China Books Podcast

Dec 03 2024 15 ep. 50 mins 28

China Books Podcast artwork

The China Books Podcast is a monthly interview series on all things China and bookish, from ChinaBooksReview.com. Hosted by editor Alec Ash and guests, we talk to authors about their recent works on or from China, from politics and history to fiction and culture. Subscribe to stay in the loop about new China publications. China Books Review is a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes TheWireChina.com.

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Ep. 15: Paul French on Wallis Simpson's China Year

Dec 03 2024 36 mins

The American socialite Wallis Simpson is best known as the wife of former British king Edward VIII. When they announced their intention to marry, her status as a divorcée (and an American) caused a constitutional crisis that led to Edward's abdication in 1936. But long before that, Simpson's adventures had led her to spend a year in interwar China, from 1924-25, while fleeing her

Ep. 14: Kishore Mahbubani on the Asian Century

Nov 05 2024 36 mins

In this episode, we’re pleased to have had the opportunity to talk to Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean former diplomat who was Singapore’s representative to the UN in the 1980s and 1990s, and later Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore. Mahbubani is the author of ten books on Asia and the world, most recently Living the Asian Centu

Ep. 13: Peter Hessler on 'Other Rivers'

Oct 01 2024 45 mins

Our guest this month is renowned writer Peter Hessler, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of five books about China, most recently Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, published earlier this year by Penguin Press. In the book, Hessler details his most recent stint living in China, teaching writing at Sichuan University in Chengdu from 2019 to 2021. Hessler talked to us about

Ep. 12: China's evolving art scene

Sep 03 2024 59 mins

China’s edgy contemporary art exploded into global view over decades of China’s meteoric economic growth. Gone were the days of Mao Zedong insisting that art had to “serve the people", by which he meant, the Communist Party, with socialist realist propaganda. Freed from those contraints with Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, successive generations of

Ep. 11: Beijing in Short Fiction

Aug 06 2024 40 mins

Beijing is many things to many people, sometimes all at once – a mecca for migrants and artists, a tech hub, a proving ground for young graduates, a capital of politics and power, a smoggy, traffic-choked dystopia, a charming collection of lakes, leafy parks, narrow lanes and courtyard houses, an enduring city with 800 years of history and lore, and millions of stories to tell. T

Ep. 10: Rethinking U.S.-China trade

Jul 02 2024 55 mins

Who are the winners and losers in U.S.-China trade over recent decades, and what's a better way forward? Laying out a compelling argument in this episode is Peter Goodman, a former correspondent in China, current global economics correspondent at The New York Times, and author of How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain. He takes the supply chain snarls a

Ep. 9: Tiananmen remembered

Jun 04 2024 59 mins

Tiananmen -- the place, the protests, the crackdown -- reverberates in memories and imaginations around the world, even 35 years after tanks rolled in Beijing’s streets, and the Chinese military’s crackdown on student demonstrators in the week hours of June 4, 1989, killed at least hundreds and wounded thousands of people. The protesters had been calling for political reforms,

Ep. 8: Uyghur Women Speaking Out

May 07 2024 51 mins

Genocide is not a word thrown around lightly by the U.S. government, but it uses that term to describe the Chinese government’s ongoing assaults on Uyghurs’ distinct culture, identity, rights, and freedom in China’s far western region of Xinjiang. China's government has long had an uneasy relationship with Uyghurs’ distinct Turkic Muslim identity, and has tried in various w

Ep. 7: Why China's ahead in the green energy 'gold rush'

Apr 02 2024 49 mins

China has bet big over the past couple of decades on how building up its renewable energy sector -- solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and their batteries, and the metals and minerals that make them all possible -- will help China achieve a dominant global position in an essential field. So far, with intensifying climate change making the need to speed the transition fr

Ep. 6: Spy novels, a real-life thriller, and the BBC

Mar 05 2024 56 mins

Acclaimed spy novelist Adam Brookes started out in China as a languge student in the mid-'80s, skipping class to travel in trucks and buses to Tibet and other parts of China that had just opened up after being shut off to foreign visitors for decades. He want back as a BBC China correspondent, informed by his earlier experiences in remote parts of China, and informing a huge global