minutes. The honest answer, he warned me, is that most of the Global South simply isn't watching the way we are — and the disappointment turned out to be the most interesting thing in the room. What looked like the absence of a story was the story. I'd built my questions around one assumption about what mattered; Eric had built his answers around another, and I cop to being schooled.Once you set the summit framing aside, what Eric's contributors are actually seeing comes into focus: Japan racing to recenter an Asia-Pacific security architecture, a region quietly de-risking from an unreliable United States, fresh cracks in the BRICS, Justin Yifu Lin's “three moves” for Chinese manufacturing, Latin America's “find out” phase, and a Gulf where the Chinese setback so many in Washington insist must exist simply isn't there. We get into all of it — and close on the summit as a remarkable piece of theater, the first since 1945 at which no one quite knew who the most powerful person in the room was.04:27 — The dominant mood: pro forma coverage, exhaustion, and bigger problems at home08:15 — Breaking news: the paused $14B Taiwan arms package and the canceled Colby trip11:15 — The dog that caught the truck: China and the costs of a receding U.S. umbrella13:00 — "Constructive strategic stability" — new equilibrium or just choreography?28:23 — The snub: Beijing sends only an ambassador to the BRICS meeting in New Delhi37:56 — Africa: tariff-free access, the trade imbalance, and Kenya's "collapsed" exports44:34 — Justin Yifu Lin's "three moves": move up-market, localize, move south51:00 — Latin America's "find out" phase in Panama, and very low China literacy57:35 — The Gulf after the war on Iran: who really won?Paying it Forward:Boston University's Global Development Policy (GDP) Research CenterRecommendationsEric: A “rabbit hole” of books on Xi Jinping, currently Party of One by Chun Han Wong (after Kevin Rudd's On Xi Jinping).Kaiser: Angine de Poitrine, a “microtonal math rock” duo from Quebec — think Frank Zappa meets King Crimson — possibly the thing to breathe new life into progressive rock.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

GENRE SPECIAL: What if your country fell to a foreign power? How much would you be willing to sacrifice to take it back? Four-time indie published author, Gabriel Garcia, discusses his new alternate history release, DECIMUS: THE WOLF OF ROME. A retired Roman solider is called back to the battlefield to throw off the yoke of Carthiginian oppression. In a pivotal shift from the historical record, Hannibal rules Rome with an iron fist. Can Decimus overcome the odds to free his people? "Jam-packed with action from beginning to end…an adventure of grand proportions.”—Angelina Kaul, Historian, Artist, and Author Listen in as we chat about the origin of the story, the importance of humanizing the fallen, and the rabbit holes I fell into while reading! https://www.mariesutro.com/twisted-passages-podcast ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gabriel Garcia is a passionate historian with a diverse research background in various historical periods and cultures. His academic journey led him from studying Asian Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to delving into classical history at San Francisco State University. His time studying abroad in Chengdu, China, sparked his interest in combining history with fantasy, culminating in the debut of his novel, The Gathering. His primary goal is to continue exploring the intersection of history and fantasy in his writing, and he aspires to reach a wider audience through his books and his YouTube channel, Tales from the Wandering Scribe, where he shares his passion for storytelling and historical knowledge.

GENRE SPECIAL: What if your country fell to a foreign power? How much would you be willing to sacrifice to take it back? Four-time indie published author, Gabriel Garcia, discusses his new alternate history release, DECIMUS: THE WOLF OF ROME. A retired Roman solider is called back to the battlefield to throw off the yoke of Carthiginian oppression. In a pivotal shift from the historical record, Hannibal rules Rome with an iron fist. Can Decimus overcome the odds to free his people? "Jam-packed with action from beginning to end…an adventure of grand proportions.”—Angelina Kaul, Historian, Artist, and Author Listen in as we chat about the origin of the story, the importance of humanizing the fallen, and the rabbit holes I fell into while reading! https://www.mariesutro.com/twisted-passages-podcast ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gabriel Garcia is a passionate historian with a diverse research background in various historical periods and cultures. His academic journey led him from studying Asian Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to delving into classical history at San Francisco State University. His time studying abroad in Chengdu, China, sparked his interest in combining history with fantasy, culminating in the debut of his novel, The Gathering. His primary goal is to continue exploring the intersection of history and fantasy in his writing, and he aspires to reach a wider audience through his books and his YouTube channel, Tales from the Wandering Scribe, where he shares his passion for storytelling and historical knowledge.

This week on Sinica, I speak with Andrew Seth Meyer, professor of history at CUNY Brooklyn College and the author of a remarkable new book from Oxford University Press, To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor. Sixteen years in the making, it's the first proper one-volume narrative history of the Warring States in English aimed at a general reader — a gap in the field that Andy has now decisively filled. We talk about why this period — the roughly 260 years between Confucius's death and Qin's unification in 221 BCE — really is the deepest layer of Chinese political history that still genuinely matters, and we try together to find the line between responsible historical reasoning about modern China and the kind of lazy essentialism that reaches for Han Feizi every time Xi Jinping makes a speech. Along the way we get into the displacement of the hereditary aristocracy by the shi, the Lüshi Chunqiu as a piece of political genius, why the standard caricature of “Legalist” Qin is wrong, and what it means that the Chinese state is still, in some real sense, running on operating software written in the 4th century BCE.8:14 – The 16-year gestation, why no general-reader Warring States book existed in English, and what made Andy think he could be the one to write it11:06 – The romanization headaches: Wei vs. Wey, King Zhao of Qin vs. King Zhao of Yan, and the special agonies of writing about early China for an English audience14:31 – Why he organized the book by state rather than strictly chronologically — and what that structure lets him do18:14 – The relevance question: how to take the deep continuity of Chinese political life seriously without falling into the orientalist “eternal China” trap25:52 – Why the Warring States is properly called a revolution: the destruction of Zhou-era hereditary aristocracy and the rise of the shi33:15 – Fukuyama's claim that Qin built the world's first genuinely modern state — is “modern” the right word?36:30 – Qin's 38 commanderies, why the radical version lasted only 15 years, and the Han retreat: aristocracy or regional autonomy?39:46 – Reading the Hundred Schools as embedded political actors rather than tidy textbook categories — and the Jixia Academy as ancient Brookings44:06 – The Lüshi Chunqiu as a brilliant piece of political propaganda, and what its tripartite cosmological structure was actually arguing52:31 – Why the cartoon-legalist version of the Qin is wrong: the 70 erudites, the Taishan stelae, and what the book-burning episode really was57:05 – The axial age question: pattern-matching or something real?1:00:40 – What the Warring States actually has to teach us about China in 2026: zhong guo as aspiration, not description1:05:08 – How the Warring States is taught in China and Taiwan today, and what archaeology is doing to the field1:08:36 – Constant self-reinvention as the real Chinese legacy, and why no plausible future China fully repudiates the CCPPaying it forward:Avital Rom (postdoc at Cambridge, early Chinese cultural history, editor of a forthcoming volume on disability and impairment in early China)Liang Cai (Notre Dame, new book on Han-era jurisprudence and legal traditions)Recommendations:Andy: Hadestown on Broadway — and Anaïs Mitchell's original concept albumKaiser: To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis (audiobook especially recommended)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week I'm sharing the fourth and final installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — “The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead.” The first three episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the panels on what China wants, what the United States wants, and tech rivalry and competing visions of the future. This final installment is a fireside conversation between Henry Farrell and Alondra Nelson, followed by Jessica's closing remarks.Once again, my deep thanks to Jessica Chen Weiss, ACF's inaugural faculty director, for organizing this terrific conference and for so generously letting me share this audio with Sinica listeners.Henry Farrell, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at SAIS, sits down with Alondra Nelson — Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — for what turns out to be the day's most generative reframing of the AI race. Henry begins by asking how it is that ideas once confined to 1980s science fiction — the singularity, AGI, brains-in-vats — have come to anchor mainstream American AI policy discourse. Alondra traces the genealogy back to the “Californian ideology” and the long history of outré thinking in Silicon Valley, but her real point is that something has shifted: U.S. negative sentiment around AI has been climbing and plateauing high since 2022, even as adoption has spread — the opposite of the usual technology-acceptance curve, and the opposite of what's happening in China, Nigeria, or Brazil.From there the conversation opens up into what I found to be its richest vein: the contrast between a Cartesian, disembodied American conception of AI — “we're working on the brains,” as Sam Altman put it when OpenAI shut down its robotics team in 2022 — and a more embodied approach that integrates the cognitive and the physical, which is part of what's powered China's advances in advanced manufacturing and robotics. Alondra is sharp on the costs of the brain-in-a-vat framing: it treats AI as a state of exception in which existing laws and institutions somehow don't apply, and it lets us float aspirational claims (”AI will cure cancer”) that elide all the clunky institutional stewardship actually required to get from aspiration to outcome.She also offers an incisive reading of the Trump administration's AI policy — which, she argues, is misleadingly described as “deregulatory.” Between export controls, the golden share in Intel, immigration restrictions on STEM talent, and the administration's tight stewardship of who wins and who loses in the AI ecosystem, this is industrial policy by another name — and a narrowing of democratic input over decisions of enormous infrastructural consequence.The conversation closes with Henry asking what a small-d democratic successor administration ought to do, and Alondra's answer is bracingly practical: get rid of the state of exception, take the material supply chain of AI seriously (data centers, electricity, critical minerals, communities), let state-level policy generate evidence about what works, and aim for high-watermark aspirations — North Stars, in the spirit of the AI Bill of Rights — rather than pretending the technology itself will deliver our values.Jessica then offers her closing remarks, thanking the panelists, previewing the ACF Insights Series, and putting out the call for new junior fellows at the Institute.Participants:Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study; former Director, White House Office of Science and Technology PolicyHenry Farrell, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins SAISClosing remarks: Jessica Chen Weiss, David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies and Inaugural Faculty Director, ACFSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, I chat with Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser for U.S.-China at the International Crisis Group, just hours after President Trump's plane left Chinese airspace at the end of a three-day state visit to Beijing. We dig into the new framework Xi Jinping put on the table — what Beijing is calling 中美建设性战略稳定关系, a "constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability" — and ask whether it's a genuine doctrine of mutual restraint or a rhetorical tripwire that future American moves can be characterized as having violated. Ali and I work through Foreign Minister Wang Yi's morning-after media briefing, including his striking claim that the U.S. side now "does not accept" Taiwan independence — a notable shift from the standard American formulation. We talk about what Trump actually said on Taiwan in his Air Force One press gaggle, the gap between Trump's account of Xi's private remarks on Iran and what Beijing is willing to say publicly, and whether AI can serve as a durable basis for cooperation coming out of the summit. We also turn to the American domestic side: the bind Democrats find themselves in trying to critique Trump's China engagement without out-hawking him, the generational data showing a striking gap in American attitudes toward China that transcends partisan division, and the question of when that shift in mass opinion actually starts to bite on policy.Full podcast page with timestamps and links forthcoming! Just wanted to get this out quickly.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Eleanor Hulm left Bangkok on a loaded bike she'd just assembled in a hotel room at 6am, sleep-deprived, slightly terrified, and laughing her way through the traffic. Four months later she's ridden solo through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan and she's just getting started.In this episode you'll hear about:The 20km of peanut butter mud in Laos that nearly broke herPushing a loaded bike up a 20% gradient in Thailand until her cycling shoes had to come offPako, a bikepacker from Chengdu who taught her to knock on strangers' doors and trust what comes nextWhat Eleanor calls the mind prison, and why the road gave her the mind palace insteadThe moment of awe when she cycled past Mount FujiSigning up for the Transpyrenees ultra race with half the world still left to rideEleanor is heading next into China, the Stans, Georgia and Turkey before cycling home to the UK. Be sure to follow her adventures via her instagram - @elbybike Check out Old Man Mountain's new Manzanita Handlebar Cradle  Support the showBuy me a coffee!I'm an affiliate for a few brands I genuinely use and recommend including:

