China’s push into Eastern Europe: A conversation with Martin Hála

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

🗓️ 30 March 2017

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

16+1, a new Chinese initiative, takes its name from 16 countries of Central and Eastern Europe plus China. It held a summit in November 2016 attended by Premier Li Keqiang and prime ministers or deputy prime ministers from the other member states. Earlier, President Xi Jinping had visited three countries in the region — Serbia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. What’s it all for? How have China’s overtures been received by the governments of Central and Eastern Europe? Many of them — like those of Poland and the Czech Republic — had, until recently, real difficulties in their relations with China. And how have the two powers flanking Central and Eastern Europe — Russia to the east and the EU to the west — reacted to China’s creation of 16+1? For answers to these questions and many more, Kaiser and Jeremy talked to Martin Hála, a China scholar who heads a project called AcaMedia, which is based in his native Prague. Recommendations: Jeremy: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Martin: Black Wind, White Snow, by Charles Clover, Eurasian integration: Caught between Russia and China, by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Kaiser: The “relative calculator” app on WeChat, which calculates the correct Chinese term for family relations. Search for 亲戚计算器 (qīnqi jìsuànqì) on WeChat. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Cynica Podcast, a week of discussion on current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SubChina.
0:14.9	SubChina is the best way to stay on top of China news in just a few minutes a day with a free email newsletter, a smartphone app, and at the website subchina.com.
0:23.6	It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world.
0:29.0	I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you today from the Seneca South Studio here in downtown Durham, North Carolina.
0:34.3	Joining me from New York is, of course, Jeremy Goldcorn, editor-in-chief of Sub-China
0:39.0	and short film Auteur. Say hello there, Jeremy, and tell the people where they can see your
0:43.5	latest work, Tube Girl.
0:47.9	Well, Auteur, I think, is perhaps not the appropriate word for a maker of B-films,
0:54.0	but if you're interested, search for Tube Girl and Goldcorn on YouTube or follow me on Facebook at somewhere on my Facebook page.
1:01.0	But thanks, Kaiser.
1:02.2	Yeah, definitely check it out if for no other reason than to see Jeremy act in a very ominous Afrikaans accented English.
1:09.4	So, Jeremy, what is 16 plus 1?
1:12.2	17.
1:13.1	And I would have said the same thing until very recently.
1:15.5	Luckily, I've had a crash course in the last couple of days in Chinese geopolitical mathematics
1:20.5	and would offer a very different answer now to what 16 plus 1 means.
1:26.9	In all the media frenzy in the weeks just before the U.S. presidential election, China
1:31.3	quietly advanced a relatively recent initiative that it calls 16 plus one, referring to
1:36.8	16 countries in Central and Eastern Europe plus, of course, China.
1:41.2	So it held a summit in Riga, Latvia, attended by Premier Liga Chang and
1:45.7	prime ministers or deputy prime ministers from 16 Eastern European member states that included just
1:51.5	about every country except Russia, Belarus, and Croatia, which I guess recently dropped out,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kaiser Kuo, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Kaiser Kuo and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.