Barbarians at the Gate

Following a tumultuous 2025, we gallop into the Year of the Horse. Tradition says it should be a year of dynamism and progress, but which way is the stampede heading? To help us read the tea leaves, we welcome back our occasional co-host, Zhang Yajun. As a global strategist and former innovation lead at the World Economic Forum, Yajun has spent over 16 years translating complex shifts—from AI to cultural narratives—for international audiences. She joins us to look past the headlines and offer a reality check on where China’s policies, social fabric, and daily life are actually going in 2026. Topics include: The Student Exodus: After American student numbers hit historic lows, can China lure them back? Is the "China Dream" for foreign talent dead, or can the country overcome deep-seated geopolitical friction to become a destination for career-building again? The AI Reality Check: Beyond the state-level hype, how is Artificial Intelligence reshaping the rhythm of the street? We look at how aggressive government promotion of the sector is filtering down to everyday life. The Death of the Dining Room: The delivery apps are winning. As take-out replaces the communal table, restaurants are closing at an alarming rate. Are we witnessing the end of China’s boisterous, public food culture? Character Amnesia: As digital input methods proliferate, muscle memory is fading. With fewer people able to write by hand, will the Ministry of Education double down on rote discipline, or is the era of handwritten Chinese officially over? Yajun Zhang, Global Strategy & Innovation Leader | AI & XR for Policy | East–West Connector LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yajun-zhang-strategist/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@yajun_zhang Substack: https://yajunzhang.substack.com/

Champions Day in the city of Shanghai, November 1941. The world was at war, but the clubhouse at the Shanghai Race Club (now People's Park) was packed with owners and punters cheering on the pony. The funeral of Shanghai's richest widow, Liza Hardoon, was a spectacle that filled the streets of the International Settlement. Japanese occupiers and their Chinese collaborators came together in a bizarre ritual to celebrate the birthday of revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. The opening of a new movie featuring, of all subjects, Charlie Chan had folks lining up at the local cinema box office. The world had changed, but the "Lone Island" of Shanghai persisted, as it had since becoming a treaty port a century earlier. In this encore episode from 2020, historian James Carter joins us to discuss his fascinating book Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai. Carter brings to life the vivid tableau of an era coming to an end. By the end of the year, Japanese authorities would take control of Shanghai and the city would never again be the same. What did the end of the colonial era mean for Shanghai and its residents? Why were race tracks such powerful symbols? Join us as we discuss the history of horse racing, colonialism, and the last days of Old Shanghai.

How does a teenage girl from Beijing’s hutongs end up ruling the world’s largest empire—without ever technically sitting on the throne? In this episode, Jeremiah traces the improbable ascent of Empress Dowager Cixi, who entered the Forbidden City as a minor concubine and departed as the most powerful woman in Chinese history. The story begins in imperial catastrophe: the Xianfeng Emperor dies in the wake of the humiliating looting of the Summer Palace, leaving behind a four-year-old son and a power vacuum waiting to be filled. Cixi, her fellow empress dowager Ci’an, and Prince Gong move quickly to take control, using the child emperor as both symbol and shield. Jeremiah explains the peculiar constitutional fiction known as “ruling from behind the curtain” (垂帘听政), a political maneuver that allowed Cixi and Ci’an to steer the empire while officially remaining in the shadows. When Cixi’s own son, the Tongzhi Emperor, dies at eighteen, she executes another audacious maneuver—installing her young nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, ensuring that the throne remains occupied by someone conveniently underage. For a brief period—one hundred days, to be exact—Guangxu confers with intellectuals like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, planning an ambitious series of bureaucratic and military reforms. Cixi, unconvinced that constitutional monarchy and radical modernization were viable at the time, pulls the plug. Jeremiah and David examine the mystery surrounding the death of Zhenfei, the Pearl Concubine, as well as the lingering question of whether the Guangxu Emperor was poisoned by his aunt. Finally, we weigh the verdict of history: was Cixi a ruthless “Dragon Lady” who strangled China’s chances at modernity—or a pragmatic, formidable ruler judged by a double standard?