BUFFALO, NY — May 15, 2026 — A new #review was #published in Volume 18 of Aging-US on May 4, 2026, titled “Cellular senescence: from pathogenic mechanisms to precision anti-aging interventions.” The study was led by first author Jian Deng and corresponding author Dong Yang from the Department of Targeting Therapy and Immunology, Cancer Center, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. In this comprehensive review, the authors examine how cellular senescence contributes to aging and age-related disease across multiple organ systems, while also highlighting the emerging complexity and functional diversity of senescent cell populations. Traditionally, senescent cells have been viewed primarily as harmful byproducts of aging, characterized by irreversible cell-cycle arrest and chronic inflammatory signaling. However, growing evidence suggests that some senescent cells also play beneficial physiological roles in tissue repair, embryonic development, and maintenance of tissue homeostasis. The review outlines how senescence develops in major tissues including the liver, lungs, kidneys, heart, adipose tissue, brain, and skin. Across these organs, aging-related cellular dysfunction is driven by a combination of oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, DNA damage, chronic inflammation, metabolic stress, telomere shortening, and environmental insults such as ultraviolet radiation and pollution. The authors describe how senescent cells accumulate in highly specialized cell populations—including hepatocytes, endothelial cells, fibroblasts, macrophages, astrocytes, and epithelial cells—where they can disrupt normal tissue architecture and promote chronic disease progression. Importantly, the article emphasizes that senescent cells are highly heterogeneous and should not be treated as a uniform population. Depending on the tissue context and biological environment, senescent cells may exert either protective or harmful effects. For example, certain senescent cells may help limit fibrosis or support wound healing, whereas others drive chronic inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, tissue degeneration, and cancer progression. This growing recognition of functional heterogeneity has prompted a major shift in anti-aging research away from indiscriminate elimination of senescent cells toward more selective and precision-based therapeutic strategies. “Based on these insights, this review summarizes the induction mechanisms of cellular senescence and the subsequent evolution of their functional phenotypes across diverse tissues.” Full press release - https://www.aging-us.com/news-room/precision-anti-aging-strategies-aim-to-target-harmful-senescent-cells-while-preserving-beneficial-ones Paper DOI - https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206375 Corresponding author - Dong Yang – yangdong@wchscu.cn Abstract video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkJRwF8mp4A Keywords - cellular senescence, aging mechanisms, functional heterogeneity, precision anti-aging To learn more about the journal, please visit www.Aging-US.com​​ and connect with us on social media at: Bluesky - bsky.app/profile/aging-us.bsky.social ResearchGate - www.researchgate.net/journal/Aging-1945-4589 X - twitter.com/AgingJrnl Facebook - www.facebook.com/AgingUS/ Instagram - www.instagram.com/agingjrnl/ LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/company/aging/ Reddit - www.reddit.com/user/AgingUS/ Pinterest - www.pinterest.com/AgingUS/ YouTube - www.youtube.com/@Aging-US Spotify - open.spotify.com/show/1X4HQQgegjReaf6Mozn6Mc MEDIA@IMPACTJOURNALS.COM

En Chine, la population vieillit à grande vitesse. D'ici quelques années, les plus de 60 ans seront vraiment nombreux. Et parallèlement, le nombre d'actifs diminue. Dans les grandes villes, une question devient centrale : comment vieillir, quand les enfants sont moins nombreux, quand ils vivent trop loin… et que physiquement, le corps et l'esprit donnent des signes de faiblesse. Les seniors chinois vivent donc entre activités traditionnelles et assistance, parfois à la pointe de la modernité. « Vieillir en Chine : entre robots, débrouille et nouvelles solidarités », un Grand reportage à Pékin et à Chengdu de Cléa Broadhurst et Chi Xiangyuan.

