This week, my narration of a longish essay about my recently-concluded four-week trip to Dalian and, more importantly, Beijing — my first time back in the city I called home for so long since the COVID pandemic. If you prefer to read rather than listen, you can find the essay — free for everyone this week — on the Substack. I hope you enjoy this! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ..read more

I'm trying something different: totally unscripted and very, very lightly edited recordings grabbed on the go where I happen to be. For the inaugural episode, I've got Wang Zichen, the author of the amazing Pekingnology newsletter on Substack, as well as the man behind the Center for China and Globalization's newsletter "The East is Read." Hear Zichen's origin story, his approach to publishing Pekingnology, the skinny on his new Got China show with Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang, as well as his take on what we can expect from the Third Plenum. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Cali ..read more

This week on Sinica, I chat with University of Melbourne transnational historian Pete Millwood about his outstanding book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations. The road to normalization is told too often with a focus only on the Nixon-Kissinger opening and official diplomatic efforts culminating in the final recognition of the PRC in January 1979, but there's much more to the story than that, and Millwood tells it deftly, drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with many of those directly involved. 3:33 — Transn ..read more

This week on Sinica, in a show recorded on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions, historian Adam Tooze joins to chat about what the U.S. wants from China, China's vaulting green energy ambitions, and much more. Don't miss this episode: Tooze gets pretty darn spicy! 3:13 How Adam launched Chartbook in Chinese  5:37 How Dalian and Beijing have changed since Adam’s last visit in 2019 9:01 What the West wants from China, the Thucydides Trap, 15:11 The trajectory of China’s economic development and why it’s hard for the West to reconcile with ..read more

This week on Sinica, Part 2 of the interview with anthropologist Stevan Harrell, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, about his magnum opus, An Ecological History of China. Be sure to listen to Part 1 first, as many important framing concepts are discussed in that episode! 1:44 “– The Four Horsemen of Ecopocalypse” and ecological disasters during the Mao period, and the story of the double-wheel, double-bladed plow 11:00 – The effect of the introduction of water systems and fertilizers on agricultural production  21:03 – “The replumbing of China:” The South-North ..read more

This week on Sinica, Part 1 of a two-part podcast with Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Washington. Steve's groundbreaking book An Ecological History of Modern China represents the culmination of a professional lifetime of work in disparate fields. It synthesizes ideas from geography, earth science, biology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and more. It's a book that will make you change the way you think not just about China, but about history more broadly, and about resilience in natural and social systems. In this first part, we focus on som ..read more

This week on Sinica, the highly-regarded writer Peter Hessler joins to talk about his new book, out July 9: Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. Over 20 years after teaching with the Peace Corps in Fuling (the subject of his first book, Rivertown, Pete returns to China to teach at Sichuan University in Chengdu. He writes about the two cohorts of students, with whom he has maintained extensive contacts, to offer fascinating insights into how China has changed across this momentous period with touching, deeply human stories. 3:47 – Why Pete couldn’t teach in Fuling again 6:56 – How Pete stayed in ..read more

This week on Sinica, a conversation that I moderated on May 30th called “Assessing the Impact of US-China Rivalry on Ukraine and Taiwan,” put on by the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China. The main organizer was my friend Vita Golod, who is the chair of the Ukrainian Association of Sinologists. The panelists are: Dmytro Burtsev, a Junior Fellow at A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Da Wei, Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy and Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University. Emilian Kava ..read more

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Jonathan Chatwin, author of a new book about Deng Xiaoping's "Southern Tour" of early 1992 — a pivotal event that renewed a commitment to economic reforms after they'd stalled following 1989, and seized the initiative from conservatives in the Chinese leadership. The book is called The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future. 2:10 – Why Jonathan focused on the Southern Tour, and the narratives surrounding it in China 7:19 – How the events of ’89 influenced Deng’s thinking  11:08 – How the political fates of Hu Y ..read more

This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to welcome — my brother! Jay Kuo is a Broadway writer & producer, and the man behind the terrific U.S. politics-focused Substack newsletter The Status Kuo. In a previous life, from 1996 to 2000, he was also really active in Beijing's gay community, just at the time when homosexuality was being decriminalized and was stepping out of the shadows. We talk about how it all took off. Jay also puts on his other hat to talk about how China figures into American politics with the election less than five months away, and about the legal standing of the TikTok dive ..read more