What does it take to be 'an old friend of the Chinese people'?
** Chinese Whispers is coming to an end. Later this year, Cindy Yu will be joining The Times and The Sunday Times to write a regular column on China. To stay abreast of her latest work, subscribe to her free Substack at chinesewhispers.substack.com **
The term ‘old friend of the Chinese people’ might seem a colloquial, almost sentimental, phrase to appear in official diplomatic language, but in the Chinese context, those words have a very specific meaning. Most often, they refer to high profile foreigners whose actions have helped the Chinese Communist Party in one way or another. The most famous of these is Henry Kissinger, who led the way for American rapprochement with China.
That the CCP gives various foreigners this honour is revealing of China’s priorities over the decades, but also of its attempts to co-opt foreign forces to its cause. Think back to the United Front strategy, which we looked at on the podcast earlier in the year.
To discuss this honorific, I’m joined Professor Anne-Marie Brady, a China expert at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who was among the first to look at China’s old friends as a serious political concept some 20 years ago, and Ryan Ho Kilpatrick, a journalist based in Hong Kong.
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37:44
From Chimerica to Cold War II: how US-China relations soured
** Chinese Whispers is coming to an end. Later this year, Cindy Yu will be joining The Times and The Sunday Times to write a regular column on China. To stay abreast of her latest work, subscribe to her free Substack at chinesewhispers.substack.com **
It’s easy to forget that, as recently as the start of this century, the US was China’s biggest ally. Washington saw Beijing as a necessary bulwark against Moscow, and consistently supported China’s entry into the world economy ever since rapprochement in the 1970s, including its accession to the World Trade Organisation.
These days, the relationship couldn’t be more different. Why have relations cooled quite so fast? When was the turning point? And can we now say that rapprochement was a strategic mistake from the US?
Bob Davis is a former senior editor at the Wall Street Journal, who was posted to China between 2011 and 2014. In recent years, he has been conducting a long running series of interviews - with dozens of high level officials over successive American administrations - for the online magazine, The Wire China. He has interviewed defense secretaries, ambassadors, national security advisors, treasury secretaries and more. Now, these interviews have been collated into a new e-book released by The Wire China: Broken Engagement.
Through these interviews, we can see the changing direction of US-China relations through the eyes and words of those at the very heart of America’s decisions. Bob joins this episode to tell us all about it.
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Rana Mitter on the legacy of Sun Yat-sen
Walking around Taipei a couple of years ago, I spotted a familiar sight – a bronze statue of a moustachioed man, cane in his right hand, left leg striding forward. The man is Sun Yat-sen, considered modern China’s founding father. I recognised the statue because a larger version of it stands in the city centre of Nanjing, the mainland Chinese city that I was born and raised in.
That one figure can be celebrated across the strait, both in Communist PRC and Taiwanese ROC, is the curious legacy left behind by Sun. March 12th this year is the centenary of Sun’s death, so what better opportunity to look at his legacy, and who better to discuss Sun than the historian Rana Mitter, who needs no introduction with Chinese Whispers listeners.
Further listening:
Japan’s role in the making of modern China
What is it to be ‘Chinese’?
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43:24
What China's planned mega-dam means for Asia
Just before the end of 2024, Chinese state media Xinhua slipped out an announcement – the long discussed mega-dam in Medog County, Tibet, has been greenlit. When built, it will generate three times more energy than China’s Three Gorges dam, currently the largest in the world.
The Xinhua write-up gave few other details, but the news has caused reverberations across Asia as the river on which the dam would be built, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows into both India and Bangladesh. The existence of the dam could, as we will hear in this episode, have extensive impact on these downriver countries.
To break down the complicated water politics of the region, I’m joined today by Chinese Whispers regular, the journalist Isabel Hilton, who founded the climate NGO Dialogue Earth (formerly known as China Dialogue); and Neeraj Singh Manhas, an expert on transboundary rivers and Asian water politics, currently at South Korea’s Parley Policy Initiative.
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Have America's chips controls backfired?
Beginning in the first Trump presidency and expanded under Joe Biden, the US has taken a strategy of technologically containing China through restricting its access to cutting edge semiconductors. As Chinese Whispers has looked at before, these chips form the backbone of rapid advances in AI, telecoms, smartphones, weaponry and more. Washington’s aim was clear: to widen the technological gap between the two powers
But has this strategy worked? Lately this has become a hot topic of debate as Chinese tech companies such as Huawei and DeepSeek have nevertheless made technical strides. Some even argue that the export controls have spurred on Chinese innovation and self-reliance.
In this episode of Chinese Whispers, two very informed and smart guests debate this issue. Ryan Fedasiuk is U.S. Director of The Future Society, an independent nonprofit organization focused on AI governance, and former Advisor for U.S.-China Bilateral Affairs at the US State Department. Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University and a start-up founder. He also hosts the podcast, Manifold.
Produced by Cindy Yu and Joe Bedell-Brill.
A fortnightly podcast from the Spectator on the latest in Chinese politics, society, and more. From Huawei to Hong Kong, Cindy Yu talks to experts, journalists, and long time China-watchers on what you need to know about China.
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