The South China Sea has been an area of regular clashes and heightened tensions under the leadership of Xi Jinping. It seems that, every few months, Chinese naval or coastguard ships clash or almost clash with vessels from South East Asian nations like Vietnam and the Philippines. Only last week, a Chinese ship clashed with the Filipino coast guard in the Spratly Islands, with both sides levelling angry accusations at each other.

The region is full of disputed claims, making it fertile waters for accidental escalation. China says its claims to the region – encompassed by the ‘nine-dash line’ – are historic; that island sets such as the Spratlys and the Paracels in the South China Sea are as integral to the Chinese empire as Hong Kong or Taiwan. How sound is that claim?

This episode will be digging into the origins of the nine-dash line (roughly pictured here) – and finds them not so much in ancient imperial days. The chaotic formation of China’s claims in the South China Sea is researched and detailed in Bill Hayton’s book, The Invention of China.

To hear more about Bill's book, tune in to our previous episode: What is it to be Chinese?

Trump is tough on China, but what really motivates his hawkishness? Does he care at all about China's human rights abuses? Or is he fundamentally a foreign policy disentangler, hoping to rein back America's overseas commitments? How much does the China policy of a second Trump presidency depend on which advisors the president surrounds himself with?

On this episode of Chinese Whispers, The Spectator's China podcast, assistant editor Cindy Yu talks to deputy editor Freddy Gray and Jordan McGillis, economics editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

Produced by Cindy Yu and Patrick Gibbons.

When I recently came across a book review asking the question ‘was Marco Polo a "sexpat"?’, I knew I had to get its author on to, well, discuss this important question some more. The 13th century Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s account of China was one of the earliest and most popular travelogues written on the country. Polo spent years at the court of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, and whose family founded the Yuan dynasty in China.

My guest today, and the author of that book review, is the historian Jeremiah Jenne. Jeremiah has lived in China for over two decades, and he is also the co-host of the fascinating podcast Barbarians at the Gate, all about Chinese history. He has been doing a series of historical book reviews for the relatively newly established website China Books Review, and in re-reading The Travels of Marco Polo, he noticed that there was a lot of sex.

We talk about all of this, of course, but there’s a serious point here too. How much do Europeans observe when they go to China and how reliable are their accounts, understood and told through the perspective of the outsider? How much has Marco Polo’s portrayal of China moulded the western mindset on the country in the centuries since, and even today? And what does it say about the China of the 13th century that a trio of Venetian merchants could make it to the heart of the Mongol empire?

You can’t get far doing serious business in China without having friends in powerful places. So when her husband’s company, Jardine Matheson (which once upon a time had sold opium into the country), was invited back into a liberalising China in the 1990s, Tessa Keswick had rare access to the country’s top leadership. On the podcast, she recounts seeing Bo Xilai, the disgraced Chongqing party secretary, days before he was arrested by Xi Jinping; the prank that Zhu Rongji, the then Prime Minister, played on Henry Keswick; and what it was like inside Zhongnanhai, the secretive Beijing compound that China’s leaders work from.

Tessa Keswick's book, The Colour of the Sky after Rain, is out now and she is pictured above with Cai Qi, Party Secretary of Beijing.

We don't hear much about his wall with Mexico anymore, but Trump seems to be building a digital wall to shut out Chinese tech. WeChat and TikTok are the two victims to his latest ban. On the episode, Cindy Yu talks to Chinese business expert Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba, and Rui Ma, host of the TechBuzz China podcast. They tell Cindy about how WeChat has created a cashless society in China, and why banning it would be more significant than banning TikTok.

Earlier this year, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson gave credence to the conspiracy theory that the US military took coronavirus to China. It's just one example of a new school of diplomacy that has dominated Chinese foreign policy - the 'wolf warriors'. But does this approach work, or does it merely antagonise the world? Professor Todd Hall is a Chinese foreign policy expert at Oxford University, and tells Cindy Yu about what the wolf warriors say about China's view of the world.

Subscribe to the Spectator's first podcast newsletter here and get each week's podcast highlights in your inbox every Tuesday.

The days of tightly controlled state economy are gone in China - but are they returning? In recent months, Chinese companies from Huawei to TikTok have caused concern in the West for fear that they don't really work for shareholders or themselves - but for Beijing. On this episode, I speak to Duncan Clark, a China expert who advises western investors on the Chinese economy, and author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. So how independent are Huawei, TikTok and even Alibaba? More than you may think - but less and less so these days.

Subscribe to the Spectator's first podcast newsletter here and get each week's podcast highlights in your inbox every Monday.

The year-long Hong Kong protests seem to have come to an abrupt end - as China introduces a draconian national security law that punishes criticism of the Chinese government. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to academic and former diplomat Kerry Brown and Hong Kong journalist Jennifer Creery about what China wants with the city, and where this will end.

Over the last week the UK has been rocked by allegations that China was responsible for two cyber attacks in recent years – one on the Electoral Commission, where hackers successfully accessed the open register, which has the details of 40 million voters; and a set of attempts to access the emails of a number of China critics within parliament. 

So what do we know about China’s cyber capabilities? What are its goals? And now that the UK knows about these attacks, what should we be doing?

Joining me on the podcast today is Nigel Inkster, senior advisor for cyber security and China at the think tank IISS, formerly director of operations and intelligence at MI6, and author of China’s Cyber Power, a 2016 book on precisely this question.

You can also join Cindy Yu at The Spectator's Chinese wine lunch on June 14th. To find out more and buy tickets, visit spectator.co.uk/chinesewine.

In the last episode, I discussed Chinese rural lives with Professor Scott Rozelle. One point he made which particularly stuck with me was the dying out of farming as an occuption – he'd said that most rural people under the age of 35 have never farmed a day in their lives.

