Sinica Podcast

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk, both professors at the University of British Columbia, about their translation of Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection (骗经 piànjīng), by Zhang Yingyu 张应俞. Anyone who has lived in China in recent decades will understand intuitively why a podcast ostensibly about current affairs in China would want to talk about a 16th-century book...

The dominant narrative in the U.S. about China’s relationship with the small northeastern neighbor is relentlessly one-sided. For decades, American officials have referenced Mao Zedong’s famous (though slightly mistranslated) description that North Korea and China are as close as “lips and teeth...

“Can a society which has not...come to terms with its own past go on to have a successful future, or do the sins of the past somehow...come back to haunt it and reexpress themselves in some mutant form?” This is a question that the seasoned historian and scholar of China, Orville Schell, has been thinking and publishing academic articles about in recent years, and is now writing a book on...

This week, our featured topic is Chinese students overseas. There are about 800,000 of them, and according to China’s Ministry of Education, nearly 80 percent choose to return to China soon after finishing their education. This group is referred to as “sea turtles” (海龟; a pun on 海归 hǎiguī, meaning “to return from overseas”) for their ambitious swim to and from faraway shores...

There is no question that China has seen a miracle of poverty reduction. According to the World Bank, since the economic reforms that started in 1978, economic growth in China has “lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty...

This week, we have an inadvertently timely podcast on China’s authoritarian revival. Mere days before the episode’s recording, Chinese President Xi Jinping set the stage to extend his power to rule China indefinitely...

"Having read hundreds and hundreds of these cases, I have decided that I'm never going to drive in China." That is what Benjamin Liebman, the director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University, concluded after his extensive review of laws relating to traffic violations in Hubei Province. Geoffrey Sant, a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney, notes that traffic accidents in China are substantially more fatal than traffic accidents in the U.S. While the U.S...

  “We hear, in the media and in comments by politicians, a lot of very glib statements that oversimplify China, that suggest all of China is one thing or one way,” says Michael Szonyi, a professor of Chinese history and director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. China, of course, is as complicated as — if not more complicated than — any other country, and misunderstandings about it among Americans are both common and consequential...

Outside observers typically view China’s media as utterly shackled by the bonds of censorship, unable to critique the government or speak truth to power in any meaningful sense. In part, this is true — censorship and other pressures do create “no-go” zones for journalists in China, as well as gray zones that sometimes rapidly turn red. But Maria Repnikova, a professor at Georgia State University, believes that the critical role of media in China is underappreciated...

China, as we say at the beginning of each Sinica Podcast episode, is a nation that is reshaping the world. But what does that reshaping really look like, and how does — and should — the world react to China’s role in globalization? Few are better placed to answer these questions than Kishore Mahbubani, a veteran former diplomat from Singapore who recently ended a stint as dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy...