Welcome to the Cineka podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China.

In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural

trends that can help us better understand what's happening

in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth

conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to the way we think and talk about China.

Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

a National Resource Center for the Study of East Asia.

The Cynica podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the podcast,

please consider lending your support.

You can get me at Cineca pod at gmail.com.

You can also support me as an individual on

the new Cynica substack, substack.cina.com. This week, I am delighted to have Cary Brown on the program.

Carrie, who is a professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lao China Institute at King's

College London, is well known, imagine, to most of the listeners

here. He is an enviably prolific writer who embodies all the qualities I look for in an

observer of contemporary China. His latest book, China Incorporated, The Politics of a World where

China is number one, looks critically at the narratives about China that have become so pervasive

in the English-speaking world and beyond. The book also offers a thoughtful and deeply informed

perspective on the nature of Chinese power. It's one of the best attempts to right-size China's

capabilities, its intentions, and its many limitations. What I especially love about the book is that it ranges

over a lot of the issues and questions that I think are really at the very heart of the way that

we think about China. And it does it in a way that's really accessible. It's not theory and

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