Episodes
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In our third episode on pig butchering scams, we explore the origins of the Chinese criminal syndicates that enslave people from at least 66 different countries. We examine the institutions supporting this appalling business, from the Thai military to cryptocurrencies, Burmese border guard forces to special economic zones. And the marks for these scam syndicates are not just Chinese lonely hearts—Western countries are now more profitable to scam than China. To ask what can be done to counter this trade, Graeme is joined by Jason Tower, director of the Burma Program at the United States Institute of Peace, and Greg Raymond from the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.
Image: c/- Stefan Czimmek/DW, KK Park on the Myanmar-Thai border
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Taiwan is ground zero for cognitive warfare, with the island subject to more disinformation than any other democracy. The targets are political candidates, media outlets, even boy bands. The threat is so serious that Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice recently set up a Cognitive Warfare Research Center. To explore this war for Taiwanese minds, Louisa and Graeme are joined by independent writer Min Chao and journalist Brian Hioe from New Bloom Magazine.
Image: Taiwan News Formosa TV, YouTube, 20 January 2024.
Transcripts available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/
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Missing episodes?
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After our last episode on an online romance scam operating out of Palau we were contacted by Neo Lu, who was trafficked to work in an online scam camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border, the victim of a $US3 trillion global criminal industry. He joins Louisa and Graeme to offer jaw-dropping detail on life inside a scam centre, the mechanics of pig butchering, who benefits from this new form of slavery and how they launder their profits.
Image: c/- Yihao Lu, Scamming equipment, Dongmei Camp, 2022
Episode transcripts are available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/
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Chinese triads have been making a Pacific play, notably in the tiny nation of Palau. There a notorious triad boss - nicknamed Broken Tooth - reinvented himself as a CCP-linked businessman trying to set up a 'gangster-themed' casino, while police busted a Chinese 'fraud factory'. In Palau, this scam scheme was linked to businessmen touting United Front credentials, who are also involved in local politics and media outlets. To examine the ties between Chinese gangsters and the Communist Party, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Aubrey Belford, the lead Pacific editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and freelance journalist Bernadette Carreon.
Image: Downtown Koror, Palau’s largest town. Image c/- Richard Brooks
Transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/
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For our hundredth episode, there was only one choice in the Year of the Dragon. We tackle the scaly mythical beast, which now finds itself central to the Party’s image. We look at the political efficacy of the dragon for the CCP, which has recently launched a nationalistic rebranding campaign for the ‘loong’ to distinguish it from evil Western dragons. We explore the history of the dragon, its often-fraught relationship to power, and (once common) “official sightings” of dragons in government gazetteers. To get to grips with the most auspicious creature in China’s pantheon, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Australian sinologist Linda Jaivin, author of The Monkey and the Dragon, historian James Carter from St. Joseph's University, and Annie Ren, a postdoctoral fellow of Chinese literature at the Australian National University.
Transcripts are available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/Image: c/- Louisa Lim, Bendigo, 2024
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China’s largesse in the Pacific is nothing if not visible. From mobile phone towers to gleaming stadiums and government buildings, Beijing’s splashing out on those it sees as choosing “the right side of history.” In this episode, we explore Taiwan’s future in the Pacific as it is deserted by its former diplomatic allies, lured by Beijing’s goodies. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham, co-founder of the Melanesian News Network, and the University of California’s Jessica Marinaccio, a former staffer in Tuvalu’s Taiwanese embassy.
Show transcripts can be found at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/
Image: Wikimedia Commons. “President Tsai and Tuvalu Prime Minister Sopoaga plant a coconut seedling, symbolizing the close friendship between Taiwan and Tuvalu.” (2017) Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan) | Government Website Open Information Announcement
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Stand-up comedy looked set to be the next big thing on China’s entertainment scene, with shows like Roast Convention drawing billions of views and comics scoring lucrative commercial endorsements. But comedy now finds itself in retreat. A new wave of feminist comics is struggling with attacks from online trolls and a disapproving state. To ask whether the regime–and China’s men—can take a joke, Louisa and Graeme are joined by three stand up Chinese comedians: He Huang who's based here in Australia, and two members of the London-based 50 Shades of Feminism, Barbie and Elena.
