Episodes
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This week on Sinica, I chat with Jessica Chen Weiss, until recently at Cornell University but now the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS, in Washington D.C. Jessica, to those of you familiar with her work, has been at the forefront of the fight for a less strident, diplomacy-first approach to China, balancing threats with assurances to find a modus vivendi with China. She has challenged prevailing notions about China's intentions, and has called for the U.S. to advance an affirmative vision of how it wants to live in the world with China. We focus in this conversation about a recent piece in Foreign Affairs in which she challenges both the solidity and the logic of the "bipartisan consensus" on China, and holds out hope that a next administration might approach the relationship differently.
3:45 – How Jessica has settled into D.C.; her professorial namesake; and how she has become a leading voice for a less confrontational approach to China
9:30 – Where Jessica sees diverging views on China in the Republican and Democratic Parties
12:41 – What a more durable basis for coexistence should look like
14:46 – Credible deterrence and strategic ambiguity in the context of Taiwan
16:03 – Acknowledgements to limits on American power and the importance of being realistic
18:09 – Assurances on Taiwan and what threatens their credibility
21:13 – The question of engagement and the deterrent effect of economic integration
25:30 – How the U.S. can combat legitimate national security threats from China without undermining its own values, and the importance of not treating the Chinese in diaspora as a fifth column
31:31 – Electoral politics: the importance of welcoming and inclusive policies and creating space for debate and discernment
35:07 – The importance of testing our assumptions
38:30 – What another Trump presidency might look like
40:30 – How a Harris administration might differ from the Biden administration
44:13 – The U.S. and China-Russia relations
Recommendations:
Jessica: Valarie Kaur’s Sage Warrior: Wake to Oneness, Practice Pleasure, Choose Courage, Become Victory
Kaiser: BeaGo, an AI-powered search tool (download from your app store!)
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This week I continue my conversations with some of the outstanding Schwarzman Scholars who presented at the Capstone Showcase in late June. In this episode, I speak with Nainika Sudheendra about the problem of space debris and what can be done to reduce the creation of more of it or even begin removal of debris before it makes the launching of new satellites more costly or even impossible.
2:34 Nainika’s background and interest in the Schwarzman program
5:33 Why Nainika focused on space debris
7:23 Nainika’s prior knowledge about the Chinese space program and what she learned through the Schwarzman program
10:30 How space debris is measured, the Kessler syndrome, and the hazards that space debris poses
14:33 The obstacles Nainika encountered in her research
16:35 How political leaders in China and the U.S. are thinking about the space debris problem
20:02 How debris mitigation might [ought to?] be incentivized, who is working on the problem now, and the role of private insurers
24:03 The Wolf Amendment and Chinese private sector space companies
27:22 Technologies for mitigating and remediating debris
31:00 Lessons from another tragedy of the commons (the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer), and how the EU could take a leading role
34:59 The importance of data standardization and opportunities to negotiate fair use and safety precautions
38:17 How redundancy prevents public perception — the difficulty in going from “outage” to “outrage”
40:27 What Nainika has been doing since finishing at Schwarzman
Recommendations:
Nainika: From Streets to Stalls: The History and Evolution of Hawking and Hawker Centres in Singapore by Ryan Kueh (another Schwarzman alum)
Kaiser: Journalist Andrew Jones on Twitter; the South Indian restaurant Viks Chaat in Berkeley, California
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Episodes manquant?
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I thought Sinica listeners might be interested in listening to an audio narration of my latest essay. I hope you enjoy and that it gives you some food for thought! If you prefer to read, you can find the essay — free for everyone this week — right here.
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The Chinese game studio Game Science has a hit on its hands! The game Black Myth: Wukong, an action role-playing game (ARPG) based on the Monkey King from Journey to the West, has sold extraordinarily well in China and is breaking new ground in the U.S. market as well. This week, I speak with Rui Ma, who runs Tech Buzz China and is one of the most highly-regarded China tech commentators in the U.S., and with Robert Wynne, an industry veteran with many years in China currently serving as COO of a new game start-up that's still under wraps. They share their insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Black Myth: Wukong and the future of Chinese games.