This week on Sinica, in a special episode recorded as a live joint webcast with NYRB/Poets and Equator Magazine, I sit down with Eleanor Goodman — poet, scholar, research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center, and one of the most accomplished translators working between Chinese and English — to talk about the extraordinary Sichuan-born poet Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼).Born in 1980 in a mountain village, trained as a nurse, Zheng joined the great tide of internal migration in her early 20s, ending up on the assembly line of a hardware factory in Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta. She picked up a pen after a workplace injury — part of her finger taken off by a lathe — and what came out across poems, essays, and reportage has made her one of the most singular voices in contemporary Chinese literature. Her trajectory from the assembly line to the editorial desk of an official literary magazine is, as far as I know, essentially without parallel.Eleanor has been translating Zheng since around 2013, and the partnership they've built has given Anglophone readers access to a body of work that defies easy categorization — at once intimate and historical, ethnographic and lyric, tender and unsparing. We talk about how they met, about Zheng's resistance to the "migrant worker poet" label, about the bodily feminism that runs through her verse, about her unmoralizing portraits of sex workers, about lost youth and the way the body keeps the ledger of factory time. Eleanor reads Zheng's poem "Woman Worker: Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工: 被固定在卡桌上的青春) in both Chinese and her English translation — and it is, every time, devastating.Huge thanks to Abigail Dunn at NYRB Poets and Ratik Asokan at Equator for organizing this conversation and for inviting me to host it, to Eleanor for her generosity and her brilliance, and most of all to Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose voice — even when she cannot be with us in person — comes through with absolute clarity.Eleanor's translation of Zheng Xiaoqiong's In the Roar of the Machine is available from NYRB Poets. The Equator selections, drawn from Zheng's long-form prose, are available at Equator Magazine.05:07 — How Eleanor and Zheng met in 2013, and why a book had to happen08:14 — Navigating the awkward proposition of China for the Western left10:50 — Zheng's trajectory: from a Sichuan village to the assembly line to the editor's desk16:29 — Resisting the "migrant worker poet" (打工诗人) label20:47 — Conventions of the genre: exhaustion, iron, lost identity, the screw in the machine24:58 — Who gets translated into English, and why28:34 — The translator's ethics: how do you render a factory poem honestly?32:42 — Eleanor reads "Woman Worker, Youth Pinned to a Workstation" (女工被固定在卡桌上的青春) in Chinese and English37:14 — Zheng's bodily feminism: irregular periods, a different way of caring40:37 — Lost youth and the passage of time44:36 — Sex work and women's labor: portraits without moralizing49:59 — Whose work actually counts in Chinese urban discourse?52:45 — Why Zheng Xiaoqiong wasn't able to join us, and how censorship really works54:44 — Rose Courtyard and what's next: classical allusions, ancestral homes, embroidering grandmothers57:39 — Audience Q&A: American worker poets, the WeChat communities of migrant writers, and Zheng's standing in Chinese lettersSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Maayan Sebbag is living and studying in Chengdu, China. One day, on a trip to a remote nature reserve, disaster strikes. Passing through a village nestled in the mountains, Maayan and her friend suddenly find themselves at the epicentre of a terrible natural disaster - a magnitude 8 earthquake that will go down as one of the deadliest in human history. Trapped in the pitch black, buried alive, Maayan will fight to free herself from this living tomb. But escaping burial will prove just the beginning… A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. Written by Rhys Bevan | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound Supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Jacob Booth | Assembly edit by Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Ralph Tittley. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you'd like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at support@noiser.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week I'm sharing the third installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." The first two episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the panels on what China wants and what the United States wants. This week's panel — "Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future" — turns to the domain that, more than any other, has come to define how Washington thinks about the U.S.-China relationship: technology, and especially AI. Once again, my deep thanks to Jessica Chen Weiss, ACF's inaugural faculty director, for organizing this terrific conference and for so generously letting me share this audio with Sinica listeners. Moderator Kat Duffy of the Council on Foreign Relations opens by interrogating the very framing of the panel: is "rivalry" actually the right word for what's going on between the U.S. and China in tech? The panelists give a range of answers — from "yes, because both sides believe it is" to Samm Sacks's pithy rejoinder that "rivalry serves specific actors and specific interests." From there the conversation ranges across the FCC's recent move to bar most foreign-made routers, the pitfalls of framing AI competition as a sprint to AGI rather than what Jeff Ding calls a "diffusion marathon," the many internal Chinas that get flattened in DC discourse, the cybersecurity reciprocity problem (Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, and what President Trump tellingly admitted about all of it), and what it would actually mean for the U.S. to compete by being its best self — what one panelist memorably calls "Americamaxxing." There's a lot of substance packed into this hour, and a lot of generative pushback against received DC wisdom. The audience Q&A at the end takes up the role of race and xenophobia in the discourse — a topic that, as one questioner pointedly notes, had been conspicuously absent from the day's earlier discussions. Panelists:— Samm Sacks, Senior Fellow, New America and Yale Law School— Jeff Ding, Assistant Professor of Political Science, George Washington University— Mieke Eoyang, Visiting Professor, Carnegie Mellon University; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy— Selina Xu, Lead for China and AI Policy, Office of Eric Schmidt Moderator: Kat Duffy, Senior Fellow for Digital and Cyberspace Policy, Council on Foreign RelationsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this Sustainable Podcast episode by AgriBusiness Global, Ruoyan Li, Director of Strategy & Development at Chengdu Newsun Crop Science Co., Ltd., digs into changes within China to promote sustainable agriculture, roadblocks for Chinese growers' adoption of biological products, how to overcome these challenges, and more.

This week on Sinica: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrapped up his fourth visit to China in as many years last week, and this one may be the most consequential yet. It comes at a moment when Spain has emerged, almost improbably, as the most outspoken voice in Europe challenging the direction of American foreign policy — closing its airspace to U.S. military aircraft involved in the war in Iran, denying Washington the use of the Rota and Morón bases, recognizing Palestine, and getting expelled from the U.S.-led Gaza Coordination Center for its "anti-Israel obsession." Against that backdrop, Sánchez delivered a remarkable speech at Tsinghua University — a speech I wrote about in detail on the Sinica Substack (PM Pedro Sánchez's Tsinghua Speech: A Masterclass in Diplomatic Rhetoric) — defending multilateralism, calling the EU-China trade deficit unsustainable, and naming China "a country rebuilding its greatness."To help make sense of it, I'm joined by Mario Esteban Rodríguez, full professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, director of its Center for East Asian Studies, and senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute. Mario is the scholar most frequently quoted in Spanish and European media coverage of Spain-China relations, and the author most recently of China's Vertical Multilateralism and the Global South (Routledge, 2026). We discuss whether Sánchez is running an updated Merkel playbook or something qualitatively new, how much of the pivot is really about Trump, the sectoral politics of EVs and Iberian pork, the Chery plant in Barcelona, Spain's role as a gateway to Latin America, and whether Madrid is now a trailblazer for a broader European — and transatlantic — reorientation toward Beijing.06:33 — Sánchez's China strategy: pragmatism, consistency, and political capital08:35 — Domestic politics: the PSOE–PP consensus, Vox, and the regional contradiction12:40 — Merkel's playbook vs. Sánchez's: COVID, Ukraine, and the macroeconomic imbalance15:55 — The Tsinghua speech: Matteo Ricci, multipolarity, and the human rights omission28:17 — The Trump factor: Iran, Gaza, and the limits of overestimating the American effect35:48 — Trade, EV tariffs, pork, and Chinese investment in Spain (the Chery plant in Barcelona)47:04 — Agricultural constituencies and the paradox of Vox voters who benefit from China trade49:01 — Spain's influence in Brussels and the conditions for other member states to follow53:09 — Spain as gateway to Latin America, and the wider European (and Canadian) turn to BeijingPaying it Forward: The European Think-Tank Network on China (ETNC) — a network providing country-specific insights on EU member states' approaches to China, including the granular differences and nuances that non-European analysts often miss.RecommendationsMario Esteban: A trip, rather than a book — New Zealand, which he's visiting this summer with his family to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring. A nod to his love of Tolkien and tabletop role-playing games (conducted, he is careful to note, in his own basement — not his parents').Kaiser Kuo: CONG — a new large-format magazine published out of Hong Kong (the title is pronounced Kong, though its ambiguous Pinyin-like spelling invites a second reading), now preparing its third issue. Beautifully produced on glossy and textured paper, with broad coverage of the art, culture, and design scene across East and Southeast Asia. Check it out online here: https://www.serakai.studio/congSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Don't be shy, send me a message!Thomas Felix Creighton talks about the issues that really matter, getting a (slightly) nicer coffee and a gluten-free muffin in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. He compares this to doing much the same in Bingley, West Yorkshire, UK. He also compares a range of more important stories, from therapy dogs and robots to a very familiar fake doctor at a hospital. The most important story in the world: https://www.ftbchambers.co.uk/news/news-view/planning-permission-granted-on-appeal-for-mcdonalds-restaurant-and-drive-through-in-bingley The robot traffic policeman: https://english.news.cn/20260313/56c326b7fd7b4976b877775b48ca43dd/c.html The marathon robot: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/19/robots-beat-human-records-at-beijing-half-marathon/Therapy dog: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly674jzzgloCan't have West Yorkshire without endless Bronte stories: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1l92mrmmp2oWei Wei. 2007. "Piaopiao" in the City: The Emergence and Change of Homosexual Identities in Local Chengdu[J]. Chinese Journal of Sociology(in Chinese Version), 27(1): 67-97.Recommended Rabbit Hole: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/beau-brummell-nineteenth-century-fashion Support the showhttps://www.albionneverdies.com/

