Jeremy Goldkorn joins for this largely unedited throwback to the early, sweary days of the show. We talk about the announcement made on Wednesday, 28 May 2025, on the "aggressive" revocation of Chinese student visas for students with Party "connections" or who study "critical fields." You've been warned! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/priv…

This week on Sinica, in a show taped in early June in Washington, Kaiser chats with Tong Zhao (赵通) of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a leading expert on Chinese nuclear doctrine, about why the PRC has, in recent years, significantly increased the size of its nuclear arsenal. Zhao offers a master class in the practice of strategic e…

In 2014, the writer Christopher Beam published a humorous, heartwarming story in The New Republic about an unlikely team of American football enthusiasts in Chongqing who went on to defeat their archrivals in Shanghai to win a championship. The piece was optioned by Sony Pictures, and had some big names attached, but was ultimately never made — not…

This week on Sinica, I chat with Stephen Platt, historian at UMass Amherst and author, most recently, of the book The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II. Like his previous works, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom and Imperial Twilight, it offers a compelling narrative history of an overlo…

This week on Sinica, I chat with Jostein Hauge, political economist and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, based at the Centre of Development Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies, and author of the book The Future of the Factory: How Megatrends are Changing Industrialization. 3:…

This week on Sinica, I speak with Kendra Schaefer, the partner at Trivium China who heads their tech practice. She recently published a fascinating paper looking at the Cyberspace Administration of China's comprehensive database of generative AI tools released in China, and she shares the insights and big takeaways from her research on that databas…

A bonus episode this week. On May 22, I moderated a panel organized by Vita Golod and the UNC Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. The focus was on the U.S.-Ukraine Mineral Security Partnership, and it features Ivan Us, Chief Consultant at the Center for Foreign Policy at the National Institute for Strategic Studies; Jim Mullinax…

This week on Sinica, I chat with Eva Dou, technology reporter for the Washington Post, about her terrific new book about Huawei. From its prehistory to its fight for its life under tremendous U.S. pressure, she tells its story in a way that's both deeply engaging and very evenhanded. 04:53 – Meng Wanzhou’s case and its impact on media interest in H…

The Sinica Network proudly presents a new podcast: China Talking Points, featuring Kaiser Kuo (host of the Sinica Podcast), Eric Olander (host of the China-Global South Podcast and China In Africa Podcast) and Andrew Polk, co-founder of Trivium China and host of its podcast. We'll be joined regularly by Lizzi Lee, Fellow on Chinese Economy at the A…

I had scheduled a show to record while I was in Providence last week, but it fell through and had to be rescheduled, so please give this talk I delivered at Carnegie Mellon last month a listen! Hope you enjoy. Kaiser 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, I chat with veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis, who has covered the U.S.-China relationship for decades. He recently published a new book called Broken Engagement, which consists of interviews with U.S. policymakers who were instrumental in shaping American policy toward China from the George H.W. Bush administratio…

This week on Sinica, I chat with SCMP Senior Europe Correspondent Finbarr Bermingham, who joins from Brussels where he's been covering the EU-China relationship in fantastic depth and with great insight. 3:17 – EU-China relations in early 2025: the effect of the 2021 sanctions, who advocated for engagement versus confrontation with China, and the i…

This week on Sinica, in a show recorded at the University of Pittsburgh, I speak with Benno Weiner, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, about how China's policy toward its minority nationalities (or minzu) have shifted from their older, Soviet-inspired form to the policies of assimilation we now see. 2:29 – How the so-call…

This week on the Sinica Podcast, I chat with Yawei Liu, Senior Advisor for China at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and Yukon Huang, former China country head of the World Bank and now Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The show was taped live at the 2025 Columbia China Summit at Columbia University, put on by t…

This week on Sinica, I chat with Hazza Harding, a young Australian who began learning Chinese and made his way to China where he became a pop singer with hits on Chinese pop charts and a state media newscaster — and also lost his husband tragically, suffered through the COVID lockdowns while grieving for his loss. Yet he remains committed to furthe…

This week on Sinica, I chat with Jeffrey Ding, author of Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, a book that argues that a nation's ability to invent foundational technologies matters ultimately less in its overall national power than its ability to diffuse those "general purpose technologies," like electricity, digital technology, the internet, a…

This week on the Sinica Podcast, I chat with Jeremy Garlick, Director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies, Prague University, and a scholar of China’s international relations. Jeremy is the author of the book Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption, but the book we're talking about this week is his new Cambri…

This week, a special episode taped live at the University of California, Berkeley — my alma mater — on March 6 and featuring Jessica Chen Weiss of Johns Hopkins SAIS and Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution, both well-known to people who follow U.S.-China relations. This episode was made possible by the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley's…

This week, I'm proud to announce a new collaboration with Trivium, a China-focused strategic advisory firm you've probably heard of. They've got offices in DC, London, Shanghai, and Beijing, and they focus on analyzing and forecasting Chinese policy developments for multinational companies and institutional investors across a range of verticals -- …

This week: Part 2 in a series of podcasts in conjunction with the China Research Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The series, titled "Studying China in the Absence of Access: Rediscovering a Lost Art," ran from September to November 2021, and featured four eminent "Pekingologists," or specialists in Chine…

This week on Sinica: February 24 marks the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and as I’ve done for the last two years, I moderated a panel organized by Vita Golod, a Ukrainian China scholar who happens to be here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at UNC as a visiting scholar. She’s worked tirelessly to promote awareness of …

This week on Sinica, I chat with David Zweig, a veteran China scholar who is Professor Emeritus from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We discuss Davis'd latest book, The War for Chinese Talent in America, which looks at Chinese efforts to harness the intellectual firepower of Chinese scientists and engineers who studied abroad, e…

I’m delighted to bring you today the first in a series of conversations from a remarkable day-long session put on by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs, or ACF, at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The session was held on Monday, February 3, and was called “Getting China Right.” On today’…

This week on Sinica, I chat with economic historian Andrew B. Liu of Villanova University about how to understand Trump's thinking on China and tariffs. Andy wrote about this in an excellent piece on N+1 called "Back to the 80s? Trump, Xi Jinping, and Tariffs." Check it out and then listen to the show! 3:59 – How the U.S.’s current trade anxieties …

This week as we enter the Year of the Snake, Sinica co-founder Jeremy Goldkorn makes a re-appearance on the show. It's been a year since his last, and much has changed — and indeed, if Jeremy is right, we may be at an inflection point in American attitudes toward China. With the "TikTok Refugees" on Xiaohongshu or "RedNote" taking in a view of Chin…