The Little Red Podcast

For our fifth anniversary, we’ve thrown the floor open to our audience.   This month we’re doing an Agony Aunt edition for China nerds. We've gathered your burning China questions and then hunted down the world’s leading experts in search of answers. From support for the government to statistical elasticity, from clothing habits to tea-drinking titillations right at the very top, we are parrying listener questions...

China’s once untouchable tech billionaires suddenly find themselves in the unfamiliar position of being roughed up the state. Just at the time when the Party needs its homegrown tech firms to sell Xi Jinping’s new ‘lovable’ image of China, previously toothless regulators are issuing billion dollar fines and ordering companies to restructure—or else...

For a Party chosen by history, the CCP spends a lot of money targeting foreign media outlets and governments. In this episode, a panel of researchers discusses why China—or any autocracy—cares what the world thinks of it, and how it tries to shape its global image. We ask whether the CCP’s media outreach and lobbying operations bear fruit, or are readily seen through as clumsy propaganda...

China is home to 661 million online gamers, easily the world’s biggest market. Cities like Shanghai now boast some of the world’s most talented game developers. Yet the Chinese government has long been uncomfortable with online games, fretting about Internet addiction and young people wasting their energies on ‘spiritual opium’, leaving their schoolbooks for seedy Internet cafes...

China is now remoulding Hong Kong at speed.  Forty-seven Democratic politicians and activists have been arrested on national security charges for participating in last year’s primary polls, and only people Beijing deems ‘patriots’ allowed to run for office.  One prominent pro-Beijing figure has even warned that the electoral reforms risk ‘killing the patient’...

With the world’s attention focused on industrial-scale oppression in Xinjiang, developments in Tibet are passing beneath the radar.  But activists are warning of a full-spectrum assault on the Tibetan way of life, as Tibetan language teaching is outlawed and urbanisation campaigns relocate nomads from their ancestral pastures...

This month we’re delving into boys’ love or BL fiction. From niche online novels to TV shows such as the Netflix fantasy epic The Untamed, their storylines revolve around male relationships with a tinge of sexual tension. But there’s a quirk. It’s not gay fiction; the stories are often written by women for women...

China's five thousand years of history has become a fact, repeated ad nauseum by the state-run media and Chinese textbooks alike, but could it be a national myth?   In his recently published book, The Invention of China, Bill Hayton argues that “China” was cooked up by a small group of intellectuals who brought notions of sovereignty, citizenry and borders back from Europe just over 100 years ago, using a 'pick-and-mix' approach to history to invent their own past...

A quick glance at the headlines suggest that only one man seems to count in today’s China – the Chairman of Everything, as he’s been dubbed - Communist party leader President Xi Jinping. He’s helmed China’s reemergence as a world power through his aggressive foreign policy, while consolidating power at home...

Last year China's international state-run broadcaster, CGTN, spent millions opening a state-of-the-art London headquarters. Just one year on, it may already be scrambling for an exit strategy. CGTN may even lose its licence in the United Kingdom after the British regulator found it breached the broadcasting code...