This week I'm sharing the next installment from the terrific day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." Last week's episode featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the first panel, "What China Wants." This week, I've got the companion panel — "What Does the United States Want?" — which I think pairs beautifully with that first session, and which takes up a question that's arguably harder and more uncomfortable to answer. The panel is moderated by SAIS Dean James Steinberg, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor in the Clinton administration and Deputy Secretary of State under Obama — and who keeps this moving with real sharpness. He's joined by Matt Duss, Executive Vice President at the Center for International Policy, who starts things off with a bracing observation: the United States does not know what it wants. The old foreign policy consensus has shattered, he argues, and neither the Trump administration nor the Democratic establishment has produced a coherent replacement. He locates the most interesting thinking in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, where he hopes the 2028 primary will force some of these hard questions into the open. Katherine Thompson, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute who previously served in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, brings a military-strategic lens. She makes a sharp case that the new National Defense Strategy, for all its imperfections, at least opens the door to an honest conversation about trade-offs — something Washington has been allergic to. If you're going to prioritize deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, she argues, you have to actually give things up elsewhere, and the Iran situation is making that tension impossible to ignore. Jonas Nahm, the Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor at SAIS who served in the Biden administration, reframes economic competition with China in refreshingly concrete terms. Rather than abstract great-power framing, he identifies three specific buckets — affordability and energy, technological catch-up, and manufacturing competitiveness — where Chinese capacity could actually help solve American problems, if we had the political imagination to let it. And Leslie Vinjamuri, president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, brings striking new polling data showing a 40-percentage-point swing in American favorability toward China since 2024 — now at 53 percent — driven largely by Democrats but with movement among Republicans too. She situates this in the fading of pandemic-era hostility and the absence of sustained anti-China rhetoric from the current administration, and adds an invaluable perspective on how utterly confused America's allies are about what Washington actually expects of them. The conversation ranges across Taiwan and strategic ambiguity, whether allies arming up in the Indo-Pacific helps or hurts, the collapse of U.S. credibility on human rights, the future of dollar dominance, and whether the 2028 election will finally force a reckoning with these questions. It's a rich, candid discussion — and a reminder that the hardest debates in U.S.-China policy may not be about China at all. Panelists:— Matt Duss, Executive Vice President, Center for International Policy— Katherine Thompson, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute— Jonas Nahm, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins SAIS— Leslie Vinjamuri, President and CEO, Chicago Council on Global Affairs Moderator: James Steinberg, Dean, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International StudiesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Opening Remarks & Session 1: What China WantsJohns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference, April 3, 2026This week's episode features audio from a day-long conference hosted by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS, held on April 3rd in Washington, DC. The conference, titled "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead," brought together a wide range of scholars, former officials, and analysts to interrogate some of the foundational assumptions underlying US policy toward China — a conversation I found compelling enough to share directly with Sinica listeners, with the full blessing of the organizers.You'll hear two segments in this episode.Opening Remarks — Jessica Chen WeissACF's inaugural faculty director Jessica Chen Weiss opens the conference by framing its central provocation: that much of the prevailing US policy discourse assumes an intrinsically zero-sum competition with China, and that this assumption has not been adequately examined. She argues for a more rigorous, evidence-based conversation — one that takes seriously the possibility that American and Chinese interests are competitive but not necessarily adversarial, and that may even leave room for complementarity in some domains. She previews the day's three thematic sessions — on what China wants, what the United States wants, and the stakes of technological and AI rivalry — and situates the whole enterprise in what she describes as a hinge moment in world history.Session 1: What China WantsModerated by Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times, the first panel takes up the deceptively simple question of what China is actually trying to achieve on the world stage — and whether its ambitions are as expansive as much US policy discourse assumes.Jessica Chen Weiss argues that China's core objectives remain relatively modest and sovereignty-focused: security, development, and legitimacy within an order long dominated by the United States. She pushes back on the idea that China is eager to assume the burdens of global leadership, noting that Chinese interlocutors are acutely aware of the domestic overextension that has constrained American power. Sevastopulo coins — with Weiss's amusement — the term "China-first" to describe Beijing's orientation.Dan Taylor, drawing on his decades in the Defense Intelligence Agency, urges the audience to take Chinese leadership statements seriously rather than projecting worst-case intentions onto them. He notes that Beijing still sees itself as a developing nation with enormous domestic work ahead, and that its articulated goals leave considerable room for interpretation before one arrives at the conclusion that China seeks to displace the United States as global hegemon.Arthur Kroeber adds an economic dimension, tracing how China's export-driven model has generated massive global surpluses — and why the resulting tensions with trading partners are, in his view, a structural problem rather than evidence of strategic malice. He argues that much of what looks like geopolitical aggression is better understood as the consequence of an economic model operating at enormous scale with insufficient domestic demand to absorb its own output.Shao Yuqun, speaking from her perch at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, offers the most pointed challenge to the panel's relatively sanguine framing. She argues that the United States' own behavior — erratic policy, withdrawal from multilateral commitments, and the disruptions of the Trump era — has itself destabilized the order that American strategists claim to be defending. She is measured but direct, and her presence gives the conversation a texture that too many Washington panels lack.The discussion ranges across China's Iran diplomacy, the prospects for a US-China summit, the question of whether Beijing is exploiting Trump-era tensions to deepen ties with traditional US allies, and — in a lively closing exchange — who the next generation of Chinese leadership looks like (with Kroeber's deadpan answer, "Xi Jinping," getting the biggest laugh of the session).Guests:Jessica Chen Weiss, David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins SAIS; Inaugural Faculty Director, ACFDan Taylor, Adjunct Researcher, Institute for Defense Analyses; Senior Fellow, Johns Hopkins SAIS ACFArthur Kroeber, Founding Partner, Gavekal DragonomicsShao Yuqun, Director, Institute for Taiwan, Hong Kong & Macao Studies, Shanghai Institutes for International StudiesModerator: Demetri Sevastopulo, US-China Correspondent, Financial TimesRemaining sessions from the conference — on what the United States wants, tech rivalry and competing visions of the future, and a fireside chat between Henry Farrell and Alondra Nelson on the AI race reconsidered — will be released over the coming weeks.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

UNAM abre registro a Pase Reglamentado 2026 y retoma clases Más de 1.9 millones cumplen con declaración anual ante el SATArquitectura en China crea ilusión de una “iglesia sin sombras”Más información en nuestro podcast#grc

Economic historian Adam Tooze returns to Sinica fresh from the China Development Forum and his second extended visit to Beijing in under a year. In this wide-ranging conversation, Adam and I cover the 15th Five-Year Plan — what it signals about Beijing's development priorities and whether it represents a genuine shift away from investment-led growth — and the extraordinary scale of China's renewable energy buildout, which Adam argues may be bringing us to the global peak of CO2 emissions right now.They discuss the concept of the “big green state,” why Western analysts keep dancing around the role of the CPC in driving China's environmental transformation, and what the “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon says about a slow but real reckoning in Western public consciousness. From Europe's evolving posture toward China — caught between EV anxieties and transatlantic rupture — to China's role in the Global South's energy future, the conversation moves through coal transitions, Indonesian nickel zones, African microgrids, and the collapse of the flying geese model.The episode closes with a frank exchange on the Iran war, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, the stunning political silence on American campuses, and what Beijing is most likely doing: sitting pretty and waiting it out. Adam also offers a preview of his forthcoming book on the energy transition — which turns out to be another massive one — and recommends Tim Sahay and Wang Hui as essential reading.02:44 – Adam's Chinese language study: HSK3, the Confucius Institute curriculum, and the joys of chasing characters09:41 – The jìhuà/guīhuà distinction and what the shift in nomenclature from the 11th Five-Year Plan onward actually signals12:01 – The 15th Five-Year Plan: green energy tinkering, sci-tech ambitions, and the human development dimension18:10 – Does Beijing genuinely mean to shift from investment-led growth? Reading “high quality development” and “common prosperity”22:38 – The Great Reckoning: has Western intellectual and policy consciousness actually moved on China?29:45 – Environmental authoritarianism, the CPC as mobilizing institution, and why Xi's “petty bourgeois environmentalism” deserves to be taken seriously33:39 – Persistent misperceptions of China in Western discourse; the “jaundiced American” trench perspective39:16 – European neuralgia: EV overcapacity, Ukraine, and whether transatlantic rupture opens a window for China45:02 – China and the Global South: the end of the flying geese model, African microgrids, Indonesian nickel zones, and BRI record lending59:32 – Mark Carney's “age of rupture”: does the framing capture something real, or does it flatter the West?01:05:18 – What Beijing sees from its windows: Iran, Venezuela, the postponed Trump-Xi summit, and a five-point plan for Chinese hegemony (that won't happen)01:14:55 – Preview of Adam's forthcoming book on the energy transition and the “second world” thesisPaying It Forward: Tim Sahay (PolyCrisis / Phenomenal World)Recommendations:Adam: Wang Hui's The End of the RevolutionKaiser: The Chinese series Shēng mìng shù (Born to Be Alive)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Große Pandas, 20 Millionen Menschen und ein entspanntes Leben mit ein paar mehr Freiheiten, was Politik und Lifestyle betrifft: In dieser Folge der Hintergrund-Serie „Weltstädte“ nimmt uns China-Korrespondentin Eva Lamby-Schmitt mit durch Chengdu. Lamby-Schmitt, Eva www.deutschlandfunk.de, Hintergrund

The community is a richer place to live when individuals find their true calling and dare to buck the trends by opening unique businesses. Today I want to highlight a special business in Lansing's Old Town, Chengdu Teahouse. Joining Chris to share her journey and offerings is the owner of Chengdu, Elyse Ribbons!