So that got me thinking, what do they do instead? In this episode I’ll be looking at one, very high profile, alternative – vlogging. I’ve noticed through my hours of scrolling through Chinese social media that there is a huge genre of rural, pastoral content. 

This is an interesting phenomenon both for what it says about the rural population today, as well as what it reveals about the – often – urban viewers on the other end. So today I’m joined by Yi-Ling Liu, a writer on Chinese society who has had bylines in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and WIRED. She’s looked in detail at the phenomenon of the rural influencer.

On the episode, we talk about a few of our favourite rural influencers. You can watch Li Ziqi's videos on YouTube here and 王大姐来了 (the middle aged rappers I mention) here.

Too often our stories about China are dictated by the urban experience, probably because journalists inside and outside of China are often based in the big cities; Beijing specifically. Those who live in the cities also tend to be more educated, more privileged, and so able to dominate the global attention more. 

That’s why I’m particularly keen to hear about the lives of those who still live in the countryside, or at least are still considered ‘rural residents’ by the Chinese government. They make up a sizeable proportion of the population, and you’ll hear that in my first question to my guest today, we discuss just how big this group is.

How do the poorest in China live today, considering the government has announced that there is no more extreme poverty? Just how wide are their gaps in living standards, education, health, compared to their compatriots who live in the cities? 

Professor Scott Rozelle joins me on this episode. He is the co-director of the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, a developmental economist who has been conducting research in China for over three decades. He is also the co-author of Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise.

Further listening from the archive:
Second class citizens: the lives of China’s internal migrants: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/second-class-citizens-the-lives-of-chinas-internal-migrants/
Is China turning away from the world?: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/is-china-turning-away-from-the-world/

Produced by Cindy Yu and Joe Bedell-Brill.

The Argentinian football star Lionel Messi has been trending on Weibo – and unfortunately, not for a good reason. It all started when Messi sat out a match in Hong Kong earlier this month. His reason – that he was injured – wasn’t good enough for some fans, and keyboard nationalists quickly took offence when Messi played in Japan, a few days later. The furore has dominated Chinese social media over the last few weeks, and even led to the cancellation of some upcoming Chinese matches with the Argentinian national team, as authorities demanded an apology from Messi.

What a mess. But beyond its seeming triviality, this episode tells us something about the nature of Chinese online nationalism, I think, and it might also shed light on how football works within China. After all, why is it that China, which is so good at so many things, has still failed to turn out a competitive national team? That is the multi-billion yuan question that puzzles football fans within and outside of China.

Joining me on the episode this week is Cameron Wilson, an expert on Chinese football and founder of the Wild East Football blog, who has lived in China for almost two decades.

Produced by Cindy Yu and Max Mitchell.

At last count, the Chinese Communist Party has 98 million members, more people than the population of Germany. Its membership also continues to grow, making it one of the most successful and resilient political parties of the last a hundred years, perhaps with the exception of India’s BJP, which boasts 180 million members.

And yet the CCP's track record is strewn with bloody crackdowns and systematic persecution. So what would drive someone to join the CCP, and what accounts for its success? Do party members today all support the atrocities committed by their government? I think these are important questions to ask, because without understanding the answers to them, one couldn’t understand China’s modern history or its society today. 

To delve into the psychology of card carrying communists, I’m joined by two great guests in this week's episode.

Xinran Xue is a Chinese journalist, who had a popular radio show in China in the 90s, before moving to the UK and becoming an author of numerous books on China. Her latest book is called The Book of Secrets, which is a memoir of sorts, where her protagonist was one of the founding members of the CCP’s intelligence service. I recently reviewed it for The Spectator.

Professor Kerry Brown is Director of the Lau China Institute at Kings College London and a former diplomat in Beijing where he worked alongside Chinese government officials for many years. His latest book is China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One.

On the episode, we discuss the party membership's divide between the intellectuals and the peasants; how the Cultural Revolution changed the party from an ideological body to a corporate one; and what a new generation of communists might have in store.

Today, the US and China are at loggerheads. There’s renewed talk of a Cold War as Washington finds various ways to cut China out of key supply chains and to block China’s economic development in areas like semiconductors and renewables.

There’s trade, of course, but the imbalance in that (some $370 billion in 2022) tilts in China’s favour and only serves as another source of ammunition for America’s Sinosceptics. China, on the other hand, is also decoupling in its own way, moving fast to cut its reliance on imported technology and energy.

At this moment, it seems like US-China tensions are inevitable – but look into the not so ancient history, and you’ll find a totally different picture. In fact, when it comes to Communist China’s early entry into the global economy, American policymakers and businesspeople were vital in the 1970s and 80s. You could even say that a big part of China’s economic success was ‘Made in America’.

I'm joined on the podcast by Elizabeth Ingleson, Assistant Professor of International History at the LSE, whose upcoming book contains some very interesting research on this question. It’s called Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade. We discuss President Nixon's visit to China and how that opened up decades of American economic support to the Chinese miracle – including at the expense of its own workers.

India is the fifth largest economy in the world, and now has a population larger than China’s. It’s no surprise, then, that officials in Washington often see India as a powerful non-western bulwark to growing Chinese power. On this podcast, I look at where China and India’s rivalry comes from. How much have long-lasting skirmishes on the China-Indian border damaged relations? How have demographics, economic competition and recent international conflicts affected the relationship between the two countries? And are the domestic politics of China and India in fact more similar than most westerners like to admit?

I speak to Avinash Paliwal, an international relations expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the author of India’s Near East: A New History.

Taiwan goes to the polls in just over a month. This is an election that could have wide repercussions, given the island’s status as a potential flashpoint in the coming years.

