China’s largesse in the Pacific is nothing if not visible. From mobile phone towers to gleaming stadiums and government buildings, Beijing’s splashing out on those it sees as choosing “the right side of history.” In this episode, we explore Taiwan’s future in the Pacific as it is deserted by its former diplomatic allies, lured by Beijing’s goodies. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham, co-founder of the Melanesian News Network, and the University of California’s Jessica Marinaccio, a former staffer in Tuvalu’s Taiwanese embassy.

Show transcripts can be found at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/

Image: Wikimedia Commons. “President Tsai and Tuvalu Prime Minister Sopoaga plant a coconut seedling, symbolizing the close friendship between Taiwan and Tuvalu.” (2017) Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan) | Government Website Open Information Announcement

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Stand-up comedy looked set to be the next big thing on China’s entertainment scene, with shows like Roast Convention drawing billions of views and comics scoring lucrative commercial endorsements. But comedy now finds itself in retreat.  A new wave of feminist comics is struggling with attacks from online trolls and a disapproving state.  To ask whether the regime–and China’s men—can take a joke, Louisa and Graeme are joined by three stand up Chinese comedians: He Huang who's based here in Australia, and two members of the London-based 50 Shades of Feminism, Barbie and Elena.

Transcript available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/the-feminists-have-stood-up-gender-and-comedy-in-china/

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Every generation in modern China has been richer and more ambitious than the one before—until Gen Z. With youth unemployment so high that the government has simply stopped reporting the figures, many are opting to lie flat, slump down dead, or even become full-time children. The Party frets that despite the best efforts of the propaganda organs to get them excited about a tech-driven utopian future, China’s young people seem to have lost their work ethic. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Steven Sun Zhao, a Gen Z writer at Chaoyang Trap and Yaling Jiang, a proud millennial and the founder of Aperture China.

A full transcript is available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/full-time-children-or-half-dead-chinas-gen-z-goes-to-ground/

Image: Woman in black jacket sitting on blue chair, c/- 绵 绵 on Unsplash

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The exponential trauma produced by the Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in China, yet has been foundational to a generation.  Now the Communist Party is using the experience of its leader Xi Jinping as one of the 17 million young people sent down to the countryside to reframe the movement as showcasing personal sacrifice in the interests of national success.  The party would like other aspects to be forgotten, such as the unimaginable violence in Chongqing or the petty brutality that set children onto their parents.  In the second part of our series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme discuss the legacies of the Cultural Revolution with sociologist Xu Bin from Emory University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the author of Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China and Guardian journalist Tania Branigan whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution came out in May.

Show transcript: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/bombard-the-past-exhuming-the-cultural-revolution/

Image: Red Guard, June 1968. c/- Wikimedia Commons and China Pictorial

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Writing history in China has never been easy; China’s first historian, Sima Qian, was forced to choose between execution and castration and imprisonment.  He chose the latter in order to finish his life’s work, Records of the Grand Historian.  Now China’s keepers of inconvenient truths are put under immense pressure by Xi Jinping’s war on historical nihilism—viewpoints and memories that run counter to official Party history. Fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle against the state, China’s underground historians often make huge sacrifices to keep alive histories that the Party would like to erase. In the first of a two-part series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Ian Johnson, whose book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is out today.

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Just as satirical writers struggled in Trump's America, China's sci-fi writers are facing a challenge:  how do you write in a world where reality is more like science fiction than science fiction itself? Added to that are the perils of popularity, with everyone from Netflix to the Communist Party embracing Chinese science fiction. To explore China's metaverse of sci-fi, Loiusa and Graeme are joined by Emily Jin, a science fiction and fantasy translator who’s also a PhD candidate at Yale and translator Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Beijing's recent ban on the export of two rare metals represents the latest front in the global battle to control chipmaking technology. Now there are fears China could block the export of rare earths, over which it has a stranglehold.   How close are we to that nuclear option? To find out, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Martijn Rasser, a former senior intelligence officer and analyst with the CIA, who is now the managing director of the Netherlands-based Datenna, and Jon Hykaway, the director and president of Stormcrow Capital in Toronto.     

Image: c/- NASA. The Baiyon Ebo Rare Earths Mine, Inner Mongolia.

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New Zealand is in Beijing's good books, attracting state media praise as setting 'a good example' for other countries in its ties, as Prime Minister Chris Hipkins jets into China.  He's said his message is crystal clear: New Zealand is open for business.  But critics say the country's policy is muddled and ambiguous, despite Chinese encroachment.  Two ethnic Chinese MPs have been expelled over their links to Beijing, and a prominent New Zealand China academic was targeted with office break-ins. To unpack what the future holds for China-New Zealand relations, Louisa is joined in Auckland by writer and sociologist Tze Ming Mok and journalist Sam Sachdeva, author of The China Tightrope: Navigating New Zealand's relationship with a world superpower.

Image: c/- Michal Klajban. Solidarity Grid by Mischa Kuball (Wuhan, China), Christchurch, New Zealand. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

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In the final episode exploring China's Strategic New Frontiers, we are investigating China's growing cyberpower ambitions. On the National Cyber Power index, Beijing is already the world's number two cyberpower, behind only the US. Its cyberdoctrine includes promoting cybersovereignty, constructing internet standards and infrastructure, and playing a bigger role in cyber governance bodies. To ask what this means for the future of the Internet, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Konstantinos Komaitis, a non-resident fellow at the Lisbon Institute and the Atlantic Council, as well as Julia Voo, cyber fellow leading a team at Harvard University’s Belfer Institute who publish the National Cyber Power Index.

Image: IPad with keyboard, c/- 绵 绵 on Unsplash. 

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China appears to have restarted construction on its fifth Antarctic station for the first time since 2018. It’s just one sign that Beijing is trying to increase its footprint in the world’s coldest regions. It already calls itself a near-Arctic state and is planning for an ice-free shipping route across the top of the world. This month, to discuss the drivers behind China’s polar ambitions, Graeme and Louisa are joined by Eyck Freyman of the Arctic Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the University of Washington’s Mia Bennett and Singapore Management University’s Nengye Liu.

Photo credit: Wikimedia commons

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China's reaching not just for the stars, but also for the deepest ocean depths.  It's even parked its deepwater submersible in the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the world's oceans, and planted flags on the ocean bed.  This month, Graeme and Louisa are joined by China Ocean Institute CEO Tabitha Mallory and Tiffany Ma, the senior director of Bower Group Asia, to talk about how the Great Game is playing out on our seabeds. 

Image: Caulophryne pelagica [Angler Fish] D. Shale, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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