The ChinaTalk Podcast: Where to Start
ChinaTalk has a podcast with 300 episodes you should really be listening to!
The ChinaTalk podcast features weekly interviews with experts covering the same mix of topics you see on this newsletter: modern China, US-China relations, and technology. The button below allows you to subscribe for free on your podcast app of choice.
I recently pressed publish on ChinaTalk’s 300th podcast episode. Below are some fan favorites to get you started and here’s a Spotify playlist of our best of 2023.
RAND’s Jason Matheny on Tech Competition and Organizational Design
As I was starting to wrap up at the top of our first hour, Jason cut me off. “Jordan, I actually blocked out two hours — it is really important to get into these issues!” The best shows tend to be those with guests who not only are engaged in the world today but also share perspectives informed by deep study of the past. Jason ranged with me through organizational design, cultivating a strong culture of research, x-risk, and even how art can illustrate aspects of national security. This show was my favorite of 2023.
How Corruption Works in China
How can China be so corrupt and yet grow so fast? What’s the relationship between corruption and competent governance? How does “access money” at the higher levels differ from the “profit sharing” you see lower down in the bureaucracy? How does China in the twenty-first century compare with America’s gilded age? And why won’t anyone give me dinosaur eggs?
To discuss, Professor Yuen Yuen Ang joins the show to talk about her fantastic new book, China’s Gilded Age.
Peter Hessler, from Beijing to Cairo
Peter Hessler spent seven years in China as a correspondent for The New Yorker, followed by five years in Egypt. In this episode, Peter discusses his long and prolific career reporting on the society, politics, and culture of these two dynamic nations; he also considers the similarities and differences in the ways the Chinese and Egyptian people make sense of their respective places in the world based on their rich historical and cultural legacies. In addition, Peter reflects on the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and contrasts it with the 2013 mass protests and eventual coup d’état in Cairo.
Jake Sullivan from October 2019 on a Vision for US-China
Before he joined the Biden campaign, Sullivan took an hour to talk with me about his perspectives on the current US-China relationship, as well as his experiences working in the Obama administration and on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton. Given how relations have soured over the past four years, it’s fascinating to hear him try to imagine a path not taken where the US and China find a more amicable way to coexist.
How China Can Take Over Tech
Douglas Fuller and I discuss his fantastic book, Paper Tiger, Hidden Dragons: Firms and the Political Economy of China’s Technological Development. In his book, Fuller explores a question that has hounded heads of state around the world for decades: how can a developing country get ahead in the tech sector? Drawing on the results of 499 interviews with experts over the course of fifteen years, Fuller discusses China’s answer to this question in the context of its attempts to dominate the global semiconductor industry. We get into the weeds on why Huawei succeeded where ZTE failed, and explore the concept of technology transfer and implications for the future of the Chinese tech sector.
How Chinese Ink Painting Survived the CCP
Occasionally on the podcast we cover more culture-forward topics like “why is Chinese TV so terrible” and “the best of Chinese hip hop.” I particularly enjoyed this show with artist Arnold Chang and Joe Scheier-Dawlberg, who is the curator of Chinese Paintings at the MET in New York. We got into how Chinese painting — arguably the elitist of arts — fared during the Cultural Revolution, as well as ink paintings, socialist realism, oil paintings, and the political upheavals that formed their backdrop. We also got into:
Whether chaotic periods produce the best art;
The role of escapism in the creation of Chinese paintings;
Which university exhibited a twelve-by-twenty-foot oil painting of yours truly without prior permission.
Lastly, if you listen to your podcasts via YouTube, ChinaTalk has a growing YouTube channel where we’re running all of our shows, often with videos of the guests.