The incumbent President, Tsai Ing-wen, is coming to the end of two elected terms, meaning that she cannot run again. Her party’s chosen successor is William Lai – Lai Ching-te – who is the current vice president. For most of this year, he has been facing off opposition from the Kuomintang, the biggest opposition party in Taiwan, and the Taiwan People’s Party, a third party led by the charismatic Ko Wen-je.

Lai remains in the lead with a month to go, but polls show that the KMT is only a few points behind, meaning that an upset is still possible. Since Taiwan became a democracy, it’s the KMT that has been the party calling for closer relations to China, and Tsai and Lai’s DPP that has been more pro-independence and pro-West. Given Beijing has shut off the hotline with Taipei in protest of the DPP since Tsai was first elected in 2016, if Lai wins in January, relations with Beijing are unlikely to get better. But how can the KMT justify closer relations with China, when it seems like the world is in a different place compared to 2015, the last time the KMT held the presidency?

Joining the episode is William Yang, a Taipei-based freelance correspondent, who has written for Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian and the Times.

Across the span of China, a country as big as Europe, there are countless regional dialects and accents – perhaps even languages. Often, they're mutually unintelligible.

The Chinese call these ‘fangyan’, and each Chinese person will likely be able to speak at least one fangyan, while also understanding Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic. It means that the Chinese are more multilingual than you might think.

But it also means that the question of language is inherently a political one. Standard Mandarin has a relatively short history, created by the country’s founding fathers to unify the spoken word in a huge country. But with the ubiquity of Standard Mandarin now, is fangyan at risk of dying out?

Joining the episode is Gina Tam, a historian and author of Dialect and Nationalism in China.

Whenever I go back to China, I try to eat as much as I can – delicious Chinese food that I can’t have outside of the country, whether childhood favourites or the latest food trends. But I’m often struck by my relatives and friends who turn their noses up at many of these delicious dishes – they commonly say ‘不敢吃’ – ‘I’m scared to eat it’.

The Chinese middle class can now be very discerning about the food that they eat, and who can blame them? In the last twenty years, there seems to have been a steady stream of food safety and hygiene scandals – most infamously melamine-laced milk powder in 2008, which poisoned tens of thousands of babies. Since then, we’ve heard about pesticides being put into steamed buns to improve their texture, used cooking oil being retrieved from gutters to be reused, and lamb meat that might contain rat or fox.

The latest scandal, breaking over the last couple of months, is that of fuel tankers being used to carry cooking oil without the tankers being cleaned in between. 

So what gives? Are these scandals a particularly Chinese phenomenon? Why hasn’t government regulation or punishment worked? And how does this impact political credibility in the eyes of the middle class?

I’m joined by two brilliant guests to discuss all of these questions and more.

Dali Yang is a political scientist and sinologist at the University of Chicago, whose research has focused on Chinese regulations when it comes to food and medicine. His latest book is Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiralled Out of Control.

James Palmer is deputy editor at Foreign Policy and author of numerous books on China. He worked for years as a journalist inside China.

For further listening, check out the Chinese Whispers episode on the gig economy – another huge labour rights issue in the country today: Algorithms and lockdowns: how China’s gig economy works.

Controlling history is key to the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the country. Whether it’s playing up the ‘century of humiliation’, or whitewashing past mistakes like the Great Leap Forward or the Tiananmen Protests, the Party expends huge effort and resources on controlling the narrative.

That’s why it’s so important and interesting to look at those Chinese people who are documenting the bits of history that the Party doesn’t want you to know about. They interview survivors from Communist labour camps, or keep their own memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, and try to keep the memory of past horrors alive through film, magazines and paintings.

A new book called Sparks documents their work. Its author is Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and long time China journalist. Ian calls these people the ‘underground historians’. He joins this episode of Chinese Whispers.

Visit https://minjian-danganguan.org/ to see some of their work documented, in an upcoming website founded by Ian and others.

Produced by Cindy Yu and Patrick Gibbons.

All cultures care about their cuisine, but the Chinese must have one of the most food-obsessed cultures in the world. It may be because we have the best food...

Those listeners of Chinese Whispers who’ve been to China will know exactly what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, you may have come across the classic Chinese takeaway with dishes like sweet and sour pork, or you may like Cantonese dim sum, and some of you may be big fans of Sichuanese cooking.

But China has so much more to offer than what has made across into the West’s Chinese restaurants. Thankfully, that’s changing and quite fast.

Part of the education campaign to bring more of the diversity and richness of Chinese cuisine to the West is the work of people like Fuchsia Dunlop. She trained to cook in Chengdu and is one of the most engaging and thoughtful writers on Chinese cuisine in the English language.

I’m delighted to be joined by her on the podcast today, to mark the publication of her new book, Invitation to a Banquet, which is all about the history, meaning and diversity of Chinese cuisine.

When China brokered a historic detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year, it seemed that a new phase in world history – and certainly in Chinese foreign policy – had opened up. Instead of the US being a policeman of the world, it was the rising power, China, that was stepping into that role. Whereas Chinese foreign policy had previously only really cared about promoting trade and silencing dissidents, it seemed that perhaps, now, Beijing was taking a more leadership role in global diplomacy and security issues.

And yet the events of the last week and China’s response to them have shown that perhaps the country isn’t ready for that responsibility just yet. In response to the horrors unfolding in Israel and later Gaza, Beijing has given only lukewarm statements, calling for 'relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint and immediately end the hostilities to protect civilians'. At no point has it condemned Hamas by name.

So what does this mean for China’s grander ambitions in the Middle East? With me to discuss is Tuvia Gering. During peacetime, his full time role is as a researcher on China and the Middle East, with the Israeli thinktank the Institute for National Security Studies and he is also a nonresident fellow in the Atlantic Council.

But in the last week, as with all Israelis, his life has been changed forever. He’s now been called up for active duty.

What you’re about to hear is an incredibly well informed but raw contribution from an expert whose research interests have come crashing into his real life.

