Friday

28 Oct 2022
Chinese Whispers
Reflections on the 20th Party Congress: how Xi took complete control
32 min listen

This week Xi Jinping has taken his new Politburo Standing Committee on a group trip – to Yan’An, the base of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution after the Long March. The symbolism is easy to see. On this episode of Chinese Whispers, I’ve asked back Bill Bishop, author of the popular Sinocism newsletter, and Professor Victor Shih, author of Coalitions of the Weak, to reflect on the Party Congress just past. It's been a more dramatic event than many (inside and outside the party) expected, starting with a brave, lone protestor hanging a 42-character banner off a popular bridge in Beijing, lambasting the authoritarian regime; and ending with the forcible removal of former general secretary Hu Jintao in front of the world's media.

Reflections on the 20th Party Congress: how Xi took complete control

Wednesday

26 Oct 2022

Monday

24 Oct 2022
Xi Jinping has zombified the Chinese Communist party

In the run up to China’s National Party Congress, there were whispers that a high level official in state security had been wiretapping the President. After all, why else would Sun Lijun, previously the vice-minister of public security, have been sentenced to death for taking bribes that others got much lighter sentences for?  But if Sun was wiretapping Xi Jinping, who was behind him? Wishful speculation abounded, often from overseas observers. Had Xi pushed the country too far with his zero Covid policy? Are there secret daggers drawn from rivals who lament the days of double-digit growth? But with the Party Congress now finished, it’s clear that Xi no longer needs to worry about organised opposition to him, if indeed he ever faced any.

Xi Jinping has zombified the Chinese Communist party

Monday

17 Oct 2022
Chinese Whispers
Censorship and sexuality: being gay in China
31 min listen

I recently caught a rare viewing of a 2001 Chinese film, Lan Yu. It tells the story of two gay men falling in love and finding domestic life throughout the reform and opening years of China. The filmmakers never bothered to apply for approval from the censors, knowing that its homosexual storyline would never make it past the moralistic Communist censors. On this episode, I take a look at the place of homosexuality in the traditional Chinese mindset and under these years of Communism. My guests are Zhang Yongning, the producer of Lan Yu, and Liu Yiling, a a writer covering Chinese society, technology and internet culture who has written about the the dating apps that millennial gay men now use. We discuss the homosexuality rooted in traditional Chinese literature, like Dreams of the Red Chamber, balanced against the Confucian need to procreate and pass on lineage.

Censorship and sexuality: being gay in China

Friday

14 Oct 2022

Wednesday

12 Oct 2022

Thursday

6 Oct 2022

Monday

3 Oct 2022
Chinese Whispers
Succession and power: a look ahead to the 20th Party Congress
58 min listen

Every five years, Beijing goes into heightened security as senior members of the Chinese Communist Party gather. The National Party Congress is an occasion for the party to review its track record and determine its future direction, but most crucially, it’s a moment to unveil future leaders. Older members of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee are retired while fresh blood is brought in, including at the very top – the General Secretary. Under a norm set down by Deng Xiaoping, this General Secretary is meant to be changed every other congress – in other words, every ten years. But at this upcoming Congress, most China watchers expect Xi Jinping to remain in position, beginning his third term in power.

Succession and power: a look ahead to the 20th Party Congress

Tuesday

20 Sep 2022
How to holiday like James Bond in Sardinia

Posing as a marine biologist and with Soviet agent Anya Amasova posing as his wife, James Bond checked into Hotel Cala di Volpe in the The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Their mission: to gather intelligence aboard super-villain Karl Stromberg’s secret underwater lair, somewhere in the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia and the Italian mainland. In the meantime, they stay in a spacious suite with exposed wooden beams and open ocean views (where Amasova also vows to kill Bond when the mission is over). When I stayed at Cala di Volpe this year, I saw no villainous marine lair, just Tommy Hilfiger’s super yacht. The hotel has retained its Bond glamour through the years and offers the super-rich (and some super-famous) a more private experience than St Tropez or Monaco.

How to holiday like James Bond in Sardinia

Sunday

18 Sep 2022

Saturday

17 Sep 2022

Friday

16 Sep 2022
It’s wrong to ban China from the lying-in-state

Unlike some Americans, China’s communists have no problem getting their heads around hereditary monarchy. Last week, President Xi sent his condolences to the United Kingdom. Now, he’s sending one of his most trusted deputies to pay respects at the Queen’s funeral. China has called off its wolf warriors, its diplomatic ideologues known for berating the West. Beijing is on best behaviour. Instead, the bellicose rhetoric is coming from a few British MPs, indignant that Chinese officials have been invited to the funeral. Vice-president Wang Qishan, the man tasked with representing China, is one of Xi’s most reliable lieutenants, having led the President’s flagship anti-corruption drive. But the two men go even further back, first meeting in the poverty-stricken Chinese countryside during the Cultural Revolution, both twenty-somethings condemned to manual labour as a result of Mao Zedong’s madness.

It’s wrong to ban China from the lying-in-state

Thursday

15 Sep 2022
An outcast in Xinjiang: The Backstreets, by Perhat Tursun, reviewed

Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Perhat Tursun’s unnamed protagonist is an outcast. A young Uighur in an increasingly Han city (Urumchi, the capital of Xinjiang), he is alone, angry, unstable and homeless. The events of The Backstreets take place over one long night, as he looks for somewhere to stay (‘I just wanted a small space – the space a person would need in a graveyard’) or, more accurately, somewhere to belong. In this poignant and disturbing short novel, the influence of Dostoevsky and Camus, among others, is clear. It’s not meant to be comfortable reading. Identity permeates the book in the same way that a fog forever buries Urumchi. Almost everyone the narrator meets, as he walks through the smog-filled streets, seems terrified of him.

An outcast in Xinjiang: The Backstreets, by Perhat Tursun, reviewed

Wednesday

14 Sep 2022

Wednesday

7 Sep 2022

Monday

5 Sep 2022
Chinese Whispers
Will Truss declare a genocide in Xinjiang?
24 min listen

After a long summer of hustings, Liz Truss has finally been confirmed today as the next leader of the Conservative party. As she gets the keys to Downing Street, she'll finally be able to carry out her vision of Sino-British relations. But what is that vision? On the latest Chinese Whispers, I speak to Sam Hogg, editor of the must-read Beijing to Britain newsletter, about what we know about Truss's views on China so far. Will she declare a genocide in Xinjiang? What is an acceptable level of trade with Beijing? The difficulty for Truss is that she has never had to balance her opinions on China with the wider remit of government (for example, when it comes to a trading relationship that she lambasted her rival Rishi Sunak for pursuing, while at the Treasury).

Will Truss declare a genocide in Xinjiang?

Thursday

1 Sep 2022

Wednesday

31 Aug 2022

Tuesday

30 Aug 2022
What happens if Liz Truss designates China as a ‘threat’?

Early on in the Tory leadership campaign, Liz Truss was the only contender to say that she wanted to sit down with Vladimir Putin – so that she could ‘call him out’. It now seems that President Xi Jinping will be next in her firing line, after her team briefed yesterday that as PM she intends to put China on the same footing as Russia. According to campaign sources who spoke to the Times, Truss intends to redesignate China as a ‘threat’ rather than the ‘systemic competitor’ the government described Beijing as in last year’s integrated review. In the 114-page document setting out Britain's foreign policy, the review described Russia as ‘an acute threat’ but said that ‘Open trading economies like the UK will need to engage with China and remain open to Chinese trade and investment, but they must also protect themselves against practices that have an adverse effect on prosperity and security’.

What happens if Liz Truss designates China as a ‘threat’?

Saturday

27 Aug 2022

Thursday

25 Aug 2022
I’d be the perfect communist shill

Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and read Chinese. Some question my English accent, almost suspiciously posh given that I didn’t speak a word of the language until the age of ten. Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. My podcast, Chinese Whispers, often explains the Chinese government’s way of looking at things. I studied at Oxford and now work at the heart of the British establishment. Am I not ideally placed to advance Beijing’s agenda? When I started my career, this was all a joke. Now it’s less of one. The atmosphere in Britain towards China has soured. Over the past seven years, the government has gone from David Cameron’s kowtowing to Beijing to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss jostling to out-hawk each other.

I’d be the perfect communist shill

Monday

22 Aug 2022
Chinese Whispers
The new great game: how China replaced Russia in Kazakhstan and beyond
41 min listen

What does China want with Xinjiang? Its systematic repression of the Uyghur people and other regional minorities has shocked the world, eliciting accusations of genocide from politicians and activists across the West. The Chinese Communist Party claims that its re-education camps are an anti-terrorism measure, but surely if anything is going to radicalise vast swathes of a non-Han population, it’s their forced internment and (for many) subsequent incarceration. So what is the CCP’s long term aim? According to Raffaello Pantucci, senior associate fellow at the think tank Rusi, ‘the Central Government recognises that a very strong security crackdown is not necessarily going to deal with these problems in perpetuity’.

The new great game: how China replaced Russia in Kazakhstan and beyond

Thursday

18 Aug 2022

Monday

8 Aug 2022

Friday

5 Aug 2022
Chinese Whispers
Pelosi’s swansong: the Taiwanese view on her fleeting visit
25 min listen

Nancy Pelosi’s controversial trip to Taiwan made headlines across the world this week, after President Xi’s warnings to the US ‘not to play with fire’. Furious, Beijing has responded with economic sanctions and a flurry of missiles over and around the island, as well as sanctioning Pelosi and her family. But as the West frets about possible escalation, often lacking from the discussion is what Taiwanese people actually think. In fact, as Taipei-based journalist Brian Hioe explains to Cindy Yu in this episode, most people there were less worried about the visit than you might expect. ‘There’s been so much in terms of Chinese military drilling or activity directed at Taiwan for a decade, people are quite used to it.

Pelosi’s swansong: the Taiwanese view on her fleeting visit