Transcript available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/the-feminists-have-stood-up-gender-and-comedy-in-china/
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Every generation in modern China has been richer and more ambitious than the one before—until Gen Z. With youth unemployment so high that the government has simply stopped reporting the figures, many are opting to lie flat, slump down dead, or even become full-time children. The Party frets that despite the best efforts of the propaganda organs to get them excited about a tech-driven utopian future, China’s young people seem to have lost their work ethic. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Steven Sun Zhao, a Gen Z writer at Chaoyang Trap and Yaling Jiang, a proud millennial and the founder of Aperture China.
A full transcript is available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/full-time-children-or-half-dead-chinas-gen-z-goes-to-ground/
Image: Woman in black jacket sitting on blue chair, c/- 绵 绵 on Unsplash
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The exponential trauma produced by the Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in China, yet has been foundational to a generation. Now the Communist Party is using the experience of its leader Xi Jinping as one of the 17 million young people sent down to the countryside to reframe the movement as showcasing personal sacrifice in the interests of national success. The party would like other aspects to be forgotten, such as the unimaginable violence in Chongqing or the petty brutality that set children onto their parents. In the second part of our series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme discuss the legacies of the Cultural Revolution with sociologist Xu Bin from Emory University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the author of Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China and Guardian journalist Tania Branigan whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution came out in May.
Show transcript: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/bombard-the-past-exhuming-the-cultural-revolution/
Image: Red Guard, June 1968. c/- Wikimedia Commons and China Pictorial
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Writing history in China has never been easy; China’s first historian, Sima Qian, was forced to choose between execution and castration and imprisonment. He chose the latter in order to finish his life’s work, Records of the Grand Historian. Now China’s keepers of inconvenient truths are put under immense pressure by Xi Jinping’s war on historical nihilism—viewpoints and memories that run counter to official Party history. Fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle against the state, China’s underground historians often make huge sacrifices to keep alive histories that the Party would like to erase. In the first of a two-part series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Ian Johnson, whose book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is out today.
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Just as satirical writers struggled in Trump's America, China's sci-fi writers are facing a challenge: how do you write in a world where reality is more like science fiction than science fiction itself? Added to that are the perils of popularity, with everyone from Netflix to the Communist Party embracing Chinese science fiction. To explore China's metaverse of sci-fi, Loiusa and Graeme are joined by Emily Jin, a science fiction and fantasy translator who’s also a PhD candidate at Yale and translator Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Beijing's recent ban on the export of two rare metals represents the latest front in the global battle to control chipmaking technology. Now there are fears China could block the export of rare earths, over which it has a stranglehold. How close are we to that nuclear option? To find out, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Martijn Rasser, a former senior intelligence officer and analyst with the CIA, who is now the managing director of the Netherlands-based Datenna, and Jon Hykaway, the director and president of Stormcrow Capital in Toronto.
Image: c/- NASA. The Baiyon Ebo Rare Earths Mine, Inner Mongolia.
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New Zealand is in Beijing's good books, attracting state media praise as setting 'a good example' for other countries in its ties, as Prime Minister Chris Hipkins jets into China. He's said his message is crystal clear: New Zealand is open for business. But critics say the country's policy is muddled and ambiguous, despite Chinese encroachment. Two ethnic Chinese MPs have been expelled over their links to Beijing, and a prominent New Zealand China academic was targeted with office break-ins. To unpack what the future holds for China-New Zealand relations, Louisa is joined in Auckland by writer and sociologist Tze Ming Mok and journalist Sam Sachdeva, author of The China Tightrope: Navigating New Zealand's relationship with a world superpower.