In 2010, David Cameron and George Osborne ushered in what they called ‘a golden era’ with China, the world’s rising superpower. They argued that Britain could be China’s best friend in the West. Thirteen years later, after a global pandemic, up to a million interned in Xinjiang, and a Communist Party General Secretary seemingly keen to roll back democratic progress in the mainland and in Hong Kong, that policy looks ill-thought-out, at best. But are we at risk of swinging the other direction now, going from ignorance to hysteria within a handful of years? Did we get China wrong, and do we keep getting China wrong? Is Britain now losing influence in China?

On this episode, live from Conservative party conference, I’m joined by Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, Sophia Gaston, Head of Foreign Policy at Policy Exchange, and Sam Hogg, editor of the Beijing to Britain newsletter.

Two years ago, Richard Moore, head of MI6, said that China was now the organisation’s ‘single greatest priority’.

Parliamentarians and the British public have been starkly reminded of this by last week’s news that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on suspicion of spying for China.

On this episode, we won’t be commenting on the ins and outs of that case, but talking more generally about Chinese espionage. What forms does it take, what are its goals and how successful are the Chinese secret services at achieving those?

I’m joined by a brilliant and knowledgeable guest. Nigel Inkster is the former director of operations and intelligence for MI6. He has served in Beijing and Hong Kong, and is now the senior adviser on cyber security and China at the think tank IISS.

Produced by Cindy Yu.

For thousands of years, Confucianism has run through the fabric of Chinese society, politics and culture. Decades of Communism has taken its toll on China, so can it still be considered a Confucian country?

Joining the episode is one of the world’s leading experts on the philosophy, Professor Daniel Bell. In 2017, he was appointed the dean of Shandong University, an unusual appointment for a foreigner in China but one based on his expertise in Confucianism, in the province of Confucius’s birth. His new book, The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese university, details some of the ups and downs of his time in that position.

178 miles to the east of Beijing, there’s a beach resort called Beidaihe. The water is shallow and the sand is yellow and fine. Luxurious holiday villas dot the coastline. Starting from the 1950s, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have moved their families and work to Beidaihe in the summer, making the beach resort something of a summer capital. Secrecy clouds the gatherings, and though this tradition continues, today the resort seems to serve a much more leisurely purpose when the CCP visits.

On this episode, I’m joined by the historian James Carter and Bill Bishop, editor of the very popular Sinocism newsletter, to discuss where Communist leaders go, when they go on summer holiday. What is the changing role of Beidaihe, and what does this tell us about the changing nature of Communist leadership?

Presented by Cindy Yu.

Produced by Cindy Yu and Joe Bedell-Brill.

At the end of last year, some thought that the Chinese economic recovery after three years of zero Covid could happen just as fast as zero Covid itself ended being government policy. I admit, that included me.

And yet, more than halfway into 2023, that recovery looks increasingly elusive. The Chinese economy has failed to shake off its own long Covid while other structural problems have reared their heads.

What does the future hold for the Chinese economy? Is this the new normal? And if so, is that really a problem?

I’m joined on this episode by the economist Keyu Jin, author of The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism. Keyu is an associate professor at the London School of Economics and advised and consulted for the World Bank and the IMF.

Keyu has divided opinion. Unlike some other English-language economists, she is sympathetic to the Chinese political and economic structure, arguing, as you’ll hear, that Chinese state intervention can often virtuous; that the Chinese people value stability more than liberty. On the episode, I challenge these views as we discuss what the macro data tells us about the health of the Chinese economy, and whether there are reasons to be optimistic for China's politics and economy in the years to come.

Produced by Cindy Yu.

In the 1800s, Qing China’s final century, European powers were expanding eastwards. The industrialised West, with its gunboats and muskets, and the soft power of Christianity, pushed around the dynasty’s last rulers.

But was this period more than just a time of national suffering and humiliation for China? The British Museum's ongoing exhibit, China’s hidden century, tells the story of Qing China’s final decades. The more than 300 exhibits tell a story not only of decline, but of a complicated exchange between China and the West about culture, fashion, politics and ideas.

I reviewed China’s hidden century in The Spectator last month, and hosted a live Chinese Whispers recording about the exhibition in the British Museum a few weeks ago. I was joined by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian from University of California, Irvine, and by Isabel Hilton, the journalist and founder of China Dialogue.

It’s now a week since the Wagner Group revolted against the Kremlin.

Though the dramatic uprising was quelled within 24 hours and the group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is now exiled to Belarus, the episode will have lasting impact on President Putin’s authority.

Among those closely watching the events unfold would have been the Chinese leadership, who sent out a statement of support for Putin, but only after it was clear that the revolt had been put down.

What will those in Zhongnanhai make of the Prigozhin uprising? And could something similar happen in China?

On the episode, I’m joined by James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and long time China hand, to discuss.

‘Swifties’, as Taylor Swift’s fans are known across the world, are extremely dedicated to the cause, and often estimated to drive up local economies wherever they flock, and Chinese fans are no different. Swift didn’t perform in China on the latest global tour, but that didn’t stop more wealthy fans flying to Singapore to see her; or the less wealthy, going to cinemas in China to watch the Taylor Swift Eras Tour documentary – which has broken box office records in China.

All this got me thinking – how popular is American, and western, pop music in China in general? Is it considered mainstream, or something a bit more indie compared to Chinese pop? Is the language barrier a problem, or censorship?

On this episode I'm joined by two people very much in the know. Alex Taggart is an artist manager who has previously worked as a DJ and a Nightlife columnist in China. Jocelle Koh also works in the music industry and founded the media platform Asian Pop Weekly.

They tell me about Chinese opera-style covers of Adele and explain how an American missile system brought down K-Pop in China...