In 1981, the Indian writer and poet Vikram Seth traveled from Nanjing, where he was studying literature, to his hometown of Delhi. Moving by train across China to Gansu, then hitchhiking southwest through Qinghai and Tibet, it was an itinerary that makes sense when a traveler has a surfeit of curiosity but a shortage of funds. Armed with half-decent Mandarin, a fistful of foreign exchange certificates, and a scrap of paper authorizing his route, he negotiated China just as it was emerging from the Maoist era. No WeChat. No Trip.com. No Google Translate. Just a student improvising his way home as the date on his travel pass crept ever closer: fording rivers in rickety trucks, suffering altitude sickness, dealing with roadside thieves and the occasional military checkpoint. From Heaven Lake, the book that came out of that trip, still hits hard. It’s sharp, observant, funny in places, bleak in others. A snapshot of a country trying to reinvent itself while one traveler tries to get home before his paperwork expires. In this Barbarians at the Gate crossover with China Books Review, Jeremiah sits down with Alexander Boyd to talk about Seth’s strange, scrappy journey, what travel in China looked like in 1981, and how a writer from India saw things Western visitors of the same era tended to miss in the early 1980s.

Yuanmingyuan, the "Garden of Perfect Brightness," commonly referred to as the Old Summer Palace, was a Qing Dynasty imperial residence comprised of hundreds of buildings, halls, gardens, temples, artificial lakes, and landscapes, covering a land area five times that of the Forbidden City and eight times the size of Vatican City. This expansive compound, once referred to by Victor Hugo as "one of the wonders of the world," now exists only as a sprawl of scattered ruins on the northern outskirts of Beijing, having been thoroughly burned and looted by the French and British over three days in October 1860, in the aftermath of the Second Opium War. The razed remnants of the glorious gardens have been left in place by the Chinese government as an outdoor museum of China's "Century of Humiliation" at the hands of foreign powers. On the 160th (now 165th) anniversary of the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, Jeremiah and David discuss the political and cultural clashes that led to the action, the significance of the incident for China's national self-image, and the government's attempts to repatriate the massive amounts of looted artifacts found scattered among the museums of Europe and the West. The conversation also explores the changing symbolic significance of the ruins in the context of a rejuvenated and economically powerful China.

It’s just two guys talking China's naval history. In this episode, David and Jeremiah dig into the story of Zheng He, the 15th-century admiral who took China's treasure fleets halfway around the world as Western Europe was just starting to figure out ocean navigation. Here's a Muslim eunuch who went from prisoner to running the emperor's treasure fleets. The man brought giraffes home as diplomatic gifts and offered up Sri Lankan kings as trophies to his boss. His fleets dwarfed anything Europe had, yet China wasn't really interested in claiming territory, just showing up, trading, and reminding everyone who ran the seas. Then Beijing killed the whole program. Just like that. Done. Why'd they stop? That's the question. Because when China bailed on blue-water sailing, Portugal and Spain filled the gap. Different game plan entirely. Flash forward to 2025, David is in Addis Ababa this month watching Chinese construction projects in Ethiopia and he's drawing lines between Zheng He's trade missions and today's Belt and Road. Same waters, same connections, five centuries apart. What can a eunuch, a giraffe, and a fleet of enormous ships can teach us about the history of globalization?

Picture this: You’re 45 years old, halfway through writing the definitive history of your civilization. Writing this history is the family business, and you’ve made a promise to your dying father to finish his work no matter what, when your boss, who happens to be the Emperor of China, gives you a choice. You can be executed or, if that doesn’t work for your schedule, how about castration? Sima Qian picked door number two. If you enjoyed this tale of commitment, consider subscribing or supporting the Substack. Your subscription will cost far less than what Sima Qian paid. We promise. In this special episode of Barbarians at the Gate, Jeremiah teams up with China Books Review’s Associate Editor Alexander Boyd to dig into the story of history’s most committed writer. Sima Qian didn’t just compile China’s first great historical work—he literally sacrificed his manhood to complete it after defending a friend got him sideways with Emperor Han Wudi. Jeremiah and Alexander explore what it means to speak truth to power when the consequences are real, why Sima Qian’s model of moral courage feels especially relevant in our current moment of “spiritual castrations,” and whether anyone today has the stones (so to speak) to make that kind of sacrifice for their work. Sometimes the classics hit different when the world’s gone sideways.