6:44 – The scale of the phenomenon of Black Myth: Wukong
12:01 – Rui and Rob’s thoughts about the game (so far)
17:23 – What Chinese players think of the game, and the difficulty in understanding its esoteric characters for Western players
24:23 – The appeal of mobile games versus console games in China
27:30 – The difficulty of attracting investment [or “How Game Science attracted investment”]
31:06 – Rob’s criticism of the game’s go-to-market strategy and its lost opportunities
35:46 – The party-state's response so far, and the politics surrounding the game
40:57 – Feng Ji, the founding of Game Science, and his criticisms of the gaming industry
46:01 – AAA Chinese games to look forward to
49:29 – The impressive success stats of Black Myth: Wukong
Recommendations:
Rui: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Rob: The Chinese TV series Escape from Trilateral Slopes (Biān shuǐ wǎngshì 边水往事) (2024)
Kaiser: Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
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This week on Sinica, I chat with Olivia Fu, who this spring completed her year at Schwarzman College and wrote her Capstone project — a research paper that is required of all Schwarzman Scholars — on the rise and fall of the Beijing hip-hop scene. We explore some of the parallels to Beijing's rock scene, and how many of the same factors that stifled rock in Beijing ultimately led to Beijing's relative decline as a hip-hop city.
3:16 – Olivia’s background and connection to China, and what drew her to the Schwarzman Program and studying hip-hop
6:13 – Olivia’s Schwarzman mentor, Paul Pickowicz
7:47 – How Olivia dealt with censorship in her Capstone project
10:24 – The parallels and differences between the hip-hop and rock scenes in China
12:27 – The dakou CDs and the origins of the hip-hop scene in China
17:03 – The influences of Japanese and Korean rap and hip-hop and Black American culture
18:30 – The importance of studying Beijing hip-hop
23:05 – The spirit of Beijing and societal commentary in Beijing hip-hop
27:38 – The phenomenon of Rap of China
29:50 – The divergence of PG One and GAI, and the regulatory influence of the State Administration on Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television
35:13 – Sinifying hip-hop
37:21 – What the burgeoning hip-hop scene in China was like in the early 2000s
40:10 – Critiques of the Beijing dialect in rap and the Beijing rap style
45:16 – Iron Mic rap battles and Shanghai, and Chinese hip-hop’s critique of the educational system
48:34 – Why Beijing rap declined
59:09 – What’s next for Olivia
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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.
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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
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Here's a little bonus ep for you ahead of tomorrow's show, which will be a re-run of a really fun one from about 10 years ago! I'm driving the rest of this week to the Midwest to drop my kids off at their respective universities, and I've been thinking a lot about the education systems in China and the U.S. So here's my essay for this week.
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This week on Sinica, Paul Triolo rejoins the show for a deep, deep dive into China's response to American export controls on advanced semiconductors and related technologies. How much hurt has the policy put on Chinese firms — and how far along is China in finding its way toward technological autonomy? Kevin Xu, author of the fantastic "Interconnected" newsletter, joins to talk about some of the big ideas he's written about in recent months and to play co-host as we grill Paul on China's efforts to get out from under American controls.