We also mention a range of our favourite viral videos featuring western pop in China. Links here:
Vlogger Lorelei in Singapore
Countryside Nicki Minaj
'Low low low your boat'
Last Emperor Puyi dancing to Harry Styles
Chinese opera Adele

The word ‘West’ is often used as a shorthand to describe liberal democracies in Europe, and perhaps in Asia too, such that we’ll often talk about ‘the West’s attitude to China’, or the ‘West’s relations with China’. But this is at best a lazy shorthand – because when you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that there is no unified West on China. On this episode, I'm joined by Noah Barkin, senior advisor at the Rhodium Group and author of the Watching China in Europe newsletter with the German Marshall Fund, to disaggregate the idea of ‘the West’, focusing especially on the continent of Europe. How do different European nation states, institutions, and even political parties see China differently?

Produced by Cindy Yu and Joe Bedell-Brill.

In much of the conversation surrounding China and Taiwan, the question of invasion seems to be a ‘when’ not an ‘if’. But is an invasion really so inevitable?

No one knows for sure, of course, but there are good reasons to think that speculations of a war have been overblown.

For one, the economic links between Taiwan and China mean that their respective interests are not so zero sum. For another, China may well be causing serious damage to itself through an invasion.

Former diplomat Charles Parton has written for the Council on Geostrategy on why Xi Jinping would not take the risk of invading, and he joins the podcast. Also on the episode is Professor William Kirby at Harvard University, who explains the complicated trade links between China and Taiwan.

Ultimately, you must decide for yourselves whether you think an invasion will happen, but I hope that this episode at least presents a different side to the conversation.

The mail-order bride industry is booming – but today's international dating doesn't look as it used to.

It turns out that it’s not so much young and uneducated Chinese women looking to marry out of the country anymore, and more middle aged and financially well off divorcees, looking for something different.

The mail order bride industry is changing as the women involved are becoming more empowered with their growing wealth – and more demanding.

On this episode, I speak to sociologist Monica Liu, whose new book, Seeking Western Men, is all about these changing dynamics of race, class, gender and, ultimately, power. She writes about the book in an article for Sixth Tone.

Hidden in March’s GDP figures was a shocking statistic – a fifth of Chinese 16 to 24 year olds are out of work. This is a near record high, and the economic background to a fresh wave of disillusionment among China’s young.

It has led to the creation of a new meme - you’ve heard of lying flat, but young people are now comparing themselves to a Republican-era literary character, Kong Yiji.

On this episode, I’m joined by the journalist Karoline Kan, author of Under Red Skies: The Life and Times of a Chinese Millennial. We talk about the Kong Yiji trend, why prospects are so thin for the most educated Chinese generation, and what this all means for the government's claims to economic competence.

Just before Christmas, it was reported that the billionaire Jack Ma had moved to Tokyo after getting into trouble with the Chinese authorities. If he's still living there, he'd be one of several well known Chinese who seems to have made Japan their home after run ins with Beijing.

In so doing, they’re following in the footsteps of those who came over a century ago – other Chinese exiles who holed out in Japan because of a hostile political environment back home.

This episode is all about how important it was that Japan served as a safe haven for these exiles – both reformers and revolutionaries – at the turn of the 20th century. That would later contribute to the establishment of a Chinese national identity and even the creation of the Chinese republic itself. It turns out that Japan was not only an aggressor against modern China, but an inspiration for it.

On this episode, I'm joined by the Professor Rana Mitter from the University of Oxford and Bill Hayton, a journalist and author of The Invention Of China.

[Pictured: Sun Yat-sen with Japanese film producer Umeya Shokichi and wife, who helped fund Sun's activities]

Historical timeline:
1839 - 1842 – First opium war
1856 - 1860 – Second opium war
1868 – The 'Meiji Restoration' begins in Japan
1877 – The first Qing delegation arrives in Tokyo, including diplomat Huang Zunxian.
1894/95 – The Sino-Japanese war. China's defeat results in Taiwan being ceded to Japan as a colony.
1898 – The 'Hundred Days Reform', a failed attempt by the Emperor Guangxu and allies (including Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei and Huang Zunxian) to constitutionalise the Qing dynasty. It was quashed by the Empress Cixi.
1899 - 1901 – The Boxer Rebellion, a peasant movement against foreign forces in China and endorsed by the Qing dynasty. It ends in defeat and an influx of Chinese students are sent to Japan as a part of Qing indemnities.
1911 - The last emperor abdicates and the Republic of China is formed.

Further listening:
Jing Tsu on the Chinese language revolution.
Bill Hayton on 'The Invention Of China'.
Dylan Levi Thomas on modern China's psyche surrounding Japan.

Until a few years ago, Hollywood dominated Chinese cinemas. In the People’s Republic, Marvel’s superhero romps were the people’s favourite, with Avengers: Endgame taking in over £510 million at Chinese box offices.

Hollywood is desperate to crack the Chinese market – after all, it’s a country with a fifth of the world’s population and a growing middle class. But there’s just one problem – the small issue of the Chinese Communist Party, which tightly controls the films people can see.

Since the success of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel films had effectively been blacklisted until earlier this year, with other Hollywood blockbusters failing to break through either. On this episode, we’ll be talking about the complicated love affair between Beijing and LA.

I’m joined by Wall Street Journal journalist Erich Schwartzel, author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy; and Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies at Kings College London – you might remember him from our previous episode discussing the golden age of Chinese films.

As Xi Jinping visits Vladimir Putin in Russia this week, this episode of Chinese Whispers is returning to one of the missions of this podcast series – to look at things as the Chinese see them. 

My guest today is Zhou Bo, a retired Senior Colonel of the People’s Liberation Army whose military service started in 1979. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University. He’s an eloquent and informed advocate of Beijing’s perspective.

