Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast at the Association for Asian Studies in Boston.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Madison, Wisconsin.
Last month I was lucky enough to attend the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, AAS, in Boston, which I try to get to most years. This was actually my first time back since the pandemic. You can imagine that for somebody like me who is very interested in a huge range of topics in Asian studies, and specifically Chinese studies, it was a target-rich environment. Now, some years that I’ve gone, I have recorded shows there, but this time, I actually just brought a portable recorder and microphone and grabbed various scholars, some of whom I had already known, some of whom I had just met or had been introduced to me or only knew through Twitter, and asked them to introduce themselves and to talk briefly about their work. I also ask them to do Sinica-style recommendations. So, if you listen to the, what,15 or so capsule interviews that follow, it will give you a real sense of the just amazing breadth of topics that academics these days are working on.
It was, for me, really inspiring. I talked to everyone from MA students to Ph.D. candidates, to tenured professors, and many of the people that you will hear from will be coming back to do full episodes. So, if there’s somebody who you found particularly interesting, drop me an email at kaiser@thechinaproject.com or sinica@thechinaproject.com, and I will try to move that person up in the queue. I cleaned up the sound a little where possible, but most of these were done in the lobby of the Sheraton or just in the Hall Conference Center. And so, you are not always going to hear the questions I was asking where I did decide to jump in. Anyway, enjoy this. And let me know what individual particularly impressed you or what research area sparked your interest. Enjoy.
Kristin Shi-Kupfer: My name is Kristin Shi-Kupfer, and I’m a full professor for China studies, contemporary China studies, at the University of Trier, and I’m also a senior research associated with Merics, the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, Germany. My recent project is about the Chinese diaspora — specifically the public influencers or public intellectuals, which are speaking out on social media, on U.S. social media, Twitter or YouTube, trying both to attract and impact Chinese audiences and also U.S. audiences, Western audiences. And it’s a really fascinating group, and I think it’s a really an understudied group because I think we could learn so much from them, from their perspectives, how they look at China, also how they look at the U.S. or Europe, how they interpret global events. Because I think, and, of course, there are different types. There are people, for example, who provide mainly information that they get from their context in China, either in Chinese or in English, but there are also people who kind of provide different interpretative frameworks like narratives, offering both to Chinese and English audiences to really make sense of all this information we get from China.
Because I think it’s oftentimes not a lack of information we do have, but really a lack of how to make sense and interpret conflicting informations. And I think those Chinese public influencers, because of their knowledge, they can also oftentimes make really much more sense than us as, or at least me, as a foreign researcher, although being embedded hopefully enough into the Chinese context, but they can make sense of the ambiguity of China, right? And they’re also willing to not kind of resolve everything saying it has to be this or that, but to really accept. And I think that’s also something I learned from them a lot — that China is complex. It’s confusing, it’s contradicting, but this is also the dynamics and the beauty, especially of the Chinese society.
In general, I do believe it’s important to study them, and also counterparts in China, some of those Twitter public influences are also based, and China’s even more courageous. It’s also because we tend to focus so much on Xi Jinping and the CCP. And that also brings us oftentimes into this very antagonistic focus on national security or technological competition kind of framework, which is, of course, important and we have to pay attention to that. But China is so much more. It’s beyond the CCP. We should engage with the people, and we really should use their narratives and their understanding when we try to make sense of what’s going on in China.
So, I mean, this is a highly fragmented group. There are different kinds of constituencies, different professional backgrounds. One of the lines that kind of has kind of broke up into, kind of divided the community actually is their position on Trump and conservative values and identity politics. And there is, and I’m not in a position to say how much, but there is a large population within those political influencers who are supportive of Trump and for various reasons — and people, Ian Johnson, Teng Biao, and others have written about that. It’s because some of them think from the more old generation democracy activists. They believe Trump can bring down the CCP. He’s so tough on China. That’s why we like him. Others rather think, because they want to keep their own status, they feel they worked hard to achieve what they have, and so they very much buy into this anti- new immigrant. And also, in a very, oftentimes, sadly racist way, kind of looking down on other more struggling people and don’t acknowledge that they don’t have maybe the same opportunities because they’re people of color or their educational background.
And there’s also another group which really struggles with this whole issue of identity politics and feminism, and come from a very different value background. And for them, it’s really hard to accept what, for example, the Democrats or like more liberal people offer. And that’s one of their main reasons why they would support Trump.
Kaiser: Fantastic. Do you have a good book recommendation for us?
Kristin: Well, I have a, a really good recommendation for an essay by Teng Biao who wrote on those people and tried to understand, I think it’s called “Why Pro-Democracy Chinese Intellectuals Support Trump.” So, it’s really unpacking that very well. And in addition, I would recommend Han Rongbin’s work on digital society and also Yang Guobin’s work on all what’s going on in terms of digital China, younger Chinese, and the various kinds of notions we see and the way they express themselves online.
Lev Nachman: My name is Lev Nachman. I am a professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. Two things that I’m working on — I have two book projects coming out in the next year. The first is an introduction to Taiwanese politics for people who want to learn about Taiwanese politics that I’m co-writing with Jonathan Sullivan from the University of Nottingham in the UK. The other book is a solo-authored book that’s based off my dissertation work on the relationship between social movements and political parties in Taiwan and how Taiwan, as a contested state, can actually teach a lot to the world of political science because of the way that politics are defined differently in Taiwan because it’s based off questions of territorial integrity and national identity — that a lot of our assumptions around why social movements mobilize and political parties form are a little different in Taiwan.