9:10 – The downplaying of generative AI in the Third Plenum’s decision document
18:25 – Why the Middle East is an appealing and important region for major AI players
26:20 – Why chip wars have evolved into to cloud wars
29:36 – How China has fared in trying to achieve its goal of indigenous advanced semiconductor manufacture
31:50 – Semiconductors: What lies within the “small yard” versus what products are unaffected under U.S. export controls
35:42 – The quality and reliability caveat to China’s goal of self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacture
38:35 – The success of the Biden administration’s export controls and whether the controls have really put the hurt on anyone
46:00 – The Harmony operating system
47:47 – The importance of packaging
50:45 – Paul explains what he calls “China Semiconductor Industry Policy 3.0” and its predecessors
57:03 – China’s EUV lithography challenge
1:03:14 – DUV lithography and multi-patterning, and the importance of collaboration across the ecosystemin the process of making semiconductors at scale
1:11:50 – Huawei’s progress so far and remaining major hurdles and bottlenecks
1:18:42 – Paul and Kevin’s thoughts on whether the American strategic class will regret its approach to export controls and whether there is an off-ramp
Recommendations:
Paul: Ed Conway’s Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
Kevin: Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America
Kaiser: The House of the Dragon (2022- ) TV series
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This week on Sinica, I'm joined by Eric Olander, host of the outstanding China in Africa Podcast and the indispensable China-Global South Podcast, and creator of the China-Global South Project. Eric's detailed and very current knowledge of China's relations across the developing world is on display in this whirlwind tour that takes us from the troubled waters of the South China Sea to China's diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, on to Subsaharan Africa and how Washington has struggled to create policies that can match what China offers, and to Latin America. He then zooms out and talks about what it all means in aggregate. Don't miss this show!
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2:39 The situation with the Philippines and the Second Thomas Shoal, and the U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty — the potential challenges in activating it on the U.S. side and President Marcos’ changing standards for invoking it
15:50 ASEAN’s difficulty in reaching consensus, and Myanmar as another ASEAN priority
18:53 China’s role as convener in brokering a “unity deal” for Palestine
23:02 The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC)
30:20 Why Africa is so hard to fit onto the U.S. foreign policy agenda and the lack of a forward-looking American vision for Africa
37:56 Geraud Neema’s disappointment with Washington’s talk about battery metals and critical minerals
42:22 The pushback from Mexico’s finance minister and Mexico’s concern over the growing number of imports from China
46:48 The trade surplus number and long-term concerns for China’s exports
49:35 Brazilian President Lula hints at willingness to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
51:51 How it all fits together, and how China has leveraged the Global South’s frustration over the U.S.-European-led international order
Recommendations:
Eric: Matt Pottinger’s The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, and Anne Stevenson-Yang’s Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy
Kaiser: Will Durant’s books from The Story of Civilization, especially The Age of Faith and The Reformation, as well as the audiobook versions read by Stefan Rudnicki
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This week, my narration of a longish essay about my recently-concluded four-week trip to Dalian and, more importantly, Beijing — my first time back in the city I called home for so long since the COVID pandemic. If you prefer to read rather than listen, you can find the essay — free for everyone this week — on the Substack. I hope you enjoy this!
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This week on Sinica, I'm in Beijing, where I spoke with my dear friend Anthony Tao, an English-language poet and a builder of community in the city where I lived for over 20 years. Anthony recently published a volume of his poetry called We Met in Beijing, and it captures the relationship that so many have with the city wherever they might come from. The episode features readings of some of his — and my — favorite poems.
3:28 Why Anthony chose poetry as a medium, and the poetry he has read [appreciated?]
9:13 A discussion of Anthony’s poem, “I Landed in Beijing,” and the feelings Beijing inspires
19:56 Anthony’s poem, “Self-censorship”
27:08 Anthony’s journalism in poetic form and processing the trauma of COVID
31:38 Living as an “expat” and writing from an expat’s perspective: Anthony’s poem “Dancing like a Laowai
40:46 Anthony’s bar — The Golden Weasel — and meeting interesting people in Beijing
44:49 The themes of place and nostalgia, Anthony’s poem, “Postcard,” and the last stanza of his title poem, “We Met in Beijing”
Recommendations:
Anthony: The poetry of Stephen Dunn; the TV series Lucky Hank (2023) based on Straight Man by Richard Russo; Spittoon, an English-language literary collective in China; and his band, Poetry x Music
Kaiser: The many international restaurants of Xiaoyun Lu in Beijing
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I'm trying something different: totally unscripted and very, very lightly edited recordings grabbed on the go where I happen to be. For the inaugural episode, I've got Wang Zichen, the author of the amazing Pekingnology newsletter on Substack, as well as the man behind the Center for China and Globalization's newsletter "The East is Read." Hear Zichen's origin story, his approach to publishing Pekingnology, the skinny on his new Got China show with Liu Yang and Jiang Jiang, as well as his take on what we can expect from the Third Plenum.