On the podcast, we discuss why China hasn’t criticised Russia more, despite its purported support for sovereignty, to what extent it really means its peace plan, and whether China is about to invade Taiwan.

We recorded most of this podcast two weeks ago, so when Xi’s visit to Moscow was announced last week, Bo kindly agreed to rejoin the podcast and give his take on the visit too.

Chances are, you won’t agree with most of the things Bo says, and as you’ll hear, I didn’t on some issues either. Even so, Beijing will continue to play a crucial role in the war, and so it remains important for the West to understand how the Chinese see things.

The Chinese Communist Party likes to blame its domestic political problems on foreign interference, and it has done so since the days of Chairman Mao.

But sometimes, does this paranoia, this narrative, have a point? Or at least during the depths of the Cold War, when the United States, via the CIA, was countering communism across the world through so-called ‘covert operations’.

My guest today is Professor John Delury, a historian at the Yonsei University in Seoul, and author of a new book looking at the history of the CIA in China. It’s called Agents of Subversion, and I’d highly recommend it because some of the incredible exploits detailed in there are nothing short of what you might find in a spy thriller. On the episode, we talk about that history and what it teaches about US-China relations today.

Pictured here is CIA agent John T. Downey, who was imprisoned by China for over two decades after an exfiltration mission over Manchuria failed. He was eventually released following Nixon's visit to China.

Further listening:
Bill Hayton on Liang Qichao and the other Chinese reformers whose followers became the so-called 'Third Force' discussed in this episode: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/what-is-it-to-be-chinese/.
Professor Rana Mitter and Jessica Drun on the history of Taiwan and what happened after Chiang Kai-shek fled there: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/why-does-china-care-about-taiwan/

Every protest needs an anthem, and for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, 'Nothing to My Name' by Cui Jian became that emblem. Cui was one of China's earliest rockers, taking inspiration from the peasant music of China's northwest and fusing it with the rock 'n' roll that was beginning to arrive in the country. It put rock music – and the Chinese interpretation of it – under the national spotlight.

On this episode I talk to Kaiser Kuo, host of the China Project's Sinica podcast, who also happens to be a founding member of Tang Dynasty, one of China's earliest and greatest rock bands. We talk about how a China opening up after the Cultural Revolution allowed in this decidedly western musical genre, how it fused with Chinese musical traditions upon contact, and its lasting association with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

A few months ago, an intriguing article in the Washington Post shed light on the latest situation Xinjiang, the western region of China where the Uighur minority live. The two journalists, Eva Dou and Cate Cadell, saw on their travels around the region last summer that many of the infamous re-education camps had been shut down, or turned into quarantine centres. A new phase of Beijing’s campaign in Xinjiang seems to have started.

So what’s really going on there now, and what does this mean for the lives of the Uyghur people?

I’m joined by Professor James Millward from Georgetown University, author of Eurasian crossroads: a history of Xinjiang, to find out. Jim had joined me on a previous episode to break down exactly why Beijing had such a problem with the Uighur minority, which is valuable background for this episode.

On this episode, we talk about exactly what has happened to the so-called 'graduates' of China's re-education centres; how the pandemic might have changed how some Han people see the Xinjiang issue; and what exactly western politicians should and shouldn't do, if they want to help.

The EU and US are turning up the pressure on Chinese made electric cars, as I discussed with my guest Finbarr Bermingham on the last episode. 

On this episode, I want to take a closer look at how China has come to dominate the global electric car market. Chinese EVs make up 60 per cent of worldwide sales, and a third of global exports. Its leading brand, BYD, now regularly gives Tesla a run for its money in terms of number of cars sold. 

How much of a role do subsidies play, versus other factors like its control of rare earths or lower labour costs? Is there really an overcapacity issue that suggests a flooding of Chinese cars globally?

On this episode, I'm joined by Zeyi Yang, China tech reporter at MIT Technology Review, who is an expert on the genealogy of China’s EV industry.

Three years ago, as people across China welcomed the Year of the Rat, a new virus was taking hold in Wuhan. In London, the conversation at my family’s New Year dinner was dominated by the latest updates, how many masks and hand sanitisers we’d ordered. 
Mercifully, Covid didn’t come up at all as we welcomed the Year of the Rabbit this weekend, though my family in China are still recovering from their recent infections. The zero Covid phase of the pandemic is well and truly over.
So what better time to reflect on the rollercoaster of the last three years? In exchange for controlling the virus, China’s borders were shut for most of that time, while the economy has tanked and a general of children had their schooling disrupted. Yet after some remarkable protests last November, the country has opened up at a breakneck pace.
The government is now keen to move on, focusing now on this year’s economic recovery. But can a country of 1.4 billion people move on quite so quickly? The exceptional nature of the pandemic and the collective trauma of the last three years need to be processed, and yet I wouldn’t say that the Chinese Communist Party is usually good at allowing people to come to terms with historical suffering, especially when it’s the Party at fault…
So on this episode we’ll be looking at the social legacy of the pandemic on China, and the collective memory of this exceptional time.
Joining me are the Financial Times’s Yuan Yang, who was the paper’s deputy Beijing bureau chief during the first two years of the pandemic, and Guobin Yang, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Wuhan Lockdown, a book looking at how the Wuhan people documented the world’s first brush with Covid-19.

On the episode I also mentioned the Chinese Whispers episode on the civil backlash against facial recognition. Listen here.