So, those are my, those are my big kind of academic projects. One book that I really love that’s out right now is by Ian Rowen called One China, Many Taiwans. I want to make sure I get that name right. It’s on tourism, Chinese tourism to Taiwan. Fantastic read. Ian actually went with Chinese tour groups from Shanghai to Taiwan and got to experience Taiwan through the eyes of Chinese tour groups. Fantastic book, whether or not you’re a Taiwan or a China scholar. And then one underrated place in Taiwan, I have a lot of love for the city of Taichung. It is a place that most people drive through on their way down south to Tainan, but I insist that Taichung actually has, not just a lot of very cool history for Taiwan, but some of the best night market food. I highly recommend Yizhong Jie and the Fang Chia yue shi [night market] if you’re ever down there.
Kaiser: Fantastic, thanks.
Lin Zhang: So my name is Lin Zhang, and I now work at the University of New Hampshire in the Department of Communication. So, my study focused on critical innovation studies, information labor, mainly focusing on China, but also from a kind of transnational perspective. So, I have a book that just came out actually from the Columbia University Press, which is called The Labor of Reinvention Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy, where I looked at what I call entrepreneurial labor in mostly post-2008 China, but actually I situate it historically. So, I look at a few different sites in urban China focusing on Zhongguancun, where I did a lot of ethnography in some of the emerging co-working spaces. One is the Garage Cafe and some of the more state-owned like Tsinghua-owned affiliated spaces. And the other side, I looked at Taobao villages in Shandong in actually my hometown, which is a handicraft-making village, and used to be mostly serving export purposes and after 2008, they repurposed that to kind of selling to online, to a kind of growing middle-class Chinese consumers. And the other is a kind of more transnational aspect of this entrepreneurial labor where I looked at actually women who are moving back and forth between China and Japan, Korea, United States, and other parts of the Western world, reselling all kinds of luxury products and others through social media mainly. I try to provide a comprehensive picture of how China’s reinvented itself. That’s why it’s called reinvention after 2008. And through technology, through promoting entrepreneurship and the kind of mixed impacts that actually it has on the different types of entrepreneurs, whether it’s more elite ones or more grassroots ones in rural China or working-class background, how their lives are impacted by this grand transformation in innovation and policy.
Kaiser: Well, just earlier this week, I got a copy of your book and I’m really looking forward to reading it. And thank you for that, and we’ll have you on the show to talk about it. But for now, you’ve been a Sinica listener for a long time, right? And maybe you could give me a sense of what it is you think that we aren’t covering enough that maybe topics that you would like to see us do more of and then give us some recommendations.
Lin: Cool. Yeah, so I’ve been really a long time fan of Sinica, and I really liked the information that I receive from Sinica about U.S.-China relations and also even politics, a lot of really important insight that I couldn’t actually get elsewhere, right? So, I really appreciate that. In terms of expectation, I hope Sinica could also focus more about kind China from the ground up, especially in regions often less covered like the countryside and people’s lives there, and how that is actually… they’re impacted by all these grand changes that we are going through. So, that’s something that I would like to see more, kind of listen to more on Sinica.
Kaiser: Well, I totally take that to heart, and I think now that travel is going to be possible again, at least when plane ticket prices come down, we’ll be able to do more of that. And I’ll be looking for more people who work on issues like that. I would love to do that. I think that’s something that I’m committed to trying to do. So, thanks so much. Okay. How about a recommendation? And give me one that is a book recommendation from something in the field of China studies and another one that’s more personal.
Lin: Right. Cool. Actually, yeah, I have been reading this one. So, I would recommend in my field, Victor Seow from Harvard University, his new book, Carbon Technocracy which I think is a really great book. It touched on so many important topics of our times, energy, China’s trying to reduce carbon emission, and also it has a transnational scope, right? So it covers states — Japanese state and Chinese state. And he’s also trying to bring the state back into the conversation, which I think is very important to really demystify state in a way. Yeah, so outside of my field, I have another recommendation by Gary Gerstle, I think he’s a historian, American, of U.S. history. And the title of the book is American Crucible Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century.
I think it’s really illuminating, helping me understand a lot of the transformations at this moment. He actually traced the formation of American racial regime from the Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s era, and different generations of immigration coming in and how that kind of co-evolved with government policies and to shape how we understand race, how people get along in this nation, and which I think really helped me to understand some of the kind of transformations we are going through at this moment. So, I would highly recommend that history book.
Kaiser: Thank you so much. That was Lin Zhang from the University of New Hampshire.
Maura Dykstra: My name is Maura Dykstra. I’m currently an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, and in the fall of 2023, I will be moving to Yale. My recently published book is called Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State. It is about how the Qing Dynasty unexpectedly manufactured its own information crisis over the course of a hundred years simply by attempting to better monitor its own bureaucracy, and step by step, author by author, character by character, in this unorchestrated and yet orchestral climax, they created so many rules about how to report themselves and to measure themselves in their own performance that at the moment they became more aware than any other dynasty of what they were up to, they became more certain that they were completely unsure of what was going on. And so, it’s a story of how the more information you get, sometimes the less you feel like you know, or the way that you believe you know them is not the way that you always imagined you knew them. So, I talk a lot about the epistemological foundations of the state and the relationship between the archive, which is how we gather information, and the operations of the state itself. And so there’s also a little bit of thought about the ways that we access and think about information in the PRC, and how maybe they’re not actually that new to history.
One of the books that I’m really interested in reading right now is an Oxford History on registration, which Richard von Glahn contributed a beautiful piece about registration in Imperial China to. Because I’m currently working on a project about the Ming administration of civil spaces. That’s all about how you count people, and that’s something that I’ve been very interested in. Because I’ve just moved to Connecticut, my new hobby is walking in the woods. So, I invite you to go outside and take a walk somewhere. Have a good day.
Kaiser: Thank you. Hey, just one quick question for you. I remember the book that must belong to my grandfather at some point, but it was on our shelves growing up, and it’s come with me, but I’ve never actually read it. It’s something like, called Imperial Communication in Qing… It’s like from the ‘60s or the ‘70s. Do you know this book?
Maura: You could be talking about Silas Wu’s Communication and Control — Silas Wu’s Communication and Control is one of the things that I think about the most. And Silas Wu and later Beatrice Bartlett who was at Yale, write about the relationship between information and autocracy in China. And my work is an attempt to add another layer of complication because we have this story that’s not unlike the stories that we talk about in autocratic governments today, that the desire for information or the surveillance state leads to more forms of powerful control. But there’s always a little bit of an unexpected twist when states start to learn about themselves and their subjects. So, I’m kind of playing with a more modern take on this story.
Kaiser: It sounds a little bit like James Scott too. James C. Scott, right?
Maura: I have lots of things to say about James Scott, most of which are that the story he tells about high modernity is beautiful and compelling, and yet maybe not the most fitting one for the era in which we currently live, when our certainties about information and its value have been clouded with interesting and nuanced considerations about how we get information and how the questions that we ask influence the things that we think we know, and maybe we shouldn’t be as sure as we had always thought we would be in the high modern context that Scott so brilliantly conveys.
Kaiser: That’s amazing. Thank you so much, Maura.
Maura: Thank you, Kaiser.
Jonathan Elkobi: Okay. So, I’m Jonathan Elkobi, E-L-K-O-B-I. I’m from UCSD. I’m a master’s student for Chinese economics and political affairs. And I’m currently working on mainly Chinese elite politics and trying to understand from speeches, what are their own original ideas and what are propaganda. And I try to differentiate that using computational tools.
So, I look at, for example, Xi’s speeches and the state’s official statement, and I try to see when his writer just copy-paste from propaganda and when he promotes a new idea that wasn’t introduced before. And then I can say, oh, this is a new idea that he decided to promote, not using propaganda tools or general channels, he uses his speeches to create and promote those new ideas. I mainly use large language models and I look at the sentence level, like each sentence, and try to calculate their similarity. You can like really, really create an index of what is the originality of each sentence. And at the same time, you can use it to understand the dominance of Xi’s sentences, of his speeches, like how many times afterwards he’s been copied. But using these large language models, it’s not have to be like directly copy-paste. More toward, it could be like the general idea that he uses in his sentence if it appeared before or not by calculating what was the most similar sentence before that in the official statements.
Kaiser: Have you had any findings pop out at you yet?
Jonathan: I don’t think anything’s special, but mainly like, it can validate a lot of the thoughts that scholars currently have. Because lots of people have claimed that Xi really dominates the system and he has his original ideas. But sometimes it feels like some people talk about specific policy issues and they quote Xi etc., but we’re not sure if it’s really Xi’s thought or some think tank or just like some, another state department have promoted this idea and he just like recite it through his speech. So, I think just validating that, for example, core technologies is something that he really promotes and he really dictates the state what to do in that, it’s something important.
Kaiser: Yes. Great. Can you recommend a book something that people listening to Sinica might be interested in reading?
Jonathan: I’m originally from Israel, so there is like a RAND Corporation study about China’s economic statecraft in Israel and the relation to each other that really helped me to understand how my original country is connected to the whole BRI and if it’s, or if it’s not just a buzzword. So, I really like jazz, and there is this ensemble, they’re like big orchestra. They’re doing like a lot of fusion, they’re called Snarky Puppy. Have you heard about them? Yeah, so they just launched a new album few months ago and it’s really great.
Kaiser: Thanks so much, Jonathan. Thanks for taking the time.
Seiji Shirane: I’m Seiji Shirane. I’m an assistant professor of history at City College of New York. I’m a Japan specialist, but I spent several years in China with language and field work in my book, Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 just came out with Cornell University Press, open access for free download. It looks at the role of colonial Taiwan and Taiwanese subjects as actors in Japanese expansion to South China, Southeast Asia. I came into the field wanting to look at Sino-Japanese relations, but something fresh besides Manchuria, Shanghai, the conventional sort of expansion from the north. Once Japan took over Taiwan in 1895, they really saw it as a stepping stone to further expansion into the free port cities of South China and Southeast Asia, looking at the Hokkien and Taiwanese Han ethnic connections with South China and Southeast Asia. And so it’s looking at Taiwan really as a intermediary between these three regions.
In terms of any book recommendations, there’s what we would call a third or fourth generation of scholars of Japanese empire that really look at Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Chinese languages, not just from the Japanese perspective, but trying to get multi-regional, multiethnic perspectives together. I have a colleague, Paul Kreitman, coming out with Japan’s Oceanic Borderlands, looking at Japan’s environmental expansion and history across the Pacific. Others, June Uchida, looking at, again, Japanese expansion and the relation between Japanese-American history, Japanese-Canadian history to the Empire.
Although I’m a Japan specialist, I’m a big fan of the podcast and looking at ways that China and Japan, these historical relations can be studied in new ways. My second book project is going look at post-1949 PRC Japan relations in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s in the Cold War when they didn’t have diplomatic relations. But what are the intellectuals, officials, ex-soldiers, tourists, and travelers, what kind of civilian and people’s diplomacy occurred between the two?
A personal recommendation, I would say that this is not new material, but in my classes on Japanese-Chinese relations and colonial Taiwan, I’ll show some movies. So, Seediq Bale for the anti-Japanese indigenous rebellion, 1930, is I think an excellent film to look at both Taiwanese and Japanese perspectives. I also show Lust, Caution for my Japanese-Chinese relations class on issues of collaboration and resistance. Those are not new films, but I would say two recommendations that I go to often.
Kaiser: Thanks so much, Seiji. That was fantastic.
Zhu Qian: I’m Zhu Qian. I’m assistant professor of History in Duke Kunshan University. My specialty is on the 20th-century intellectual history of China, and my book project, I have two book projects, the first one is called Staging the People: The Dazhong Politics and Culture and Leftism in China from 1919 to 1936. And my second book project, which is, the introduction, just published by the Positions Asian Critique, special issue on the urban village is about the New Village Movement in China from 1919 to 1936. So, I’m looking into how this anarchist tradition turned into the social activism and also state project in the 1930s. I don’t want to say that they are anarchists as what you think anarchists should look like. They’re basically socialist left or in a way that they really focus on the question of the majorities of the suppressed. So, in that way, for example, they always use the concept of dazhong, the masses. But I don’t want to use “the masses” in my book. I use dazhong because this is exactly how they understand. They understand the majority of the suppressed. That’s what dazhong really means for them. And they wanted to differentiate their political positions from the other concepts of the people, such as the Sanminzhuyi, the three people’s principles is pretty much a state concept, and in terms of state and society’s relationship. And also they differentiate themselves from the party politics, the qunzhong which is the party, the qunzhong, the masses following up with the party’s directive directives. So, their politics and their cultural practices are really based upon this principle of equality. For example, one educator called Tao Xingzhi, he proposed this theory, it was called the life education, and he built this xiaozhuang xuexiao at the suburb of Nanjing. Basically, everyone lived together and worked together and studied together. And that kind of equalized life, created a new values for, as he sees, to born new Chinese society from the grassroots, from the bottom-up, not from the top-down. That’s their view of what the Chinese society should look like and the Chinese nation of the liberation should look like.
So, a book recommendation, so I’m so much influenced by the books of intellectual histories of 20th century China. So, I will recommend Rebecca Karl’s book, Staging the World: The Nationalism in Twentieth Century China. And the book is dealing with how nationalism and the creation of the Chinese nation since the late 19th century, throughout Liang Qichao and the Chinese revolutionaries, and even the overseas Chinese anarchists, they worked together, but they eventually look into this question of nationalism, but their nationalism was received as the inflation of internationalism in a way that they see this as a global anti, for example, global anti-colonial community, and China just one of the member aligned with the other colonialized nations. So, to some extent, that’s my work — really influenced by that kind of Chinese revolutionary view of the 20th century.
Kaiser: So, what about a recommendation that just has nothing to do with your work? Something you just enjoy personally.
Zhu: Yes, I enjoy movie and I’m teaching a course on the Chinese history, modern history, but I use movies. So, students will watch two movies, and I choose those two movies. I choose those 14 movies as my favorite, and among all of my favorites, there’s one I wanted to recommend to all of you. Actually, two could be two, yes. One is Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness. That movie is so rich and so deep that even today, after I watch so many times, probably over 50 times right now, I still cannot completely understand. But every time, that movie inspired me to think about humanity and humanism and to survive. And also this relationship, of course, regional relationship and also relationship between different social groups. The second one is A Touch of Sin. That movie, I think, is… we can call it a social realistic film, which is kind of the benchmark sort of the six generation with Chinese filmmakers.
I would say that’s his peak. Right now, I don’t know. I still like his early works. And so I would like… If you wanted to enjoy, if you wanted the entertainment films, maybe I’m not a good person to talk to. I like to watch movies that make me think and linger with me.
Fabio Lanza:
Okay. Fabio Lanza, modern Chinese history, University of Arizona in Tucson. I’m currently working, I’m finishing hopefully a manuscript whose tentative title is Bridge to Heaven, and it’s about the urban commune movement in the capital city of Beijing during the Great Leap Forward. So, urban collectivization, getting women out of the house and into factories created in the neighborhoods of Beijing, and why it failed, how it failed, and why is it still interesting as a social economic project and a project of women’s liberation. That’s the book that I’m working on. It deals with issue of the socialist economy, gender, feminists, and things like that. So, recommendation for a book to read now.
A book I last read about the PRC, I recommend people to read Sarah Mellors Rodriguez’s book about the history of abortion and birth control from the Republican period to the PRC period. It is incredibly prevailing in many ways. And a strange recommendation of something that nobody will think about, I will give you a, hopefully a new translation is coming out soon of a classic of Marxist feminist, Italian Marxist feminist by Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, which is about domestic work and prostitution and socialism.
Kaiser: That’s fantastic. Perfect.
Catherine Tsai: Hi, my name is Catherine Tsai. I am a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University in the program of history and East Asian languages. I study the history of Taiwanese and Okinawan migration to the Yaeyama Islands from the Japanese colonial to the American occupation periods. My research looks at the roles that Taiwanese immigrants as well as Okinawan migrants from the Okinawan mainland play in the development of the Yaeyama Islands, specifically in the field of tropical agriculture. That is my dissertation topic. So, for the Taiwanese case, I look at sort of the Taiwanese who are from central and southern Taiwan who go to Ishigaki in the 1930s. And then I look at the roles that they play in the post-war development of Ishigaki’s pineapple industry. I also look at the Okinawans who had lived and worked in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, and how they brought their knowledge of tropical agriculture back to Okinawa to also foster the development of the pineapple industry.
In terms of books that I think are important in the field, one in particular that comes to mind is Hiroko Matsuda’s The Liminality of the Japanese Empire, which was published by the University of Hawaii Press, I think in 2019. And her book talks about Okinawans who migrate to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945. And I think her book is important because it demonstrates the role that Taiwan played in fostering both Okinawan identity, but also like shape their knowledge about sort of the oceanic borders between Southern Okinawa and Taiwan. Thank you.
Lena Kaufmann: Yeah. Hi. So, I’m Lena Kaufmann. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, and I’m also currently a visiting scholar at the University of Konstanz. And so one in Germany and one in Switzerland. And I’m trained as a China scholar and also a social anthropologist. I studied in Berlin, in Rome, and in Shanghai. And I did my Ph.D. in Zurich. So, I’ve been working on rural-urban migration, and looking in particular at the rural side of migration, because normally like people who study migration, they always look into the places of arrival and don’t always look at what’s actually happening at those that stay behind. So, I looked at rice fields and at what people do when people are lacking at home to cultivate the fields, but like these fields still need constant cultivation, otherwise they lose their soil quality and value. And people, like migrants, they have highly precarious situations in the city, so they need these fields as a safety net back home. So, I’ve been looking at the strategies of rural-urban households, like trans-local households and how they deal with these conflicting pressures of looking at that field.
And yeah, I’ve published a book about this with Amsterdam University Press that is open access also, can be downloaded online. And the title is Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Transformation In Post-Reform China. It’s quite a long title. In this book, I also looked at the role of agricultural technology and migration because this has actually also been really overlooked at… I mean, people look at the hukou system and like the structural things that push people to migrate, but what has really been overlooked is the role of labor-saving technologies, that this has also set free millions of people from their land and push people to migrate. So, I look at this intersection. But then currently I’m also working on a very different project that is about digital infrastructures.
And so I look at the Chinese digital silk road to Switzerland and how it has been unfolding historically and also currently in Switzerland. And yeah, so there is like a lot going on here in this field, like with company openings and Switzerland of… Yeah, and Switzerland’s quite a special place also for Chinese companies, I mean, because of the international organizations that are there, like the standardization bodies, and also because of the closed economic ties and Switzerland’s neutrality. So, it has like quite a special role also in Chinese foreign politics. I’m like looking from the ground up how this digital silk road is conceived and practice, on the one hand, and also in discourses around the digital silk road. If I think about one work that has really influenced my work, I think it’s the work of China historian and also anthropologist, Francesca Brey, who has been working on technology and China, and also on gender and technology and on rice fields, and on rice economies.
And really challenge the ways that yeah, our images of western progress and capitalism, and that this has to be the way to go forward to develop and economies of scale. She has shown that rice fields and rural economies develop really different that cannot be compared to these Western images of, yeah, of economies of scale. And also her explorations about technology, I think, are really valuable. So, I would really recommend her work.
Kaiser: That’s fantastic. Thanks so much, Lena.
Lena: Thank you.
Josh Freeman: Hey, my name is Josh Freeman. I am a specialist in 20th-century cultural history of China, and particularly of the Uyghur community. I write a lot about Uyghur literature and its significance in 20th-century Uyghur history. And I’m particularly interested in poetry and what poetry does in history and what history does in poetry. I did my MA degree in Urumqi at Xinjiang Normal University. I wrote my thesis on Uyghur avant-garde poetry, and then I did my PhD back in U.S. at Harvard, basically about, yeah, Uyghur cultural history in the 20th century, Uyghur national culture in 20th century China. And yeah, I’m currently an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. And in addition to my historical work, I spend a lot of time translating poetry, Uyghur poetry into English.
I also recently finished translating the memoir of Tahir Hamut Izgil, a major Uyghur poet, that’s out this August. And my own current book project is called, or right now I’m calling it The Poetry of Power: Uyghur National Culture in Twentieth-Century China. So, and Kaiser’s asked me to give a recommendation. I feel this is a time to make a plug for some Uyghur poetry. Uyghur poetry is awesome. I would absolutely recommend that you run to your nearest Google and just google Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed, Ekhmetjan Osman, Tahir Hamut Izgil, Perhat Tursun, Dilkhumar Imin, any number of other names. In the diaspora, some amazing poets as well: Abide Abbas Nesrin, Erkan Qadir, Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan… It’s a very long list of names, but basically, just google Uyghur poetry. It’s an unbelievable and ever-expanding body of work. Even with the catastrophe in the Uyghur region right now, Uyghurs in the diaspora are continuing to write a tremendous amount of great poetry. Even Uyghurs in Xinjiang, in the insane conditions there, are managing to continue to write poetry. So, that is my plug, that is my recommendation.
Kaiser: Fantastic. Thanks, man.
Susan McCarthy: I’m Susan McCarthy. I’m a professor of political science at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. And I study Chinese politics, in particular the politics of religion and ethnicity. Among other things, I’m really interested in the way in which the state tries to control religion, manage religion, but also co-op religion and religious ritual for a variety of political purposes, but also in the way in which this creates opportunities for religious people, religious organizations to do religion in unconventional ways, in ways that are not fully sanctioned by the regime. So, most recently, I published a piece in the China Journal in the summer of 2022 called Liberating Party Animals, which is about the Chinese government’s efforts to reign in the practice of 放生 fàngshēng, which is a Buddhist and popular religious ritual in which people release animals. Fangsheng literally means release of life.
And this is a really ancient practice. For instance, Buddhist believe that when you release life, release an animal in distress or a caged animal, you gain merit, which can speed your attainment of salvation. And so, in the Reform era, in the last couple decades, as people have gotten wealthier, they’ve started to engage in these rituals. And there’s a whole industry that kind of fangsheng industrial complex that has sprung up around fangsheng. So, there are all these organizations, little groups that are dedicated to the practice. And I got interested in this because I’m interested in religious charity and religious notions of the good. And for many Buddhists, this is charity par excellence, because you’re creating merit, which can help others, you can actually transfer it. But anyway, this practice has gotten somewhat out of control.
It’s hard to say how big it is, but people released hundreds of millions of organisms a year. Millions of organisms, and they spent hundreds of millions of yuan on the practice. And it often creates environmental problems. So, people release non-native species or the animals have pathogens. And there was also a case where some fangsheng practitioners released raccoon dogs and foxes in Huairou. And these were farm-raised animals, and the animals didn’t know how to survive in the wild. They decimated the villagers’ chickens and ended up turning up dead and whatnot. So, this can create real problems. There have been cases of people releasing poisonous snakes in parks, but the authorities failing to tell people where these are released. But also, rather than just suppress fangsheng, the regime is trying to transform how people think about it.
So, the state has created a bunch of official fangsheng associations like the Guangdong Fend Sheng Association, and a series of other Guangdong associations. And I argue that party state officials, it’s fairly typical for officials to intervene in religion and religious affairs, but they’re not supposed to actually be doing religion. With this, I say they’re actually behaving as ritual specialists. So, you have party people, including people with the discipline inspection commission officials who lead the ceremonies and kind of show people the appropriate, proper scientific way to release life. They procure animals from state-regulated producers. And they’ve also melded this with China’s efforts to repopulate fish stocks in critical waterways. So, this has actually been incorporated into the long-term planning to restore the ecology. And then also one thing that’s interesting is that there are more and more cases I’ve found, and this is all based on research online, of party branches. Party branches have to do monthly party branch activity days, 党支活动 dǎngzhī huódòng . And so these are to build esprit de corps, and study the thought of Xi Jinping.
And so increasingly, some organizations, their party branches will carry out release, but they don’t call it fangsheng, which has karmic connotations, they call it 增殖放流 zēngzhí fàngliú , proliferation and release. But I was reading of some cases where there’s actually this religious aspect to it, and they were talking about how this group, this party branch, they went and they toured a conservation site, and then they released hundreds of thousands of aquatic germplasm, I think is the phrase, and then also fish fry, little hatchlings. And then they retook the party oath in front of a bright red party banner. And according to the online piece that I was reading, every party member experienced a spiritual baptism. So, there is this religious dimension to it, even though they claim it’s not religion.
And I also think this is interesting too, because party officials often say that, “Well, we’re not doing religion. This is just about encouraging the core socialist values and ecological civilization.” But to me, it’s interesting that they’re in saying that they don’t believe in religion, so it’s not religious. That they’re just restoring or revitalizing China’s traditional culture. But that’s a very un-Chinese notion of religion. It’s a very protestant notion of religion — the idea of religion as belief or faith as opposed to the Chinese notion of religion, which is religion as ritual. Anyway, so this is the stuff I’ve been working on recently. And fortunately, most of the research I was able to do just reading documents online and WeChat groups of Buddhist fangsheng grassroots organizations, and then these party — It’s kind of interesting how much Party branches post online of their monthly activities. So, yeah, I just managed to kind of string this together and get something published.
Kaiser: How long is it going to be before there’s a fangsheng theory of COVID origins?
Susan: It’s possible because, like the raccoon dogs, we just… Yeah, in The Atlantic. I mean there has been a crackdown on the raising of exotic… the whole exotic animal industry, but the raccoon dogs that were released in Huairou were raised in these like off-label unregulated farms. So, it’s possible that there’s a linkage between those raccoon dogs and the, the possible raccoon dog origins, who knows? Because a lot of fangsheng practitioners will go to markets to purchase animals which has all these perverse incentives. So, people raise animals to sell them. Yeah. But so I guess actually, in terms of recommendation, one thing that led me to fangsheng, this is a book that was published ages ago, I can’t even remember the date, but it’s Joanna Handlin Smith, The Art of Doing Good. And it’s about the rise of charity during the Ming Dynasty.
And she has a chapter on liberating animals. And so that’s really how I kind of started thinking about this as a form of charity, even though my work is super contemporary. So, I found her, The Art of Doing Good, I think it’s colon: Charity in Late Ming China. late Ming China. So, that for me was really eye-opening.
Brian DeMare: My name is Brian DeMare. I am a professor of history at Tulane University. I’ve written three books. My first book, Mao’s Cultural Army was about drama troops in Rural Revolution. My second book, Land Wars, is the first and only English-language book that looks at land reform, the most pivotal moment of China’s revolution in English. And my new book is Tiger Tyrant Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China in which I explore four case files of counterrevolution in the rural county of Poyang, which is in northern Jiangxi. Readers can expect to find prison breaks, frame jobs, bandit uprisings, secret service, secret society uprisings as well. And my recommendation for your listeners, the first one is going to Fanshen, which is the pivotal book for me that turned me on to Chinese studies in Chinese history. William Hinton, that’s right. An American Radical who was wandering the countryside in the late forties and witnessed land reform firsthand. And my other recommendation is going to Sik San, the God of Cookery. It’s a movie by Stephen Chow, which is just a fun, fun movie that is in very, very rewatchable.
Juliet Lu: All right. Hey, so my name is Juliet Lu. I’m an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. And you want to know what I do, right? My elevator repented, but longer. Yeah, so I studied Chinese rubber investments in Laos. That was one my dissertation was on. And in the years I was doing it from 2013 to 2020, the Belt and Road Initiative became really huge, so I kind of joined this podcast with Erik Myxter-iino, and we kind of tried to highlight people that do research on the Belt and Road, but we, have a little bit of a bent towards highlighting people that do things, kind of like the way I do, which is trying to give a little bit more voice to people in the host countries, right? So, I focus a lot on like interviewing Lao people and people that focus on specific sectors or projects that give you a better bit of a sense of like that China’s not a monolith.
So, a lot of panels here today actually have been like talking about breaking down the monolith of China, giving some agency to actors outside of China, especially actors and voices and perspectives from the global south. So, I think that’s a cool kind of methodological conversation happening. So, that’s something I try to do, make sure I’m doing kind of on the ground research. And yeah, in the years since I was in grad school, I’ve started expanding partly just because partners on the ground, NGOs that I used to work with, they have started looking more at how rubber drives deforestation and how a couple of different actors, Chinese downstream actors in Beijing, Vietnamese actors, actually the Vietnam rubber group, and also tire companies. There’s a bunch of different groups that are like creating sustainable supply chain initiatives. So, since I worked so close to like on-the-ground stuff, how do they get land access? I’ve been trying to work with people that work more downstream to figure out, well, if you guys want less deforestation, and I was looking at how land access was working. Those two things have to be put together, but they’re coming at very different scales.
So, trying to look at supply chains in ways that would kind of link the people upstream that I study to the people downstream that are putting these initiatives in place. And that’s kind of bringing me in more conversation with people at UBC that do biodiversity stuff that want to do kind of drive biodiversity solutions and people that are in conversation more with like what policies change corporate activity on the ground in resource extraction sectors like agriculture, but others as well. So, I would say, yeah, looking at global China and looking at global China’s environmental stuff. And if I still have time, which is…
Kaiser: Yeah, go for it.
Juliet: Okay, so the last piece I would say of what that is bringing me into is a little bit of work with Tyler Harlan, which I think you met Tyler last night. So Tyler is really cool because he looks at hydropower, Chinese engagement in hydropower. He looks a lot at like how China trains these hydropower engineers, but also just like does trainings for other folks. So, what we’ve been talking about is like, well, there’s not a lot of research in this middle level of how China engages with other people through its investments, but then those investments, like the rubber plantations I look at and the hydropower projects he look at, those investments have a bunch of other activities attached to them that are kind of like development cooperation. There’s like development projects in more traditional vein that we think of like building roads or donating something, right?
But there’s like a bunch of other stuff happening, like trainings and person-to-person activity and workshops and research collaborations that we thought like, no, all of these are interconnected. They shouldn’t be studied separately. So, we’ve been trying to look at those kinds of development cooperation activities, especially how environmental turn yeah, especially how like trying to green the Belt and Road has made all of those types of activities really important for like having an environmental edge to them. And I guess what that’s making us realize too is that China is taking its own environmental turns, so it’s trying to pitch itself as a global environmental leader. And western countries, in a moment where there’s so much polarization between the China and the U.S., even within all these, for example, the Indo-Pacific strategy policies that they’re writing, they’re saying, we’re going to compete with China, we’re going to be tough on China, like eyes wide open, all this stuff, very confrontational, but then they always have an addendum of we’re going to cooperate on environment.
And so it’s weird because yeah, because when it comes to the kind of polarization, it’s almost like the environment is being carved out as this weird area in which everyone wants to say they’re going to cooperate, even though they’re going to be tough on each in other areas. I think it’s a little bit of performative politicking, but I also think like Chinese NGOs are using that to keep that space open for themselves. Foreign NGOs are using that to keep the door open for themselves into China. And so I think, I don’t know, it’s like we can pretend, I want to study how they’re keeping the environment apolitical in a strategic way because I actually think that, that allows for a bunch of politicking to happen. It’s a little bit incohesive still, but it’s… I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to do with Tyler as like a bigger picture, kind of letting us play around with, okay, what’s happening at the higher scales?
