Australia's Beijing problem

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2018

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with David Brophy, senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney and a prominent scholar on Xinjiang, and with Andrew Chubb, a post-doc fellow this year at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, about the response to China’s alleged influence operations in Australia. David and Andrew were both signatories to one of two “dueling open letters” addressing the issue; the one they signed warned of the dangers of overreaction. Recommendations: Jeremy: Bruce Lee: A Life, by Matthew Polly. David: Two pieces on China’s re-education camps for muslims in Xinjiang: “New Evidence for China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang,” by Adrian Zenz, and Rian Thum’s follow up piece in the New York Times. Andrew: The Asia Power Index, by the Lowy Institute. It allows you to interact and play around with the ratings and measures that go into the somewhat arbitrary calculation of power and influence, and includes interesting metrics such as a “Google rating” of just the raw number of Google searches for the country, and the extent of visa-free entry agreements. Kaiser: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Paperback, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, an excellent example among the many books that attempt to explain the mindset of the kind of people who voted for Trump. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina.
0:14.5	SubChina is the best way to keep on top of all the latest news from China, subscribe to our access program, and tap directly into our digital newsroom
0:20.9	through our Slack channel, receive discounts on tickets to our conferences, and free admission
0:24.8	to our live podcasts, plus early access to the podcast.
0:28.6	SubChina is a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping
0:32.5	the world.
0:33.5	I'm Kaizu Kajur Bu, and I am in New York this week, where I'm joined by the notorious
0:36.5	Jin Yu Mi, known in some quarters as Jeremy Goldcorn.
0:40.4	Jeremy, of course, is editor of Sub-China.
0:43.5	Yumi, please greet the people.
0:45.4	Yo, people. How you doing?
0:47.3	So China's sharp power has been the subject of a great deal of discussion within the
0:51.5	community of China Watchers in the last year, so.
0:53.7	Concerns have grown over influence operations or even efforts to interfere in political processes
0:59.0	through Chinese emacies, through consulates in Western countries, or through the work in those
1:04.0	countries of the United Front Work Department, which is something Chinese President Xi Jinping
1:09.0	infamously described in the speech in 2014 as a magic weapon.
1:13.6	So today we are going to focus on the country where the debate over this has perhaps been the loudest
1:18.9	and where there is arguably the most at stake. I speak, of course, of Australia.
1:23.9	We have seen a heated kerfuffle over the publication of a controversial book by a prominent Australian public intellectual, Clive Hamilton.
1:31.3	The investigation into an Australian MP named Sam Dostiari, his resignation in January over his acceptance of donations tied to China,
1:40.3	and a couple of dueling open letters issued by scholars of China. So to talk about these
	...

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