What happens when the month looks successful from the outside, but behind the scenes it comes with hiring mistakes, disappointing experiences, and a few sharp lessons in trust? In this episode, I'm bringing back my end-of-month Get the Tea episodes and giving you a real snapshot of what March looked like in my world. This one is for the woman who wants honest behind-the-scenes insight into business, lifestyle, decision-making, and the personal lessons that come with building a freedom-led life.In this episode I spill the tea on... Behind the scenes of the Female Startup Summit and why it's still one of my favourite ways to market, collaborate, and build communityThe social media agency experience that left me questioning a lot, and what it taught me about virality, discernment, and trusting myselfA disappointing situation with a past mentor that had me thinking deeply about integrity in businessLittle snapshots from my China trip, including tea houses, West Lake, Chongqing, Chengdu, and the pandasWhat's on my mind now, from filling Female Leadership LIVE London to preparing for my Portugal retreat

This week on Sinica, I welcome journalist and former colleague Chang Che. His recent New Yorker piece "How China Learned to Love the Classics" generated enormous attention. We explore one of the more surprising cultural phenomena in contemporary China: a growing, state-backed enthusiasm for the Greco-Roman classics. We dig into what's actually driving this revival, from the genuine intellectual curiosity of scholars like He Yanxiao, who fell in love with the Odyssey as a Chinese high school student and went on to earn a Chicago PhD, to what might be the more deliberate strategic ambitions of figures like Politburo member Li Shulei and the shadow of philosopher Liu Xiaofeng's Straussianism. We also compare Chang's warmly enchanted 2022 China Project piece on Austrian classicist Leopold Lieb to the politically sharper New Yorker piece four years later — and ask what that shift in tone tells us about what's actually changed. This is an episode about civilizational discourse, soft power, and the strange fate of scholarship when the state decides it finds your obscure passion useful.00:32 – Kaiser introduces the episode from Beijing and reflects on the asymmetry in how the West covers Chinese intellectual curiosity 04:08 – Civilizationist discourse: Spengler, Huntington, and The Civilization Trap 10:56 – Introducing Chang Che and the evolution from his 2022 China Project piece to the New Yorker 15:38 – How Chang first got drawn into the subject: Latin classes, Charlottesville, and young Chinese classicists returning from American PhDs 21:38 – What changed in four years: the state moves from background to foreground 25:28 – Inside the institutional push: what China's "classics departments" actually look like, and who controls the definition of "classics" 31:13 – Xi Jinping's letter to Greek scholars and the move, perhaps, to sever ancient Greece from the modern West 39:57 – Liu Xiaofeng, Leo Strauss, and why Strauss fever gripped Chinese intellectuals after 1989 47:03 – The Padilla Peralta "incident" and the strange porousness between American and Chinese discourse communities on the classics 52:13 – Chenchen Zhang's framework: civilizationist discourse claims difference internationally while enforcing homogeneity domestically 57:30 – He Yanxiao, K-pop, and the idea of "Chinatown classics" 01:07:13 – Where will China's classics revival be in ten years?Paying It Forward: Dongxian Jiang (Fordham) and Simon Luo (Nanyang Technological University)Recommendations: Chang recommends House of the Dragon; Kaiser recommends the Ah-Q Arkestra, led by trombonist Matt Roberts, whose latest album Méiyǒu yìjiàn is on Spotify.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Don't be shy, send me a message!Thomas Felix Creighton shares his experiences from a month in Chengdu (Sichuan Province, China). He previously lived in Shenzhen (Guangdong Province) 2015-2021 and Turkish Cyprus 2001-2008 – he draws on both these experiences as he discusses how experience, language ability, and the company we keep can shape our perceptions of culture. Naturally, he talks about some Chengdu highlights a little, so skip to the end if that's what you are primarily interested… or listen to the whole thing and enjoy the ride! Thomas recommends:Daniel Gaster: his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DanielGaster The jacket review Thomas mentions: https://fromtailorswithlove.co.uk/james-bonds-no-time-to-die-massimo-alba-rain-2-duster-coat-review Daniel Gaster's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danielgaster Caine: Film reviews and a video diary of a visit to small Chinese city, so if you enjoyed this podcast episode, do check these two Youtube videos out:Caine's Anqing (China) diary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qtGLk3cY7A Caine's review of a Chinese movie that delves into the meaning of 'memory' and how it shapes who we are. The review Thomas 100% recommends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6ugQHJw2IdI Support the showhttps://www.albionneverdies.com/

David M. Lampton—“Mike”—is one of America's most distinguished scholars of U.S.–China relations, director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the author of landmark works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. He joins me this week to discuss a striking new Foreign Affairs essay he co-authored with the eminent Chinese international relations scholar Wang Jisi of Peking University: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink.”Written against the backdrop of President Trump's planned visit to China (and before the outbreak of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran), the essay is less a routine policy paper than an urgent intervention — two veteran scholars, one American and one Chinese, throwing a rope across a widening chasm. They argue that strategic rivalry has become self-reinforcing, that the greatest danger is no longer deliberate conflict but accidental war driven by miscalculation and escalation dynamics neither side fully controls, and that a rare, narrow window for “a new normalization” may now be opening.We range across the essay's boldest claims — on Taiwan as the unlikely starting point for stabilization, the corrosive logic of securitization, the ghost of the first Cold War, and the looming talent crisis in serious China studies — in a meaty, substantive conversation.3:39 How the Lampton–Wang Jisi collaboration came together6:31 The division of labor and the essay's unified voice9:15 Wang Jisi's cognitive empathy and his unusual depth of American understanding13:57 The essay's emotional register: veteran scholars and the specter of another Cold War16:32 From reassurance to deterrence—and why deterrence keeps getting harder to maintain25:02 Mirror-image threat narratives as self-fulfilling operating systems32:08 Securitization, the “one-way ratchet,” and whether economic interdependence can be rebuilt39:23 Accidental war: what has changed since Hainan 2001 and Belgrade 199944:16 Where the most damaging choices were made—China's Ukraine pivot, U.S. arms-control withdrawals51:29 The window of opportunity: Trump's China visit, the 4th Plenum, and post-Iran recalculation1:01:30 Taiwan as the counterintuitive starting point for stabilization1:10:03 Collapse fantasies, hubris, and the Pearl Harbor danger of “act now or lose the window”1:13:14 The looming China-talent crisis and the future of the fieldPaying It ForwardMike highlights Rosie Levine, executive director of the U.S.–China Education Trust, where she is leading a major new initiative to expand serious American scholarship in China and encourage Chinese institutions to open their doors wider to foreign researchers and students.RecommendationsMike: The Raider by Stephen R. Platt (Knopf, 2025) — a biography of Major Evans Carlson, the swashbuckling Marine officer who trained with Chinese Communist forces in the 1930s, befriended Zhu De, brought the word “gung-ho” into English, and died in 1947 just in time to miss both the PRC's turn away from liberty and McCarthyism's persecution at home.Kaiser: “How China Learned to Love the Classics,” a New Yorker piece by Chang Che on the remarkable renaissance of interest in Greco-Roman philosophy and literature in contemporary China — and what it says about the world we now inhabit. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today's Episode:In China, when something breaks at home, people usually call a shifu — and that shifu is almost always a man. But in Chengdu, a team of women is changing that. They fix lights, appliances and more. Today, let's talk about the story of the Qiangji Nügong.Membership Preview:You heard the story of the Qiangji Nügong in the MaoMi Chinese episode. But how do they actually speak in real life? In MaoMi Chinese+, we analyse a real interview and help you understand natural spoken Chinese step by step.Support MaoMi & Get exclusive   to premium content!https://www.buzzsprout.com/1426696/subscribe ↗️Transcript and translations are available on https://maomichinese.comInterested in any topics? Leave me a message on: https://maomichinese.com or https://www.instagram.com/maomichinese/?hl=en*Please note that Spotify does not support the membership program.Text me what you think :)Support the show