Kaiser: Can you give me a recommendation of a book or something that’s been influential in your field that you really like? And then maybe give me one that’s sort of random that is about… maybe a book that you’ve read or, no, it doesn’t have to be a book, a TV, shower or anything, a children’s book.
Juliet: Well, I mean, okay, this is… I’m going to recommend… you can cut out me thinking. Even on our podcast, Erik still does recommend… he wants two recommendations at the end. I always forget, and I’m like, “Oh, you go first. I can’t.” I think Maria’s next book is going to be really good. Maria Repnikova. She has the Soft Power one coming out. I think that when she does the one on Ethiopia, it’ll be even better. So, I need to recommend… shoot, who did I read recently?
Kaiser: Actually, we did a little capsule interview with Maria already.
Juliet: Yeah, I know. So, I won’t… yeah. Anyways.
Kaiser: No, that’s cool. I mean, Maria’s next… Does she have a working title for it yet?
Juliet: No. She said that she just had a meeting with Duke and the guy just totally reformulate her framing for her. So, that’s exciting. That’s cool that, I don’t know, that she gets to do that. We’re at five. Okay. Recommendations, I mean, okay, fine, I’ll recommend all Maria’s book because I love her, and the soft power stuff I think is very cool. And in the series that she did with C. K for Cambridge, Nicholas and Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere and Ivan Franceschini have one on Global China’s Method. So, I think that they’re having cool conversations about how to think of global China as like a way that opens up a bunch of other conversations about how the world is developing. So, that I would recommend. And then you can watch on YouTube Samuel L. Jackson reading this… It’s a parody of a kid’s book. It’s called Go the [beep] to Sleep. And it’s like therapy for parents because it’s like, this is what all books are. All books are just like bed books. And you really are just saying to your kid very quietly in a nice voice like, “Go the [beep] to sleep. And Samuel L. Jackson makes it hilariously palatable. So, that’s what I would recommend.
Kaiser: Fantastic, thanks.
Sabina Knight: I’m Sabina Knight. I teach literature at Smith College. My two main projects now include one on media descent, and a second on fiction and poetry by non-Han writers in China and its borderlands. Last year, the magazine, World Literature Today, published my essay titled China’s Minority Fiction. And the title was a challenge because Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs don’t consider themselves minority Chinese, but we needed a title for readers not necessarily familiar with China. For my AAS talk, I used non-Han intimacy and empire nonfiction and poetry. I began to read non-Han literature more after finishing my book, Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction. So, I was seeking to promote Chinese literature in new ways, but I found very few sources in English. I had to rely on Chinese sources, and the work took years longer than I had imagined. It was also tricky to discuss these literatures as part of Chinese literature. The categories of China and Chinese don’t work well for pre-20th century or non-Han cultures. Yet I posit that the written language has been the glue that connects Chinese people to a shared cultural past. Most of the essay present stories and novels in terms of their documenting of suppressed histories, their search for roots, and longings for cultural survival.
My media of descent project began on Twitter. I was translating and explaining lines from memes, images and videos such as name [Ning Wei’s (1:00:20] Fragile, [Chinese1:00:21]. The essay I’m writing now is lying flat, tang ping, the rallying cry of youth who rejects Xi Jinping’s Chinese dream of national rejuvenation, and especially the pressure to toil 12-hour days, six days a week known as 9-9-6. And disillusionment is coalescing into a new non-cooperation movement with lying flat and sub-trends such as put a chill for Xi and let it rot, Bai Lan. In tweets, talks, and now the essay I’m writing, I introduce memes, manifestos, music videos, and other media to parse these movements.
I’m also exploring precursor movements such as Sang Culture, sang wenhua, literally a culture of mourning. And I’m especially fascinated by commonalities between these trends in China and those in Europe and beyond. I’ve been reading the ancient Greek cynics and French, Russian and British work since at least the 1830s that praise idleness, and even laziness. These include traditions of decadence, the beats, punks, slackers. I touch on the great resignation and the nap ministry in the U.S. And I ask why lying flat strike such a chord with young people, with journalists and with us, with me, because I’m not very good at resting.
I highly recommend a 2011 novel by the Taiwan writer, Wu Ming-yi. The novel is called The Man With the Compound Eyes, Fu Yan Ren. And Daryl Stark did a fantastic lyrical translation. The novel combines science with magic realism. There’s a giant trash vortex that washes up in a hurricane. Wu Ming-yi is fictionalizing the all to real great Pacific garbage patch. The character’s personal tragedies are interwoven with environmental doom, most of it manmade like the trash vortex. But nature has agency too. The ocean expresses its wrath through the hurricane and rising sea levels that flood the protagonist’s home. And a mountain seems to reject the engineers drilling a highway tunnel by flooding the project. A German engineer wonders if their team should have gone around the mountain and if what they thought was a scientific judgment was more a lifestyle choice. Yet the novel can be read as hopeful too. It offers artful insights into distinct types of memory, dwelling and homelessness, loneliness, vulnerability. Thank you so much for speaking with me.