In this encore episode of Barbarians at the Gate, first broadcast in March 2024, John Alekna talks about his fascinating new book Seeking News, Making China: Information Technology and the Emergence of Mass Society. In 20th-century China, the gradual importation and development of information technology had an enormous impact on the way news was disseminated and accessed by the general public. When radio first appeared in the early 1920s, fewer than 8 in 1,000 people had access to newspapers, whereas by the Mao period hundreds of millions of citizens were receiving daily news and information via radio, TV, and shortwave technology. This book provides an enlightening “meta-historical” account of the evolving communications technologies that fueled the May Fourth Movement, KMT and CCP propaganda campaigns during WWII, and the mass information campaigns of the Mao era, such as the Cultural Revolution. The book describes how the various interlocking information technologies, infrastructure, and communication channels—what Alekna calls the “newsscape”—affected popular opinion, politics, and state power. John Alekna is an Assistant Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Peking University.

Teachers are an excitable lot prone to excessive consumption of caffeine and loudly proclaiming that [Insert New Technology Here] will doom a generation to intellectual oblivion. Whether it was television, computers, the Internet, Wikipedia, or now AI, we've seen this panic before. But in this episode, Jeremiah and David try to do a few deep knee bends and discuss what AI actually means for Chinese language learning. How do we teach when near-perfect translations are waiting on students' phones? How do we integrate AI into our work while putting guardrails on classroom use? AI might be the greatest learning tool since Pleco, but how do we keep the focus on connecting with actual humans, not impressing silicon tutors? An episode for language teachers, students, and anyone wondering if robots will eventually make them fluent in Mandarin.

Where are our nerds at? David Moser is on summer holiday, and stepping into David's seat for this episode is literary translator Brendan O'Kane. It takes about two minutes for Jeremiah and Brendan to go off the rails, over the edge, and back to the Amilal Courtyard in Beijing ca. 2010 (if you know, you know). In this wide-ranging conversation, Brendan and Jeremiah rate different levels of dynastic decline on the "fuckery" scale, Brendan reads a translation from Chinese philosopher Mencius, there's discussion of how to best gloss "laowai," if Xi Jinping is "president," "chairman," or something else entirely, a quick debate on whether Matteo Ricci had an eidetic memory or was just really, really smart, and Brendan's adventures battling ICE. Come with us for a wild ride of Sinological geekdom and summer-style freeflow scholarship.

Jeremiah and David are joined by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, historian of modern China and a longtime interpreter of the country’s shifting place in the world. Originally recorded in 2020, this conversation revisits the Boxer War of 1900—not through the usual lens of siege and rescue, but by examining what followed: the punitive occupation, the fractured international memory, and the long shadow cast by a global media frenzy. Wasserstrom’s reading reframes the Boxers not as an isolated burst of anti-foreign violence, but as part of a cycle of uprisings and reprisals that shaped modern China’s encounter with the West. He discusses why the term “Boxer Rebellion” obscures more than it reveals, and why “Year of the Boxers” may be a better way to understand the crisis—and its aftershocks. The episode also explores deeper patterns in Chinese history, including the 60-year cyclical mindset that links 1900 to 1960 and, by some accounts, to 2020. It’s a conversation about repetition, media distortion, and the uneasy symmetry between violence and remembrance.

In this episode we chat with Shanghai-based author and editor Jacob Dreyer, a China watcher who writes with great insight and nuance about the shifting landscape of China-US relations. We touch on questions such as: Is the China model of governance outperforming Western liberal democracy? Is China winning the AI and technology wars? (Spoiler alert: That ship has sailed.) How do the architecture and logic of surveillance and information control systems differ between the U.S. and China? Is the current China-US geopolitical chill drifting toward a hot war? And finally, we unpack the question posed in Jacob’s guest op-ed in the New York Times: Is Trump’s America beginning to look more like China?

This week on the podcast, we explore the role of the horse in Chinese culture with author David Chaffetz, whose new book Raiders, Rulers, and Traders traces the sweeping impact of horse domestication across world civilizations. Chaffetz explains how equestrian cultures not only transformed warfare and mobility in China, but also reshaped the very boundaries of empire and cultural identity. Our conversation follows China’s long and complex relationship with the horse, from defending against nomadic cavalry along the northern frontier to importing prized horses through Silk Road diplomacy. Chaffetz recounts the challenges faced by Chinese dynasties in breeding horses to match the superior mounts of Mongol raiders. We also explore the echoes of China’s horse culture preserved in relics, from paintings and artifacts to the horse statues unearthed among the Terracotta Warriors.