This week on Sinica, I speak with Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, co-authors of Governing Digital China, a new book that examines how an authoritarian state governs a digital ecosystem it doesn't fully own, can never fully control, and yet fundamentally depends on. Danie — a professor of digital governance at the Hertie School in Berlin and a returning Sinica guest, having joined us way back in 2014 to discuss her earlier book on media commercialization and authoritarian rule — and Ting, associate professor in government and artificial intelligence at the University of Birmingham, together offer a richly empirical account of the triangular relationship between the Chinese state, major platform companies, and ordinary internet users. Rather than treating firms as mere instruments of party control or citizens as passive subjects of surveillance, they develop a framework they call "popular corporatism," which captures how bargaining, incentives, and user preferences shape what is and isn't permissible in China's digital spaces — including the endlessly misunderstood social credit system.4:32 — The digital dilemma: how digital platforms simultaneously empower economic development and create political risk for the party-state — a tension that isn't unique to authoritarian regimes7:45 — Why the command-and-control model falls short: platforms require technical expertise and user engagement the state lacks, and firms like Tencent and Sina have real leverage as a result11:41 — Popular corporatism explained: why users — including the "silent majority" of lurkers — must be foregrounded in any account of China's digital governance, and how firms become state "consultants" and "insiders"21:09 — The survey: GPS-based nationally representative sampling, how to desensitize politically sensitive questions, and why this kind of research can no longer be conducted in China27:22 — Lurkers vs. discussants: the 90-9-1 rule and the counterintuitive finding that users who perceive more openness on platforms like WeChat and Weibo report higher political trust in the central government35:40 — Functional liberalization: why partial openness should be understood as governance strategy, not mere concession — and what the fandom-community doxing wars illustrate about that39:23 — The social credit system: what it actually is, what it is not, and why the Black Mirror version is a myth42:38 — Two subsystems, one misunderstood system: the financial/commercial credit infrastructure, the local-government behavioral programs, and how Sesame Credit and court blacklists actually fit together46:20 — The privacy paradox and political trust: why convenience routinely overrides stated privacy preferences — and why where Alipay is most embedded, residents trust the state most52:42 — Stability, exportability, and the Orwell-versus-Huxley question: what preconditions popular corporatism requires, which other developmental states it might apply to, and why China's digital governance is better understood as a coercion-cooption balancing actPaying It ForwardTing Luo recommends Ning Leng, assistant professor at Georgetown University and author of Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party State in China.Daniela Stockmann recommends Felix Garten, postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School, whose work examines how Chinese tech companies behave when operating in regulatory environments outside China — including the EU, Malaysia, and Singapore.RecommendationsDaniela: The Legend of the Female General 《锦月如歌》, a Chinese historical drama available on YouTube with English subtitles, especially for anyone interested in internal martial arts and martial heroines in Chinese popular culture.Ting Luo：Bordeaux, France — specifically, just going there and drinking excellent wine.Kaiser: Two Substack newsletters for following China's relationship with the Middle East, especially as the American-Israeli war against Iran continues to unfold: Jonathan Fulton's China-MENA Newsletter and Jesse Marks's Coffee in the Desert See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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't0:09 — Why 网民 (wǎngmín) took root in China as a concept of digital citizenship0:13 — The early Chinese internet: more open than we remember, but not as free as the myth suggests0:15 — Ma Baoli: closeted cop to CEO of China's largest gay dating app, and the Gay Talese reporting strategy0:20 — Lan Yu, Beijing Story, and the film that became a coming-out moment for a generation of queer men0:22 — Pragmatism at the heart of the dance: how individuals and the state negotiated the internet together0:28 — Lu Pin and Feminist Voices: from "playing boundary ball" to sudden exile0:35 — Stanley Chen Qiufan and the state's attempt to co-opt science fiction for nationalist ends0:43 — The generational split in Chinese sci-fi: Liu Cixin's cosmic scale vs. the near-future unease of Chen Qiufan and Hao Jingfang0:46 — Hip hop's arc: from underground scenes in Chengdu and Beijing to The Rap of China and sudden constraint0:51 — Eric Liu, the Weibo censor: humanizing the firewall from the inside0:55 — Common prosperity, Wang Huning, and the moral panic behind the crackdown on "effeminate" culture0:59 — 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 Oracle1:07 — What it means to be free: how the book expanded Yi-Ling's sense of what freedoms people actually wantPaying it forward: Zeyi Yang, technology reporter at WIRED, and co-author (with Louise Matsakis) of the excellent tech x China newsletter Made in ChinaRecommendations: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.

It's Tuesday, February 24th, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Kevin Swanson and Timothy Reed Early Rain Covenant Church Hit Again China Aid reports of more communist persecution of the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, China.   Pastor Wang Yi is entering his seventh year in prison -- of a nine-year sentence.   But now, elder Li Yingqiang and his wife have been arrested for their commitment to Christ. His wife was released on bail, and encouraged friends on social media that “God's arrangements are always good.” Multiple churches in North America, and an organization in Australia, have designated the ninth of each month as a “Day of Fasting and Prayer for the Persecuted Church in China.”  Mexican National Guardsmen killed the most wanted cartel leader in the country Mexico is in turmoil this week, after Mexican National Guardsmen killed the most wanted cartel leader in the country, Nemesio Cervantes, a criminal known as “El Mencho.” So far, 34 drug cartel members are dead. Sadly, another 25 federal troops were killed in the ongoing conflict. European immigration numbers down Immigration numbers have dropped sharply in Europe. Britain records only 200,000 immigrants in 2025, down from 900,000 in 2023.  Eurostat's Migration and Asylum report indicates a 13% drop in asylum applicants to European Union countries in 2024. That's the first drop since 2020.  And October 2025 numbers indicate a 28% drop compared with October 2024. European Parliament refused to affirm only women can get pregnant The Parliament of the European Union voted 340-141 to artificially redefine the definition of what a woman is. The Parliament also refused to affirm the biological fact “that only women can become pregnant.” German Parliament member Tomasz Froelich blasted the new guidance. He said, “This isn't about courtesy or pronouns. It's about law, language, and the destruction of biological clarity in public policy.” The new law opens the continent up to “the full recognition of trans women as women,” directly opposing God's created gender roles. In Matthew 19:4, Jesus asked, “Have you not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female?” Reform UK lacked traction; Will Restore Britain thrive? As The Worldview reported on February 19th, Britain has a new populist political party called the Restore Britain party. The previous nationalist party, Reform UK, gained 14% of the vote in the 2024 election, but only holds eight seats which is a little over 1% of the seats in parliament. Back in 2002, the UK populist parties had only 2% of the national vote. More debt and more inflation for the U.S. In President Donald Trump's first year in office in his second term, the US Debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio spiked to 122%. That's the highest since Joe Biden's first year in office during the COVID spend-a-thon.   Today's U.S. federal debt stands at $38.7 trillion — exactly double what it was 10 years ago during the first Trump term, and quadruple the size of the debt 18 years ago during the 2008 recession.   Also in economic news, despite all the political noise and hand waving coming out of Washington, inflation is up in the U.S. The core Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation index is up to 3% — back up to where it was two years ago.   The GDP inflator reached 3.7%, the worst it's been in three years. And yet, the average 30-year mortgage rate has dropped to 6%, That's the lowest it's been in two and a half years. Deuteronomy 15:6 ties in here. It says, “For the LORD your God will bless you just as He promised you; you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow; you shall reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over you.” Kansas legislature overturns veto on transgender Law KANSAS LEADER: “The motion prevails and the bill passes.” (Gavel comes down) And with that announcement, the Kansas Legislature, dominated by Republicans, voted to overturn Democratic Governor Laura Kelly's veto on a bill that banned men, including men pretending to be women, from entering women's spaces. The Kansas House voted 87-37 and the Kansas Senate voted 31-9 to overturn the veto.  Republican Kansas State Senator Virgil Peck, Jr. spoke from the Senate floor. PECK: “I'm amazed that we're not hearing from more of those who are, if you will, feminists standing up for young ladies.” The bill allows for criminal charges to be brought against biological men who intrude on women's bathrooms and locker rooms, and holds to the birth gender or biological definition of male and female. 118,000 applications submitted for tax-funded school vouchers Texas parents have submitted 118,000 applications since Texas Freedom Education Accounts opened up on February 4th. The Houston public school district is looking at closing down 12 of its schools for the next school year, reports The Chronicle. The Texas Homeschool Coalition estimates there are 500,000 homeschooled students in the state. Add to that 422,000 children enrolled in Texas charter schools, and another 279,000 children enrolled in Texas private schools. That adds up to 1,200,000 Texas students not attending public school, representing 21% of school-aged children in Texas. Study reveals cancer linked to COVID-19 shot A new scientific study has linked the rise in certain types of cancer to the mRNA COVID-19 shots.  The study, published by Oncotarget, marks the spike in cancers, including highly aggressive cancers, in correspondence with certain lipid nanoparticles that were in the COVID vaccines.  The study evidenced that the modRNA in the COVID shot, along with the lipid nanoparticles, could “affect various tissues and organs, including the bone marrow and other blood-forming organs.”  The study also found a link between rising mortalities worldwide and the rollout of the COVID shot. In one Italian province, for example, “vaccination was associated with a 23% increased risk of cancer hospitalization after receiving one or more doses.”  U.S. Men's Hockey team wins gold in overtime And finally … (Audio of Olympic theme song) Norway has captured the highest number of gold medals in the 2026 Winter Olympics this year — taking home 18 medals (so far). The United States comes in second with 12 golds. That's a record for America — this time including a top medal for the Men's and Women's Hockey competition.   The U.S. Men's Hockey Team won the gold medal for the first time in 46 years in a 2-1 overtime win on the final golden goal knocked in by Jack Hughes, who played center. Listen. ANNOUNCER: “Jack Hughes wins it. The golden goal for the United States. For the first time since the 1980 Miracle, the United States takes the gold.” Jack will be remembered for having taken a high stick and losing multiple teeth before scoring the winning goal. Close And that's The Worldview on this Tuesday, February 24th, in the year of our Lord 2026. Follow us on X or subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com.  Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ. Extra print stories Elderly farmer refuses to sell farm to data company 86-year-old farmer Mervin Raudabaugh refused to sell his Pennsylvania farm to data company developers, even though his farm was valued at over $15 million. Raudabaugh has lived in Silver Springs Township in Cumberland County and been a farmer for more than 60 years. He exclaimed, “I was not interested in destroying my farms. That was the bottom line. It really wasn't so much the economic end of it. I just didn't want to see these two farms destroyed.”  Raudabaugh instead sold his property for a much lower price to the Silver Springs Township's Land Preservation Program, which protects farmland, woodland, and wetlands. He explained, “I love this land. It's been my life. And I realized… if it wasn't built on or dug up, another set of families could live here—and that's what I wanted to do. And I got it done.” Micah 4:4 promises, “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.” 10 major British cities have Muslim mayors 46 million Muslims now live in Europe, as migrants from third world countries continue overwhelming the European system.  Muslims are taking over political offices in European nations, including in the United Kingdom, where 10 major cities now have Muslim mayors. The massive influx in illegal immigration to Europe, while condemned and hated by its people, is being celebrated by its leaders. Newsmax reports, “They've chosen to stand with radical Muslims over their own people. It's because of all of these reasons these countries are falling apart and failing as the attack on Western civilization continues.” Muslim infiltration has also reached the United States, evidenced by Muslim influence in states like Texas and Minnesota. Chase Bank admits to debanking Trump JPMorgan Bank has admitted to freezing President Donald Trump's bank account following the January 6, 2021 protests. Trump had sued the bank for $5 billion in damages. The admission came after JPMorgan initially dodged the question of whether it debanked the President, and is yet another confirmation that conservatives were in fact targeted and persecuted under the Biden administration.  CNBC reported, “This is not the first lawsuit Trump has filed against a big bank, alleging that he was debanked. The Trump Organization sued credit card giant Capital One in March 2025 for similar reasons and allegations.” However, some have pointed out that the Trump administration is working towards digital currencies, which run a large risk of being controlled.