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This week on Sinica, I chat with University of Melbourne transnational historian Pete Millwood about his outstanding book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations. The road to normalization is told too often with a focus only on the Nixon-Kissinger opening and official diplomatic efforts culminating in the final recognition of the PRC in January 1979, but there's much more to the story than that, and Millwood tells it deftly, drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with many of those directly involved.
3:33 — Transnational history
4:44 — The early, “pioneering” trips to China in the 1950s and ‘60s and China’s shift in invitations
11:14 — The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR) in the 1960s
16:27 — The role of the Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars (CCAS)
20:43 — Why Nixon’s opening to China was seen as so surprising, and the impact of the UN’s shift in recognition from the ROC to the PRC on American thinking
24:57 — The Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong ping-pong diplomacy story
31:21 — Edgar Snow’s meeting with Mao
33:43 — The return leg of ping-pong diplomacy and the National Committee’s “baptism by fire”
36:33 — The significance of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour of China with Eugene Ormandy
42:23 — Jiang Qing and the controversy around the cancelled performing arts tour in the U.S. in 1975
46:03 — Kissinger’s thinking in the early 1970s after the first communiqué
48:48 — The U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association
50:42 — How scientific cooperation smoothed the process toward normalization under the Carter administration, the state of play in ’77, and how Frank Press CSCPRC argued for greater reciprocity
1:02:25 — The politics in China in regards to the grander bargain and the decentralization of exchanges
1:05:43 — The disbandment of the CSCPRC and the reinvention of the NCUSCR
1:08:58 — Pete’s suggestion for continuing academic and cultural exchange
1:12:51 — How Pete got interested in such an American and China-centric topic
1:18:02 — Pete’s current projects
Recommendations:
Pete: Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism by Wendy Cheng; Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim (also available as an audiobook read by the author)
Kaiser: We Met in Beijing, a book of poems by Anthony Tao
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This week on Sinica, in a show recorded on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions, historian Adam Tooze joins to chat about what the U.S. wants from China, China's vaulting green energy ambitions, and much more. Don't miss this episode: Tooze gets pretty darn spicy!
3:13 How Adam launched Chartbook in Chinese
5:37 How Dalian and Beijing have changed since Adam’s last visit in 2019
9:01 What the West wants from China, the Thucydides Trap,
15:11 The trajectory of China’s economic development and why it’s hard for the West to reconcile with]
25:11 “Overcapacity” and the politics of renewable energy
31:00 Russo-Chinese relations and the war in Ukraine
37:12 The Global South and China since February 24th and October 7th and the importance of Africa with regards to global development
41:39 Green energy as a driver of high-quality development in China
47:49 The “Red New Deal” and the combination punch metaphor
51:57 Adam’s cognitive style (an interrelated thinker averse to analogizing), climate as a touchstone topic, and China’s importance in global climate politics
Recommendations:
Adam: The work of Lauri Myllyvirta, including his analysis on Carbon Brief
Kaiser: Rewatching The Wire TV series (2002-2008)
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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
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This week on Sinica, Part 1 of a two-part podcast with Stevan Harrell, Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Washington. Steve's groundbreaking book An Ecological History of Modern China represents the culmination of a professional lifetime of work in disparate fields. It synthesizes ideas from geography, earth science, biology, anthropology, sociology, political science, and more. It's a book that will make you change the way you think not just about China, but about history more broadly, and about resilience in natural and social systems. In this first part, we focus on some of the core framing concepts of the book and how Steve demarcates China in both space and time. Part 2 is next week!
