Getting Chinese politics wrong, with Jude Blanchette
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2021
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to talk about the faulty assumptions that American analysts and policymakers continue to make about politics in China — and the flawed policy built on those problematic assumptions. Despite much recent academic research into the behavior of authoritarian states that offer better models for understanding China’s politics, several older and less accurate heuristics persist. Jude deftly skewers these and offers useful approaches to thinking about Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 and the CCP leadership.
4:57: “Collapsism” and China’s political system
10:45: The shortcomings of engagement with China
24:21: “Xi besieged”
34:26: The “hidden reformer” fallacy
Recommendations:
Jeremy: The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease, by Charles Kenny, and The War on the Uyghurs: China's Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority, by Sean R. Roberts.
Jude: Cabin Porn: Inspiration for Your Quiet Place Somewhere, by Steven Leckart and Zach Klein.
Kaiser: Two essays by Thomas Meaney: The canonization of Richard Holbrooke and The limits of Barack Obama’s idealism.
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Transcript
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| 0:45.7 | That's audible.com slash Wondery UK. Welcome to the cynical podcast, the weekly discussion, Kurt Fares in China, produced in partnership with SubChina. |
| 1:04.3 | SubChina is the best way to keep on top of all the news out of China, especially if you subscribe to our daily email newsletter, SubChina Access, |
| 1:12.3 | or check out SubChina.com for all the original reported stories, op-eds, great regular columns, |
| 1:17.5 | and our growing range of videos and podcasts. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural |
| 1:23.2 | news about a nation that is reshaping the world. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. |
| 1:30.5 | Joining me is the man who put the villain back in Nashville, that picker of quarrels, |
| 1:35.6 | that provoker of trouble, that agent of bourgeois liberalization, that walking spiritual |
| 1:39.5 | pollutant, known in Mexico as el maiz dorado, famous in Japan as Gour of Nokonan, and back in Wogo as Giniumi. |
| 1:49.7 | It's Jeremy Goldcorn. |
| 1:51.3 | Greet the people, aren't you? |
| 1:52.4 | Hello, people. |
| 1:53.7 | Well, I'm glad you got that version of my Japanese name because the actual Chinese characters of |
... |
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