Show Notes: Elijah Siegler recalls the day of graduation on June 5, 1992, and the prominent promotion of the movie Patriot Games, which seemed at the time an ominous omen, as graduates began to navigate their post-grad journey. Elijah shares his advice to his kids and students: "You don't need to have your whole life post-college figured out. You just need one cool thing lined up, and that'll lead to another cool thing." Elijah describes his first post-graduation job as the editor of the Greece and Turkey book for Let's Go travel guides, which he found out about due to a last-minute cancellation. A Ticket to Israel and Traveling Adventures Elijah had previously been a researcher for Let's Go Pacific Northwest in the summer of 1989. After graduation, Elijah moved back to his parents' house in Toronto, Canada, and spent time reading and applying for jobs. Elijah cashed in his graduation gift from his grandparents, a ticket to Israel, and spent six months in the Middle East, including a solo tour of the Mediterranean. Elijah used his own guidebook for the Greece and Turkey parts of his trip and mentions Gary Bass, a classmate who edited Let's Go Israel and Egypt. Exploring the Middle East Elijah enjoyed both Greece and Turkey, finding Turkey to be one of the great travel destinations of the world. He highlights the unique experiences in Istanbul and Cappadocia, including staying in cave hotels and visiting a center for Sufi culture. Elijah reflects on his visit to Syria, noting the cultural richness and the sadness of seeing the country torn apart by civil war. Elijah moved back to Toronto, spent time with family, and eventually found a job in the non-profit sector in New York. Taking a Slow Boat to China Elijah describes his temporary job in New York, living in a basement in Chelsea, and the cultural experience of living in New York City. He recounts his decision to travel to Asia, including a trip to Japan, where he received a telegram about a job in China. Elijah took a slow boat to China from Kobe to Shanghai and then trains to Chengdu, where he taught English for nine months. He shares his experiences in Chengdu, including teaching and traveling around China, and his interest in Taoism. Opening the Door to the World's Parliament of Religions Elijah attended the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in the fall of 1993, which marked the 100th anniversary of the original event in 1893. He volunteered at the event, met various religious leaders, and was inspired to study religion academically. Elijah decided to pursue a graduate degree in religious studies, applying to various programs and eventually enrolling at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He describes the rigorous Religious Studies Program at UCSB and his initial research on Taoism in America. A Focus on Taoism Elijah explains the concept of Taoism, the indigenous religion of China, and its focus on the Tao, a non-personal divine force. He discusses the transmission of Taoist ideas to America through popular culture, such as the TV show Kung Fu and the book The Tao of Pooh. Elijah interviewed Chinese Taoist masters who came to America and taught Taoist techniques, such as martial arts and meditation. He completed his PhD on Taoism in America and began his academic career, moving from assistant to associate to full professor. The Americanization of Taoism Elijah contrasts Taoism with Buddhism, noting that Taoism does not have a missionary impulse and is spread indirectly through practices like martial arts. He discusses the Americanization of Taoism and the role of popular culture in shaping American Taoism. Elijah shares his research on the authenticity of Taoist masters in America and the concerns within the American Taoist community about who is a genuine master. He mentions the organizational structure of Taoism in China and the challenges of defining authenticity in American Taoism. Religion and Television Elijah discusses his research on religion and television, contrasting it with the study of religion and film. He argues that television's open narrative format allows for the exploration of religious change over time. Elijah highlights the religious themes in popular TV shows and how they reflect and shape American spirituality. He plans to publish a book on his theory of religion and television combining his previous essays on the topic. A Spiritual Journey Elijah shares his personal spiritual journey, growing up in a secular Jewish household and raising his children as Jewish. He expresses a strong affinity for Taoism but does not call himself a Taoist due to the formal initiation required in Taoist traditions. Elijah teaches a class on spirituality, exploring the rise of "spiritual but not religious" individuals and the history of spirituality in America. He emphasizes the importance of interfaith dialogue and understanding different religious traditions, both in his teaching and in his community involvement. Promoting Interfaith Understanding Elijah describes his involvement in the Charleston Interfaith Council, organizing cultural and educational programming to promote interfaith understanding. He organized a  Jewish Muslim Dinner in 2017, bringing together Jewish and Muslim communities for a shared meal and conversation, which has evolved into the Spirited Brunch, a self-guided tour of different sacred spaces in Charleston with snacks, promoting interfaith dialogue and cultural exchange. He encourages others to replicate these initiatives in their own communities, emphasizing the importance of interfaith connections and understanding. Harvard Reflections Elijah  was in the comparative study of religion that was drawn from other departments in the Divinity School, and he mentions professor Diana Eck, who was the chair of that committee on the comparative study of religion. She started something called the pluralism project in 1991 and that summer, Elijah was in the first cohort of student employees for that so I actually got paid to go to Los Angeles and study religious diversity there and inter religious dialog, and in particular, Buddhism.  Timestamps: 01:30 Initial Career Steps and Travel Experiences  04:06: Exploring Greece, Turkey, and Syria  09:03: Moving to New York and Asia  12:10: Attending the World's Parliament of Religions  15:21: Research on Taoism in America  17:31: Taoism in America and Its Cultural Impact  28:59: Religion and Television 31:49: Personal Spiritual Journey and Teaching  39:29: Interfaith Initiatives in Charleston  Links: Faculty Bio: https://charleston.edu/religious-studies/faculty-staff/siegler-elijah.php Spirited Brunch: https://thefoodsection.com/spirited-brunch-101/ The Musical: https://www.happylandmusical.com/ Featured Nonprofit: The featured nonprofit of this week's is brought to you by Tobey Collins who reports:  "Hi. I'm Tobey Collins, class of 1992. The featured nonprofit of this episode of The 92 Report is the Barnstable Land Trust, or BLT. Barnstable Land Trust is a land conservation organization dedicated to preserving green space in the town of Barnstable in Cape Cod, and enhancing access to green space for the broader community. BLT, stewards more than 1250 acres of land in Barnstable, and is always on the lookout for new opportunities. I'm proud to have served as a board member for the Barnstable Land Trust since 2022 as well as having been a regular donor going back more than 15 years. I love helping keep Cape Cod beautiful for generations to come. You can learn more about their work at B, l, t.org, and now here's Will Bachman with this week's episode.  To find out more about their work, visit: www.blt.org.  This episode on The 92 Report: https://92report.com/podcast/episode-161-elij…de-the-classroom/   *AI generated show notes and transcript

