The Little Red Podcast

We’re bringing you a second emergency podcast from Hong Kong, which has seen more record protests over the weekend. According to organisers, two million people—nearly one-third of Hong Kong residents—marched on Sunday, despite the Hong Kong government’s promise to shelve its unpopular extradition bill...

We bring you an emergency podcast from Hong Kong, one day after extraordinary police violence saw 79 people injured by baton charges, rubber bullets and over 150 rounds of tear gas. This dark turn comes only a few days after one million Hong Kongers—one in seven residents—took to the streets to protest proposed legal amendments that would allow citizens to be extradited to mainland China...

Tuesday June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the deadly crackdown ordered by Deng Xiaoping, which killed hundreds – maybe thousands – of people in Beijing and Chengdu. While the campaign to erase all memory of the event continues, explosive new information has emerged in the lead up to the anniversary.  It reveals new details about resistance to the crackdown among the military and how the Communist Party managed the aftermath of Tiananmen...

With Chinese citizens’ lives increasingly coded into data streams, the question of who owns this data and how it gets used is largely up to private companies. They control massive volumes of personal information and are tasked by Xi Jinping with everything from astroturfing public opinion to monitoring one-to-one chat in real time. As these companies expand beyond China’s borders, their operations and relationship with the Chinese state bear further scrutiny...

Hate mail, death threats and shadowy surveillance are facts of life for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists, five years after the Umbrella movement brought a million people onto the streets calling for greater democracy.   Since then, 48 legal cases have been brought against 32 different activists, often on colonial-era public order offences...

The Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping has emerged from the annual parliamentary meetings facing a rough year ahead.  China's economy is growing at its slowest in nearly three decades, amid a massive trade war and spiralling local debt, with rumblings of discontent from delegates about everything from the Belt and Road Initiative to Made in China 2025...

The Pacific is seeing a flurry of diplomatic activity: Australia is ‘stepping up’, New Zealand has ordered a ‘Pacific reset’ and even Great Britain is reopening missions in its former Pacific colonies. The reason for their sudden interest is simple: China. If Beijing comes good on $4 billion in aid pledges, it could overtake Canberra as the largest donor to the Pacific...

China has been engulfed by a controversy that strikes at the very heart of the nation—forget the South China Sea, rampant human rights abuses, even a looming economic crash. Last month food critic Chua Lam, otherwise known as the Food God, called for the end to the PRC’s most beloved dining craze: hot pot. The backlash has been immense, with enraged Weibo users calling for Chua Lam’s abolition...

China is becoming a more unequal place for women, in 2018 slipping for a fifth consecutive year in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap index.  Chairman Mao may have proclaimed that women can hold up half the sky, but the Communist party under Xi Jinping holds a far narrower view of female roles, cracking down on feminist activists and backing traditional values...

The Vatican and China have signed a deeply controversial agreement on the appointment of bishops, ending the cold war that has frozen ties since 1950.  That deep freeze led to schisms between the official and underground churches, with some clergy persecuted for decades and the church refusing to recognise Beijing's handpicked bishops...