In this classic episode from 2020, we look at Putonghua, the spoken language most people refer to as Mandarin. David wrote a book in 2016 on the evolution of Putonghua in China. What's the point of Putonghua? What is a dialect and what is a language in China? And what's the difference between Mandarin as spoken during the dynastic period, "Guoyu" (National Speech) in the Republican Period, and Putonghua in the PRC? We also get an assist from Zhang Yajun who talks with David about the differences between the spoken language of Northern China, especially around Beijing, and "Standard" Putonghua.

In this special episode, we examine the Trump administration's ongoing attacks on higher education in America and their implications for the future of US-China academic exchanges. On May 29, the Department of Homeland Security banned Harvard from enrolling international students—a decision that is now being challenged in the courts even as the educational plans of nearly 7,000 students and post-grads are thrown into jeopardy. This announcement comes on the heels of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's announcement last Wednesday that the State Department will start "aggressively" revoking the visas of Chinese students, starting with those with connections to the ruling Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.David and Jeremiah convene an emergency meeting of the podcast to unpack these developments and how these announcements will affect the future of US-China educational exchanges, America's global influence in higher education, and economic competitiveness.Spoiler alert: They're both quite salty about the subject.

In this episode of Barbarians at the Gate, hosts Jeremiah Jenne and David Moser interview Steven Schwankert about his groundbreaking research into the forgotten story of the Chinese survivors of the Titanic disaster. Schwankert, author of The Six: The Untold Story of the Titanic's Chinese Survivors, details how he uncovered the remarkable tale of six Chinese men who survived the sinking in 1912—a story largely erased from historical records. The conversation explores how these third-class passengers achieved an extraordinary survival rate despite their disadvantaged position on the ship. Schwankert explains how their maritime experience as professional sailors working for the Donald Steamship line may have helped them make crucial life-saving decisions during the disaster. We talk to Steve about the thorough detective work he and his team carried out researching the lives of the six surviving Chinese passengers, including their challenges in identifying Romanized Chinese names that had been misread for decades. They also got hands-on, using a full-scale replica of a Titanic collapsible lifeboat built by students and teachers from the Western Academy of Beijing to test historical claims about how the Chinese survivors escaped. Throughout the episode, Schwankert addresses the discrimination and false narratives these men faced in the aftermath of the disaster, including libelous newspaper accounts claiming they had dressed as women or stowed away. The documentary based on this research received a wide theatrical release in China in 2021, bringing this important historical correction to audiences worldwide. Finally, we discuss racism, official policy, and historical bias, as well as Steven and his team’s work to recover the lost stories of the six Chinese men who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

In this episode, Jeremiah and David explore a topic drawn from their many years of experience with American study abroad programs: culture shock.

In this episode of Barbarians at the Gate, we talk with Emily Feng about her new book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting for NPR, Emily paints a picture of how state control has intensified over recent years, reshaping Chinese society, politics, and culture. Emily explains how she wove together personal stories into the historical, cultural, and political contexts, offering insights into the lives of Uyghurs separated by detention camps, human rights lawyers battling censorship, Mongolian educators struggling to preserve their language, and ordinary citizens whose acts of remembrance have become quiet forms of resistance.

This week, we catch up with Dutch sinologist Manya Koetse, the creator of "What's on Weibo," a platform offering in-depth insights into trends, events, memes, and social phenomena on Weibo, one of China's largest social media platforms, often referred to as the "Chinese Twitter."As a bridge for non-Chinese speaking audiences to understand the dynamics of Chinese digital culture, "What's on Weibo" has evolved over the years, recently expanding to include a premium newsletter while maintaining its mission to decode Chinese social media for a global audience.Manya explains Weibo's role in the increasingly fragmented Chinese online environment, discussing the evolving gender and class demographics of Weibo alongside other platforms such as Bilibili, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu (Red Book). She also talks about how Weibo functions as a social barometer reflecting the changing tides of Chinese nationalism, commercialism, social unrest, and anti-Western sentiment.

In this episode of Barbarians at the Gate, host Jeremiah Jenne speaks with Chris Stewart, the creator of the History of China podcast. They discuss Chris's transition from living in Shanghai to returning to Bozeman, Montana, his journey into Chinese history, and the challenges of podcasting. The conversation also touches on the impact of COVID-19, the cultural revolution, and the importance of historical context in understanding current events. Chris shares insights on audience engagement and the evolution of his podcast over the years.