Sinica Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Hey folks! I took some time off to drive the kids to college and then flew to California to celebrate my brother John’s birthday. The upshot is there’s no interview this week, so in place of that, here’s my essay from this week. Hope you enjoy it. If all goes as planned, I’m back next week with regular interview for Sinica!

You can find the text of the essay at sinicapodcast.com.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I was looking for a good episode to pull from the archive to run this week as I'll be traveling and I asked my good friend Deb Seligsohn for a recommendation. She went immediately to this one, and by God if it's not an oldie-but-goodie. This is from December 2015 and features Jeremy Goldkorn — I miss him dearly! — and Terry Townshend, an absolute institution in China's birding community.

I'll likely have to run another re-run next week, and I welcome your suggestions!

All best,

Kaiser

Recommendations and Links:

Birding Beijing

Action for Swifts

British Trust for Ornithology

Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel

Cement and Pig Consumption Reveal China's Huge Changes

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Water Transfer Project and the National Water Network

27:32 – Areas of progress: Air pollution and the energy mix 

32:48 – Areas lacking appreciable improvement: Soil contamination, water pollution, and flood vulnerability 

36:04 – Ecological civilization and breaking the binary between development and environmental protection

47:00 – Steve’s cognitive style: A fox of the two cultures

53:23 – nSteve’s views on authoritarian environmentalism 

58:46 – The Environmental Kuznets curve 

1:05:54 – A preview of Steve’s current book project about the Yangjuan Primary School in Liangshan 

Recommendations:

Steve: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories; Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook; and the 2023 film The Taste of Things, starring Juliette Binoche 

Kaiser: The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad 

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Silvia Lindtner of the University of Michigan about her book Prototype Nation. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss how China's maker movement inspired the Party leadership to encourage tech entrepreneurship, how Shenzhen rose to such prominence in technology production, the fetishization of the shanzhai movement, and much more.

5:29 How narratives on Chinese tech innovation have shifted

14:10 What made China's technological innovation possible?

20:37 State support for the maker movement and mass innovation

29:52 The technocratic and entrepreneurial mindset of the CCP

38:45 Techno-optimism in China versus the West

45:57 Shenzhen's "hacker paradise" as a transnational project

50:02 Orientalism in the West's fascination with shanzhai, or copycat, culture

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations

Silvia: In This Moment, We Are Happy by Chen Qiufan and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures by Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski

Kaiser:  Sarmat Archery based in Kiev, Ukraine

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Paul Triolo, Senior VP for China and Technology Policy Lead at Dentons Global Advisors ASG, formerly and probably better known still as Albright Stonebridge Group. Paul provides an in-depth overview of today’s semiconductor landscape, from export control issues, to the unstable equilibrium between U.S., China, and Taiwan’s industries. He walks us through the strategic importance of semiconductors in U.S. national security considerations — and how unintended consequences of our current policies toward China might actually end up undermining U.S. national security. 

04:45 – An overview of semiconductor geopolitics and supply chains

20:33 – Why the U.S. is cutting China off from advanced semiconductor technologies

27:02 – The shift in technology export controls from Trump to Biden

32:08 – The CHIPS Act and subsidies for the semiconductor industry

37:43 – Deterrence and Taiwan’s semiconductor industry as a “silicon shield”

46:16 – Lessons learned from the chip shortage

52:30 – Why is the U.S lighting a fire to Chinese self-sufficiency efforts?

57:57 – The implications of Pelosi’s planned visit to Taiwan

A transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Paul: Rob Dunn, A Natural History of the Future; and Ryan Hass, Stronger: Adapting America's China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence

Kaiser: The Boys on Amazon Prime

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Villanova University historian Andrew Liu. Andy published an excellent essay in n+1 magazine in April that captured how the eclipse of the "wet-market" theory of COVID origins and its replacement by the "lab-leak" theory illustrates how an old racial form — "Orientalism," which sees countries of Asia as backward, dirty, and barbarous — gave way to what's been termed an "Asiatic" racial form, which reflects anxiety over Asians as hyperproductive, robotic, and technologically advanced.

