Chinese Whispers

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.

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.