Should Confucius Institutes be shut down? There are hundreds of these centres across six continents, funded by the Ministry of Education, with the stated goal of public education on and cultural promotion of China. They offer classes on language, history and culture of China, and some would say they help to plug a crucial shortage of Chinese language skills in host countries, especially across the West. 
And yet, these have become deeply controversial. Criticism of the institutes range from their CCP-sanctioned curriculum which do not include sensitive topics, to allegations of espionage and erosion of academic independence with Confucius Institutes as the core. Sweden closed all of its CIs two years ago, and universities in countries including the US and Japan have also shut their centres down.
This is a live debate in the UK right now. Last November, security minister Tom Tugendhat confirmed that the government would be seeking to ban Confucius Institutes in the UK, repeating a pledge that Rishi Sunak had made during the Tory leadership race. But is this the right decision?
In this episode, I’m joined by Charles Parton, senior associate fellow at the thinktank RUSI, who worked in or around China as a diplomat for two decades. He is an expert on Chinese interference and espionage in the UK.

My interview with Raffaello Pantucci on how Confucius Institutes play a role in central Asia: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/the-new-great-game-how-china-replaced-russia-in-kazakhstan-and-beyond/.

Over the last few hundred years, China has had a difficult and complicated relationship with foreigners. On the one hand, they added to the country’s intellectual richness by introducing western philosophy and science; and on the other, these contributions often came accompanied by guns and gunboats.
And today, out of a country of 1.4 billion, there are fewer than one million foreigners living there. So what is it like to try to make China one’s home if you were British or anything else?

On the episode, I speak to two long time China hands. Mark Kitto is a writer and actor who lived in China for 16 years, setting up two businesses in succession there but now back living in Norfolk. Alec Ash is the author of Wish Lanterns, all about Chinese millennials. He moved to China around the time that Mark left, and has just moved back to the UK after a decade there.
I want to find out from them what it is like to be foreign in China given the country’s complicated history with Brits and other foreigners; and whether the Chinese identity itself is particularly hard to penetrate as a foreigner.

Comparisons with 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests are too often evoked when it comes to talking about civil disobedience in China. Even so, this weekend’s protests have been historic. It’s the first time since the zero Covid policy started that people across the country have simultaneously marched against the government, their fury catalysed by the deaths of ten people in a locked down high rise building in Xinjiang. Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Xi’An, Urumqi, Nanjing (my home city) have all seen protests over the weekend. Most of them attack the zero Covid policy, but some have called out ‘Down with Xi Jinping’.

After two days of protests, these cities, especially Shanghai, now see heavy police presence, with the authorities searching phones of any seeming troublemakers. This weekend’s burst of free speech may already have been snuffed out. Can the protestors sustain their momentum given the tight grip of the state? 

I'm joined by Professor Jeff Wasserstrom at UC Irvine, an expert on protests in the mainland and Hong Kong, and Isabel Hilton, a long time China watcher and founder of China Dialogue.

When the city of Zhengzhou, home to the world’s largest iPhone factory, locked down recently, some of its factory workers had nowhere to go. Hoping to escape Covid restrictions, many of them walked miles along motorways to their hometowns, their journey captured by video and shared on social media in China and out.

This episode is all about China’s migrant working class – poorly paid and often poorly educated people from the countryside who go to cities like Zhengzhou for better lives. There are hundreds of millions of these so-called ‘internal migrants’, making their story an important part to understand if you want to understand modern China.

Even now, 'on average urban residents are making at least more than 2.5 times the income as the average rural resident', Professor Cindy Fan tells me on this episode. She's an expert on Chinese migration and population patterns at UCLA. Most commonly, migrants will send their earnings back to home villages and towns, where they have left behind family members. Often, children are being looked after by grandparents while the parents are earning away from home.

Cindy and I discuss the role played by these migrants – often unwelcomed in the cities but vital for urban areas to develop, grow and function. We go deep into the hukou system – household registration – that gives urban residents rights and privileges that migrant workers cannot access, making them second class citizens. But ultimately, as the Chinese are wont to do, many migrant workers make the system work for them. They don't necessarily want to swallow urban life wholesale:

'Rural migrants are pretty smart... Yes they are victims… but at the same time, they are also weighing their options, they’re also strategising. They’re not just passive.'

This week Xi Jinping has taken his new Politburo Standing Committee on a group trip – to Yan’An, the base of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution after the Long March. The symbolism is easy to see.

On this episode of Chinese Whispers, Bill Bishop, author of the popular Sinocism newsletter, and Professor Victor Shih, author of Coalitions of the Weak, have returned to reflect on the Party Congress just past. It's been a more dramatic event than many (inside and outside the party) expected, starting with a brave, lone protestor hanging a 42-character banner off a popular bridge in Beijing, lambasting the authoritarian regime; and ending with the forcible removal of former general secretary Hu Jintao in front of the world's media.

At the congress itself Xi overturned decades-long norms dictating the top leadership of the party – age no longer seems to necessitate retirement, while the Politburo has not a single woman. Above all, Xi has started his third term as general secretary with a loyal cabal of men around him. Did he not want more competent people in the top jobs? 'Loyalty is merit', Bill suggests.

What does this mean for China, and the world? Victor makes the point that Xi is putting the pieces in place to push through unpopular decisions – for example, an invasion of Taiwan. 'If you think about it, why would you want people whom you trust absolutely to fill every single position? Because even Chairman Mao didn’t do this'. It also means that as Xi becomes more truly dictatorial, the West needs to engage with him more, not less. 

We just don’t know the kind of information about the US, about other countries, that are landing on Xi Jinping’s desk. And this information can be incredibly distorted. So if anything, just presenting an alternative view of how the world works could be helpful. He may not believe you… but if you’re able to look him in the eye and tell him something, at least he’ll be forced to think about it.As for the party itself, the three of us digest the Hu Jintao incident. Regardless of what you think happened, one thing is for sure – it was a deep and utter humiliation for Hu, especially given China's deep-set Confucian respect for elders. The idea that there is any organised CCP opposition against Xi has been put to bed.

