Podcasting The Prince: Sue-Lin Wong of The Economist on her Xi Jinping podcast
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2022
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are joined by Sue-Lin Wong, who until recently covered China for The Economist and hosted an eight-part podcast series all about Xi Jinping called The Prince. The podcast features interviews with a wide range of China-watchers, peers of Xi, dissidents, and many others who offer insights into what makes Xi tick.
3:38 – Reason behind naming the podcast “the Prince”
5:53 – Differences between traditional journalism and podcasting
9:52 – The role of Sue-Lin’s mother in the podcast
13:37 – How corruption influenced Xi’s leadership style
19:29 – Identifying Xi’s greatest anxieties: party in-fighting, the collapse of the USSR
22:48 – Early signs of Xi’s ideological underpinnings most China watchers missed
29:33 – Did the CCP’s internal crisis make Xi’s rise inevitable?
32:57 – Is Xi Jinping the most powerful man in the world?
37:12 – Reframing the engagement debate after Xi’s administration
41:51 – David Rennie’s view on China: “a giant utilitarian experiment”
46:45 – Key insights on Xi that listeners of the Prince should walk away with
52:16 – How Sue-Lin would brief an American policymaker on Xi Jinping’s main motivations
A transcript of this episode is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Jeremy – A Matter of Perspective: Parsing Insider Accounts of Xi Jinping Ahead of the 20th Party Congress, an article on The China Story written by Neil Thomas
Sue-Lin – Race to the Galaxy, a two-player board game
Kaiser – Interview with the Vampire, a new AMC TV series
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with The China Project. |
| 0:15.7 | Subscribe to access from The China Project to get access to not only our great daily newsletter, but all the original |
| 0:22.6 | writing on our website at theChinaproject.com. We've got reported stories, essays, and |
| 0:28.1 | editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. |
| 0:35.8 | We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious |
| 0:39.0 | entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghers and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang |
| 0:43.9 | region, to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. |
| 0:50.8 | It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. |
| 0:56.6 | We cover China with neither fear nor favor. |
| 0:59.8 | I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. |
| 1:02.9 | Joining me from the thickets and brambles of storied Goldcorn holler in the trackless wilderness |
| 1:08.2 | beyond Nashville, Tennessee, is Tieni, also known as Jeremy Goldcorn, |
| 1:12.6 | who confessed to me privately that he's the one who sabotaged the Nord Stream Pipeline. |
| 1:17.7 | At last, we know the truth. |
| 1:20.0 | Greet the people who do not mon saboteur. |
| 1:24.1 | Greetings, people from deep in the woods in Tennessee, where I'm prepping for Armageddon in my bunker. |
| 1:30.8 | You're bringing it on. |
| 1:32.3 | You're bringing it on. |
| 1:34.7 | Anyway, today on Cineka, we were talking about another podcast, one that was released with impeccable timing just ahead of the 20th Party Congress that starts on October 16th, |
| 1:45.0 | just a few days after this show drops. That podcast is an eight-part series called The Prince, |
| 1:50.6 | and it's from The Economist and hosted by Sulin Wong. Her podcast actually made it as the actual |
| 1:55.2 | cover of the magazine, which I believe is a first. I am delighted to welcome Sulean as our guest |
... |
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