ITP - 140 A Liverpool-born educator who once resisted teaching ends up saying yes to South Korea—and never looks back. Ken Bence traces an 18+ year arc from public-school TEFL to PGCE, then into a fast-growing bilingual school in Shanghai where rapid expansion pulled him into hiring, standards alignment, and early leadership. Seeking the IB bridge, he lands in Kuwait and grows into K–12 instructional coaching with the help of strong mentors, then tackles leadership fairs, multiple offers, and a vice head role that drops him back into China just as COVID reshapes borders and daily life. The journey continues through Shenzhen and Chengdu, a doctorate alongside principal work, and a brief interim senior leadership post in Budapest—plus practical rituals that make each new country feel like home: spices, quality bedding, and a folder of notes that keeps the purpose front and center.(00:00) Introduction to Ken Bence and His Journey(02:35) Cultural Shock and First Impressions in South Korea(06:53) Transitioning to Leadership Roles in Education(12:40) Exploring New Opportunities in Kuwait(17:37) Navigating Job Fairs and Networking in International Teaching(22:48) Navigating Career Pathways in Education(24:31) Midway-Contact Break(27:06) Cultural Shifts: Returning to China During COVID(29:59) Transitioning to Chengdu: New Challenges and Opportunities(32:55) Career Baby Steps: Progressing Through Education Roles(34:19) New Beginnings: Moving to Budapest(36:20) Preparing for Change: Leaving Budapest(40:29) The Emotional Journey of Teaching AbroadThe International Teacher Podcast is a bi-weekly discussion with experts in international education. New Teachers, burned out local teachers, local School Leaders, International school Leadership, current Overseas Teachers, and everyone interested in international schools can benefit from hearing stories and advice about living and teaching overseas.Additional Gems Related to Our Show:Greg's Favorite Video From Living Overseas - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQWKBwzF-hw⁠Signup to be our guest  ⁠https://calendly.com/itpexpat/itp-interview?month=2025-01⁠Our Website⁠ -  ⁠https://www.itpexpat.com/⁠Our FaceBook Group - ⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/itpexpat⁠⁠JPMint Consulting Website  - ⁠https://www.jpmintconsulting.com/⁠Greg's Personal YouTube Channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs1B3Wc0wm6DR_99OS5SyzvuzENc-bBdO⁠Books By Greg "the Single Guy":⁠International Teacher Guide: Finding the "Right Fit" 2nd Edition (2025)⁠ | by Gregory Lemoine M.Ed.⁠⁠"International Teaching: The Best-kept Secret in Education"⁠⁠ | by Gregory Lemoine M.Ed.Featured APP:https://apps.apple.com/app/6755244840 Who's That? Name & Face Trainer  (Nov 21, 2025 ): For specialists and teachers that can't remember all 180 or more of their student's faces and names. Free. Local Data Only. Greg uses it daily to train his brain on 650 students this year.

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 buildingPaying it forward: Katrina Northrop; Grace Shao and her AI Proem newsletterRecommendations: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 LiuSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, Jared chats with Jack Mullinkosson, whose Chinese-learning journey runs from a Vice China documentary set… to living with a Chinese immigrant family in suburban California… to studying in Chengdu… and now biking from Chengdu to Hanoi.Jack got started the way many learners do: by feeling left out. On set, surrounded by Chinese speakers, he noticed how differently the foreigners who spoke Mandarin were treated. Chinese looked like a superpower, and he wanted it.With plenty of downtime during the shoot, Jack began studying characters and survival phrases, boosted by the classic “Your Chinese is so good!” encouragement (even when it wasn't). That early confidence turned into a full-on obsession.Then COVID hit, and Jack found a creative workaround. Back in the U.S., he made a flyer in Chinese offering to live with a Chinese family in exchange for helping their kids with English. The result: four months in a Rancho Cucamonga “McMansion” shared by multiple Chinese families, nightly Mandarin dinners, and a crash course in immigrant hustle and real-world language practice.Along the way, Jack:Read Mandarin Companion graded readers to build his foundationUsed shadowing to level up tones and pronunciationLooked for chances to speak—even when it was inconvenientTurned everyday errands into “Chinese missions”After a few years in Brazil, where he learned Portuguese and became a remote software engineer, Jack returned to China with a new goal: connect Chinese to his career. He now makes videos in Chengdu, capturing spontaneous conversations with park shūshu fitness legends, friendly aunties selling plum wine, and locals who light up when a foreigner speaks Mandarin.And one of the coolest payoffs? While traveling in Spain, Jack used Chinese to order food from a Chinese restaurant owner when neither of them shared English or Spanish.Links from the episode:Jack Mullinkosson | InstagramMandarin Companion Graded Readers

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 framework8:15 – Assessing the economic rebalancing goals: reindustrialization and tariffs15:30 – Technology competition: export controls and AI leadership23:45 – Supply chain security and strategic dependence challenges31:20 – The deterioration of diplomatic and military-to-military channels39:50 – The ally and partner problem: how Trump's approach undermines his own goals47:15 – Global standing and American credibility in the Trump era52:30 – Paying it forward: The Lost in Translation series at BrookingsPaying it forward:Lost in Translation Series (Brookings Global China Project)Recommendations:Pattie: To Dare Mighty Things by Michael O'HanlonKaiser: Stalingrad by Vasily GrossmanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Minh Tran (https://www.couldabeenatthe.club/), Afra Wang (https://afra.work/) and Lauren Teixeira (https://lrntex.substack.com/) join me to talk about Chinamaxxing — the growing fascination among younger Americans with Chinese short-form content. We discuss why these videos feel so appealing in a moment of pessimism at home, how Trump's America shapes that gaze, and where the “shiny,” abundance-driven vision of China starts to break down. We also get into what short-form can't show and review Chinese films and hip-hop! Chapters 00:00 Cultural Exchange and Chinese Short Form Content 08:14 Influencers and the Appeal of the China Aesthetic 14:13 Contradictions in the Chinese Narrative 25:06 Recommendations for Exploring Chinese Culture 33:33 Jia Zhangke's Cinematic Vision 38:12 Chengdu hip hop 41:48 The Future of Chinese Cultural Products 42:56 Censorship and the Dynamics of Domestic Entertainment in China Outtro Music: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 constraint8:03 – The vibe shift and Trump's “reptilian feel” for American exhaustion with confrontation10:52 – Three scenarios: soft landing, hard split, or uneasy calm through mutual constraint16:30 – Beijing's bet: managing Trump versus managing whoever comes next26:46 – 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 for42:18 – Taiwan as the most dangerous variable and where theory meets practice46:58 – Lack of institutional guardrails and the risks of Trump's personalistic foreign policyPaying it forward:Audrye Wong (USC)Recommendations:Ryan: The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China's Communist Reformer by Robert SuettingerKaiser: 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 headwindsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we look at the the final part of an interview with a Chinese pastor recently released from prison, followed by some specific prayer requests for members and friends of Early Rain Church who have recently been arrested and harrassed. In China, it seems, persecution never sleeps. Let's pray for our brothers and sisters, as bound with them! I'm your China travel guide, Missionary Ben. Follow me on Twitter/X (@chinaadventures) where I present a new Chinese city or county to pray for every single day. Please send any questions or comments to a new, secure email: chinacompass@privacyport.com. Everything else can be found at PrayGiveGo.us! Why the Prison Pulpit? The goal is to remind people to pray for persecuted believers as Hebrews 13:3 teaches: “Remember those who are in prison, as bound with them.” We’ve looked at Wang Yi and Early Rain Church’s writings in the aftermath of their arrest and attack in 2018, but I’ve also regularly turned to other persecuted ministers who have gone before, such as Richard Wurmbrand, to give us a voice literally from prison. Interview with an Imprisoned Chinese Pastor (Part III) https://chinapartnership.org/blog/2026/01/persecuted-church/ Early Rain Church Prayer Requests (January 25-31) This week, we will pray for believers associated with Early Rain Covenant Church. Earlier this month, there was a series of large scale arrests similar to those in 2018. Seven church members were arrested and confined, while five other members were brought in for questioning and then released. Several of the people arrested are elders of the church. Pray for those who have been arrested and their families… Pray for brothers and sisters in Chengdu and Deyang who have been taken away, are missing, or are under surveillance at home. Pray for God to grant them peace and protection, and to experience God’s presence and strength amidst uncertainty and hardship. Especially pray for the families and children to experience God’s comfort and love in suffering. Pray for the Lord to preserve brothers and sisters in the church, to love one another, and to be united and show the witness of Christ in times of trouble. Pray for Sister Z, who was taken to jail with her husband. Their two children were taken in with them, and spent the first night at the police station. Now they have been temporarily placed with their grandmother. Pray for a seminary student who was arrested and beaten in Chengdu recently. Pray for God’s comfort and grace to be with him, that he would know the presence of the Lord even in suffering. Pray for comfort and strength for his wife, and for him to be released soon. Continue to pray for Pastor Wang Yi, who was arrested in 2018 and continues to serve time in prison. Pray for the Lord’s presence to be with him in prison, that he may even be a witness to those with him in jail, and for his family and church on the outside. Follow China Compass Thank you for listening! Subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! There’s also a donation link at PrayforChina.us if you’d like to support our China ministry. For everything else, visit PrayGiveGo.us. Hebrews 13:3: Remember those who are in prison, “as bound with them”!

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 showerPaying 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 AnsarySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 tradeoffRecommendations: Ruixue: Piao Liang Peng You (film by Geng Jun); Stoner (a novel by John Williams) Hongbin: The Dictator's HandbookKaiser: Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field; Black Pill by Elle ReeveSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.