I recently caught a rare viewing of a 2001 Chinese film, Lan Yu. It tells the story of two gay men falling in love and finding domestic life throughout the reform and opening years of China. The filmmakers never bothered to apply for approval from the censors, knowing that its homosexual storyline would never make it past the moralistic Communist censors.
On this episode, I take a look at the place of homosexuality in the traditional Chinese mindset and under these years of Communism. My guests are Zhang Yongning, the producer of Lan Yu, and Liu Yiling, a a writer covering Chinese society, technology and internet culture who has written about the the dating apps that millennial gay men now use. We discuss the homosexuality rooted in traditional Chinese literature, like Dreams of the Red Chamber, balanced against the Confucian need to procreate and pass on lineage. It turns out that, much like ancient Greece, the problem wasn’t so much the gay sex so long as you still set up families and had children, Yongning says.
With the influx of Christianity through missionaries, there took on a ‘pathological’ view of homosexuality, more akin to the western homophobia, says Yiling.
When it comes to political attitudes, Yiling makes the astute point that ‘Chinese history has always moved in patterns of fang shou (open and close)’. Under Communism, you might expect the kind of restrictive attitudes towards divergent lifestyles, but much of this had moved in more liberal ways since reform and opening, forming the backdrop to Lan Yu’s story. Yet the sticking point is always whether these minority groups ask for political or civil rights. Unlike feminists under the MeToo movement which has been shut down by the government, gays haven’t united politically. ‘If they start asking for rights, then they will be in huge trouble’, Yongning says.
We don’t get much time to talk about other LGBT communities, but I’ll certainly come back to those in future episodes.

If you enjoy this podcast, you can now register your interest for an upcoming Chinese Whispers newsletter, at www.spectator.co.uk/whispers. It'll be everything you love about the podcast.

Every five years, Beijing goes into heightened security as senior members of the Chinese Communist Party gather. The National Party Congress is an occasion for the party to review its track record and determine its future direction, but most crucially, it’s a moment to unveil future leaders.

Older members of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee are retired while fresh blood is brought in, including at the very top – the General Secretary. Under a norm set down by Deng Xiaoping, this General Secretary is meant to be changed every other congress – in other words, every ten years. But at this upcoming Congress, most China watchers expect Xi Jinping to remain in position, beginning his third term in power.

So to look ahead to this important event in the Communist calendar, in this episode Cindy Yu speaks to  author of the Sinocism newsletter Bill Bishop and Professor Victor Shih, expert in Chinese elite politics and author of the new book Coalitions of the Weak. They discuss the possibility that Xi will be officially titled 'The People's Leader', that a senior Communist official, recently sentenced to death, may have been wiretapping the President (and what this means for his control of the party) and just how much the Politburo Standing Committee could be packed with Xi allies (Victor observes that a 'brilliant political move' by the President has so far been to put his enemies in difficult positions so as to erode their credibility, for example putting the relatively more liberal Wang Yang in charge of Xinjiang policy).

But whatever happens, what we won't see in this congress is a successor. Xi is here to stay, and who would want to be appointed successor anyway? 'It's basically putting a large target on your back and your front', Bill says.

Tune in for a detailed primer looking ahead to this monumental event in the CCP calendar.

If you enjoy this podcast, you can now register your interest for an upcoming Chinese Whispers newsletter, at www.spectator.co.uk/whispers. It'll be everything you love about the podcast.

In the last four decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved into cities. Today, two thirds of the country live in urban areas (compared to just one third in 1985), and many of these are hubs with tens of millions of people – mega-cities that many in the West have never heard of before.

What does this fast urbanisation do to communities and tradition? On this episode, my guest Austin Williams (an architect turned journalist and academic) explains how these populations were thrown up into 'vertical living'. ‘If Ayn Rand had created a country, then China would be it’, says Austin. In other words, the family unit matters more than the community surrounding you.

This episode is a deep dive into urban life in China. Austin and I discuss the residential compounds that we in the West have seen so much of through reporting of China's lockdowns; the demolitions required to pave the way for this wave of urbanisation, which, sadly, left some towns disembowelled without rebuilding (see Austin's film Edge Town about one such settlement outside the city of Suzhou); and we debate whether it's a good thing that traditional Chinese aesthetics are returning to the country's modern architecture.

If you enjoy this podcast, you can now register your interest for an upcoming Chinese Whispers newsletter, at www.spectator.co.uk/whispers.

After a long summer of hustings, Liz Truss has finally been confirmed today as the next leader of the Conservative party. As she gets the keys to Downing Street, she'll finally be able to carry out her vision of Sino-British relations. But what is that vision?

On the latest Chinese Whispers, I speak to Sam Hogg, editor of the must-read Beijing to Britain newsletter, about what we know about Truss's views on China so far. Will she declare a genocide in Xinjiang? What is an acceptable level of trade with Beijing?

The difficulty for Truss is that she has never had to balance her opinions on China with the wider remit of government (for example, when it comes to the trading relationship that she lambasted her rival Rishi Sunak for pursuing, while at the Treasury). As Sam points out, taking the example of declaring a genocide in Xinjiang (something she has privately expressed support for): 

‘When you officially recognise that a genocide is taking place, that puts an onus on the country that has done so to try and actively stop that, using a variety of means (that could be sanctions for example). With that in mind, one can see why it’s a useful campaign pledge, but a difficult policy to carry out once in power’Then she might be held hostage by China hawks on the backbenches – those MPs like Iain Duncan Smith who have lent her his support, but may want to see her be as vocally sceptical of China in Downing Street as she has been so far. In that case, there could be a vibe similar to how the hardline Brexiteers held previous Conservative prime ministers to ransom on seeing through their visions.  ‘She’s made a series of political contracts with various backbenchers about how hawkish she is going to be towards China. And each of these backbenchers will have a limited amount of patience’, Sam points out.

We won't have long to find out as she gets her feet under the desk at No. 10 and, in a couple of months, meets with President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Indonesia.