Image: c/- Michal Klajban. Solidarity Grid by Mischa Kuball (Wuhan, China), Christchurch, New Zealand. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
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In the final episode exploring China's Strategic New Frontiers, we are investigating China's growing cyberpower ambitions. On the National Cyber Power index, Beijing is already the world's number two cyberpower, behind only the US. Its cyberdoctrine includes promoting cybersovereignty, constructing internet standards and infrastructure, and playing a bigger role in cyber governance bodies. To ask what this means for the future of the Internet, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Konstantinos Komaitis, a non-resident fellow at the Lisbon Institute and the Atlantic Council, as well as Julia Voo, cyber fellow leading a team at Harvard University’s Belfer Institute who publish the National Cyber Power Index.
Image: IPad with keyboard, c/- 绵 绵 on Unsplash.
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China appears to have restarted construction on its fifth Antarctic station for the first time since 2018. It’s just one sign that Beijing is trying to increase its footprint in the world’s coldest regions. It already calls itself a near-Arctic state and is planning for an ice-free shipping route across the top of the world. This month, to discuss the drivers behind China’s polar ambitions, Graeme and Louisa are joined by Eyck Freyman of the Arctic Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the University of Washington’s Mia Bennett and Singapore Management University’s Nengye Liu.
Photo credit: Wikimedia commons
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China's reaching not just for the stars, but also for the deepest ocean depths. It's even parked its deepwater submersible in the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the world's oceans, and planted flags on the ocean bed. This month, Graeme and Louisa are joined by China Ocean Institute CEO Tabitha Mallory and Tiffany Ma, the senior director of Bower Group Asia, to talk about how the Great Game is playing out on our seabeds.
Image: Caulophryne pelagica [Angler Fish] D. Shale, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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In a new series of episodes, we’re examining how China is pushing the boundaries of science and territory. First up, China’s space program, the envy of space scientists worldwide for seemingly bottomless pots of funding from government, and increasingly, venture capital. China's space programme, with a space telescope that is constantly being upgraded and its uber-for-satellites, is no longer just cloning Soviet tech. To explore the ecology of China’s space sector and ask what’s driving their massive space spend, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at the Australian National University and Blaine Curcio, the co-host of Dongfang Hour, a podcast about China and space, and co-founder of Orbital Gateway Counselling.
Image: c/- Jamie Gilbert and Brad Tucker (ANU), View from a balloon at 32km (105,000 ft.), 2019.
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In a few short months, Chinese officials have gone from COVID cover-up to competing over who has the highest number of infections. After urbanites flocked back to the countryside for lunar New Year, the Party that ran the world’s strictest prevention regime now presides over the world’s largest and most ambitious experiment in herd immunity. To explore how this dramatic change unfolded, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Governing Health in Contemporary China and Vivian Wu, co-founder of the Mighty Voice media studio, who has worked at a host of media organizations including BBC Chinese and Initium.
Image: Abandoned Isolation House in Shenzhen with Dynamic Zero Slogan, c/- Wikimedia Commons
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Finally, China’s sloughing off the Zero Covid policy it’s embraced for three years. This followed a spasm of discontent, with people taking to the streets to demonstrate against Zero Covid, in protests that quickly spilled over to demand democracy and Xi Jinping's resignation. Beijing’s adaptive authoritarianism is in full sight, as the state eases Covid controls and reverses three years of rhetoric on the dangers of the virus. To ask whether the protests were a flash in the pan, we’re joined by William Hurst, Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at Cambridge University, Chenchen Zhang from Durham University, producer and co-host of the Shicha Podcast and Zeyi Yang, China reporter at MIT Technology Review.
Image: Vigil at Southwest Jiaotong University, c/- Wikimedia Commons
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“Controlling data means controlling the future.” Those are not George Orwell's words, but instead were uttered in 2015 by Jack Ma, founder of tech company Alibaba. Though Ma has since been brought to heel by the Chinese state, the CCP is constantly expanding the way it harnesses data to bolster its techno-authoritarian rule. Chinese companies now lead the world in AI and facial recognition technology, though they are helped by surprising allies in corporate America. To find out how Xi Jinping’s project to command the future is panning out, we’re joined by Josh Chin and Liza Lin from the Wall Street Journal, authors of Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control and Aynne Kokas, the CK Yen Professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty.
Image: Two security cameras pointing in opposite directions, c/- of Victor on Unsplash.
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