5:01 How Steve thinks about ecological history and resilience theory/ecology in relation to Chinese history
17:09 Social-ecological systems and the systems approach
24:46 The importance of etic and emic scale
30:15 How diversity contributes to resilience
36:18 The Malthus-Boserup Ratchet
42:43 The importance of buffers
51:24 The adaptive cycle
55:41 Ecological buffers and the threats they face] in the major regions of China: China Proper, Zomia, and Chinese Central Asia
1:06:28 Steve’s periodization of modern Chinese history from the perspective of ecological history
Recommendations at the end of Part 2 next week!
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This week on Sinica, the highly-regarded writer Peter Hessler joins to talk about his new book, out July 9: Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. Over 20 years after teaching with the Peace Corps in Fuling (the subject of his first book, Rivertown, Pete returns to China to teach at Sichuan University in Chengdu. He writes about the two cohorts of students, with whom he has maintained extensive contacts, to offer fascinating insights into how China has changed across this momentous period with touching, deeply human stories.
3:47 – Why Pete couldn’t teach in Fuling again
6:56 – How Pete stayed in touch with his Fuling cohort
9:46 – Pete’s SCUPI [(Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute)] cohort
13:51 – Pete’s Fuling cohort
19:35 – Chinese rural values: pragmatism and modesty
23:08 – The physical and psychological differences between the Fuling and Chengdu cohorts
29:32 – “Educated acquiescence” in the Chinese education system
35:07 – The Hessler family’s experience with Chengdu Experimental Primary School
43:04 – The impending lack of “Country feel,” and Pete’s sense of humor
47:02 – Facing criticism over his reporting during the pandemic
52:13 – Pete’s experience being jǔbào’ed and teaching Orwell’s Animal Farm
59:01 – Pete’s take on the COVID origins debate
1:02:10 – Competition and authoritarianism in China, and the phenomenon of Chinese and Chinese American Trump supporters
1:06:57 – Serena’s investigation for Chángshì and why Pete’s contract was not renewed
1:15:28 What’s next for Pete
Recommendations:
Pete: Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux, a forthcoming novel about George Orwell’s time in Burma as a policeman; Burmese Days by George Orwell
Kaiser: the Meta Quest VR headset
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This week on Sinica, a conversation that I moderated on May 30th called “Assessing the Impact of US-China Rivalry on Ukraine and Taiwan,” put on by the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China. The main organizer was my friend Vita Golod, who is the chair of the Ukrainian Association of Sinologists.
The panelists are:
Dmytro Burtsev, a Junior Fellow at A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.Da Wei, Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy and Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University. Emilian Kavalski, Professor at the Centre for International Studies and Development at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. I Yuan, Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taiwan.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Jonathan Chatwin, author of a new book about Deng Xiaoping's "Southern Tour" of early 1992 — a pivotal event that renewed a commitment to economic reforms after they'd stalled following 1989, and seized the initiative from conservatives in the Chinese leadership. The book is called The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future.
2:10 – Why Jonathan focused on the Southern Tour, and the narratives surrounding it in China
7:19 – How the events of ’89 influenced Deng’s thinking
11:08 – How the political fates of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang affected Deng’s planning
14:31 – The reformers’ path to victory from the second half of ’89 to January of ’92
20:32 – Deng’s vision of opportunity in the face of communism’s apparent global retreat
24:53 – How Deng’s personal experiences shaped his policy decisions
27:07 – The strategic signaling and risky timing of the Southern Tour
34:07 – The influence of the Chinese horoscope, and “The Story of Spring”
37:33 – Shenzhen speed
40:57 – What Jonathan learned about Deng Xiaoping
45:00 – Jonathan’s recommendations for learning more about Deng Xiaoping and the post-Mao era
46:18 – Xi Jinping, the “end” [not sure how to phrase] of Deng’s reform and opening era, and the [parallels with the?] Chinese economic situation today
Recommendations
Jonathan: China’s Hidden Century, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell, produced to accompany the British Museum’s exhibition by that name; and the app Voice Dream, a text-to-speech reader
Kaiser: Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, a book about the group of German Romantics gathered in Jena, Germany
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