Welcome to the Cynica podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina.

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We've got reported stories, essays, and editorials, create explainers and trackers, regular columns,

and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its

ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's

Xinjiang region to China's ambitious plans to shift its economy onto a post-carbon footing.

It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is

reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you

from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Many of us who've learned Chinese just in recent decades now

take for granted how easily we can communicate in written Chinese today.

Actually, knowing how to write the couple of thousand characters needed for basic literacy

isn't even all that necessary if you have even the most rudimentary digital device.

And if we don't possess literacy at all in Chinese, we can just cut and paste big chunks

of text and machine translate

them into or out of Chinese with relative ease and do it for free or at a very, very low cost.

If we only speak Chinese, we can dictate into our phones and have our words captured with

impressive accuracy. These days, most people I know who didn't learn Chinese as children

and have learned to write by hand do so mostly out of an aesthetic appreciation for Chinese

characters, which are pretty inarguably beautiful things, but go back not very long ago,

and the written language was a matter of quite fractious debate

with a great many people, giants of Chinese intellectual and literary life, arguing very forcefully

...