3:05 – Andy's n+1 essay on the lab leak theory and the two racial forms

6:26 – A primer on Edward Said's Orientalism and why it's a poor fit for Asia today

10:41 – The "Asiatic racial form" and the notionally "positive" Asian stereotypes

13:58 – How Orientalism and the Asiatic racial form interact today and historically

23:50 – Conspiracies on China, and what's wrong with the Asiatic form

27:51 – Japan's rise as a parallel

30:57 – How to talk about Chinese attitudes toward tech without invoking Asiatic stereotypes

37:27 – Race, culture, and global capitalism

A full transcript of this podcast is available on SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Andy: Stay True: a memoir by the New Yorker writer Hua Hsu and donating to abortion providers in states affected by the end of Roe v. Wade:, like Abortion Care for Tennessee, abortioncaretn.org

Kaiser: The Danish political drama Borgen on Netflix

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Jing Tsu, John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature at Yale University, about her wonderful new book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern. Jing talks about her role as culture commentator for NBC during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, about how the written Chinese language has helped shape China, and about the fascinating individuals who worked to bring a writing system so deeply rooted in history and tradition into the modern world.

Link to Jing and Kaiser interviewed for the Radio Opensource Podcast here.

4:59 – Jing's role as cultural commentator for NBC during the Winter Games

10:43 – The impetus for writing Kingdom of Characters

16:09 – Why the critics of the Chinese writing system called for its destruction

18:57 – What the defenders of the Chinese writing system love so much about it

25:51 – The challenge of writing about the technology of Chinese writing

29:05 – The Chinese writing system as a metaphor for China

32:46 – The next technological frontiers for Chinese

35:48 – Language and how it shapes thinking in China

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Jing: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Kaiser: The Pattern of the Chinese Past by Mark Elvin; and Closure/Continuation, a new album by the British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Shelley Rigger of Davidson College returns to the show to talk Taiwan. She's joined by Simona Grano, a sinologist and Taiwan specialist at the University of Zürich. They talk about President Joe Biden's recent "gaffes" that call into question the longstanding, unofficial U.S. policy of "strategic ambiguity," talk about how Taiwan has been impacted by the Ukraine War, and much more.

4:59: – What did Joe Biden's latest "gaffe" on Taiwan actually signify?

10:06 – Did "strategic ambiguity" serve its intended purpose?

16:23 – The mood in Taiwan

20:51 – The impact of the Ukraine War on thinking in Beijing and in Taipei

34:12 – European countries navigating relationships with Taiwan

43:54 – The "One China Principle" versus the "One China Policy"

47:20 – Are bilateral trade agreements enough for Taiwan?

50:27 – Ethnicity, nationality, and the Taiwan issue

59:00 – Making sense of the PRC claim to Taiwan

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Simona: Orphan of Asia, a novel by Wu Zhuoliu; and the show Orange is the New Black

Shelley: Occupied, a Norwegian thriller series on Netflix

Kaiser: Meizhong.report, a Chinese-language resource from the Carter Center's U.S.-China Perception Monitor, covering official, media, and social media commentary on U.S.-China relations

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with James (Jay) Carter, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Jay, who joined us on the show in December 2020 to talk about his book Champion's Day, is the author of one of the most widely-read columns that SupChina runs: This Week in China's History. In honor of two full years of contributions, with over 100 columns, Kaiser asked Jay to talk about his process, his purpose, and the challenges and the rewards of writing this excellent column.

6:34 – The origin story of the column, and its original intention

11:34 – How the hell does Jay do it week in and week out?

23:84 – Jay talks about Jonathan Spence and what it was like to study under him at Yale

31:32 – On the diversity of perspectives in the column

40:53 – How the column keeps Jay connected to academic work and intellectual life

43:35 – Threading the needle in deploying historical analogy, and right-sizing historical "rhymes" and patterns

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Jay: The Broadway musical Hadestown; and the New York City Ballet

Kaiser: The inaugural Sinologia Conference on June 10

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Sinica, Kaiser welcomes back Dr. George Hu, a clinical psychologist based in Shanghai, who has a lot to say about the state of mental health in Chinese cities under lockdown. Unsurprisingly, mental health disorders like anxiety and depression have been exacerbated under conditions of isolation and food insecurity. Surprisingly, there's a silver lining or two to the whole thing.

6:52 – Getting a sense for the scale of mental health problems related to the lockdown in Shanghai

16:23 – Have the lockdowns increased awareness of and empathy for people suffering from mental health disorders in Shanghai and in China?

20:07 – The lockdowns and impact on children and on the elderly

34:05 – The impact on essential workers

42:21 – What other Chinese cities are learning from Shanghai's COVID-19 experience

45:22 – The quarantine centers and mental health services

A full transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

George: How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims

Kaiser: Nicholas Confessore's series in the New York Times on Tucker Carlson, "American Nationalist"

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.