The Little Red Podcast

To welcome the Year of the Snake, we’re launching a new series looking at belief in China. Young Chinese people are increasingly turning to spirituality - even online manifestations of it - and feng shui, in this moment of high unemployment and economic stress. For a Party guided by materialism, this spike in spiritual interest presents a dilemma: how to regulate something you purport not to believe in. To discuss the state's use of spirituality from the Qing to now, we’re joined by Tristan Brown, a historian at MIT and author of Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China and Haoyang Zhai, a researcher at the University of Melbourne. Image: “May The Snake Be With You” c/- Juliette Baxter Episode transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China is in the grip of a gender war. While government officials are texting and even cold calling women to urge them have children, the fertility rate continues to drop. Better educated and often better paid their male peers, many urban Chinese women are simply choosing not to marry. To discuss the growing female backlash to the Party’s pro-natal policies, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Chloe Mofei Shen, lifestyle director of Elle China and Qiqi Huang, post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Macau. Image: “Marrying late has many advantages”, BG E15/716, Landsberger Collection, 1975. Show transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried form, a kilo from the right species goes for around $150,000 on the world market, double the price of a kilogram of cocaine. The most prized maw is found in one of the remotest corners of the planet, the Kikori Delta in southern Papua New Guinea, where the once ignored scaly croaker is being targeted on an industrial scale by Chinese fishing companies, transforming the lives of villagers—and the ecosystem. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism who reported on the fish maw trade for Nature magazine.  Image: c/- Jo Chandler, Veraibari Village 2024. Jo’s fieldwork was supported in part by the Walkley Foundation Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Writers from Hong Kong face a Kafkaesque decision in the years since draconian security legislation was imposed on the city: to stay and be subject to intense censorship, or to write freely from exile.  In this episode, Louisa speaks to two award-winning authors who have chosen different paths.  Lau Yeewa is still living in Hong Kong; her book Tongueless, translated by Jennifer Feeley, won the 2024 Pen Translates award.   Gigi Leung Lee-chi is now based in Taiwan, and her book The Melancholy of Trees has just won Taiwan's Golden Tripod award.  Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons, Empty Bookshelves, 2014 Transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In our third episode on pig butchering scams, we explore the origins of the Chinese criminal syndicates that enslave people from at least 66 different countries. We examine the institutions supporting this appalling business, from the Thai military to cryptocurrencies, Burmese border guard forces to special economic zones. And the marks for these scam syndicates are not just Chinese lonely hearts—Western countries are now more profitable to scam than China. To ask what can be done to counter this trade, Graeme is joined by Jason Tower, director of the Burma Program at the United States Institute of Peace, and Greg Raymond from the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. Image: c/- Stefan Czimmek/DW, KK Park on the Myanmar-Thai borderSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Taiwan is ground zero for cognitive warfare, with the island subject to more disinformation than any other democracy. The targets are political candidates, media outlets, even boy bands. The threat is so serious that Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice recently set up a Cognitive Warfare Research Center. To explore this war for Taiwanese minds, Louisa and Graeme are joined by independent writer Min Chao and journalist Brian Hioe from New Bloom Magazine. Image: Taiwan News Formosa TV, YouTube, 20 January 2024. Transcripts available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After our last episode on an online romance scam operating out of Palau we were contacted by Neo Lu, who was trafficked to work in an online scam camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border, the victim of a $US3 trillion global criminal industry. He joins Louisa and Graeme to offer jaw-dropping detail on life inside a scam centre, the mechanics of pig butchering, who benefits from this new form of slavery and how they launder their profits.  Image: c/- Yihao Lu, Scamming equipment, Dongmei Camp, 2022 Episode transcripts are available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chinese triads have been making a Pacific play, notably in the tiny nation of Palau. There a notorious triad boss - nicknamed Broken Tooth - reinvented himself as a CCP-linked businessman trying to set up a 'gangster-themed' casino, while police busted a Chinese 'fraud factory'. In Palau, this scam scheme was linked to businessmen touting United Front credentials, who are also involved in local politics and media outlets. To examine the ties between Chinese gangsters and the Communist Party, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Aubrey Belford, the lead Pacific editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and freelance journalist Bernadette Carreon. Image: Downtown Koror, Palau’s largest town. Image c/- Richard Brooks  Transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For our hundredth episode, there was only one choice in the Year of the Dragon. We tackle the scaly mythical beast, which now finds itself central to the Party’s image.   We look at the political efficacy of the dragon for the CCP, which has recently launched a nationalistic rebranding campaign for the ‘loong’ to distinguish it from evil Western dragons.  We explore the history of the dragon, its often-fraught relationship to power, and (once common) “official sightings” of dragons in government gazetteers. To get to grips with the most auspicious creature in China’s pantheon, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Australian sinologist Linda Jaivin, author of The Monkey and the Dragon, historian James Carter from St. Joseph's University, and Annie Ren, a postdoctoral fellow of Chinese literature at the Australian National University.  Transcripts are available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/ Image: c/- Louisa Lim, Bendigo, 2024See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

China’s largesse in the Pacific is nothing if not visible. From mobile phone towers to gleaming stadiums and government buildings, Beijing’s splashing out on those it sees as choosing “the right side of history.” In this episode, we explore Taiwan’s future in the Pacific as it is deserted by its former diplomatic allies, lured by Beijing’s goodies. In this episode, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham, co-founder of the Melanesian News Network, and the University of California’s Jessica Marinaccio, a former staffer in Tuvalu’s Taiwanese embassy. Show transcripts can be found at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/ Image: Wikimedia Commons. “President Tsai and Tuvalu Prime Minister Sopoaga plant a coconut seedling, symbolizing the close friendship between Taiwan and Tuvalu.” (2017) Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan) | Government Website Open Information AnnouncementSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stand-up comedy looked set to be the next big thing on China’s entertainment scene, with shows like Roast Convention drawing billions of views and comics scoring lucrative commercial endorsements. But comedy now finds itself in retreat.  A new wave of feminist comics is struggling with attacks from online trolls and a disapproving state.  To ask whether the regime–and China’s men—can take a joke, Louisa and Graeme are joined by three stand up Chinese comedians: He Huang who's based here in Australia, and two members of the London-based 50 Shades of Feminism, Barbie and Elena. Transcript available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/the-feminists-have-stood-up-gender-and-comedy-in-china/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every generation in modern China has been richer and more ambitious than the one before—until Gen Z. With youth unemployment so high that the government has simply stopped reporting the figures, many are opting to lie flat, slump down dead, or even become full-time children. The Party frets that despite the best efforts of the propaganda organs to get them excited about a tech-driven utopian future, China’s young people seem to have lost their work ethic. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Steven Sun Zhao, a Gen Z writer at Chaoyang Trap and Yaling Jiang, a proud millennial and the founder of Aperture China. A full transcript is available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/full-time-children-or-half-dead-chinas-gen-z-goes-to-ground/ Image: Woman in black jacket sitting on blue chair, c/- 绵 绵 on UnsplashSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The exponential trauma produced by the Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in China, yet has been foundational to a generation.  Now the Communist Party is using the experience of its leader Xi Jinping as one of the 17 million young people sent down to the countryside to reframe the movement as showcasing personal sacrifice in the interests of national success.  The party would like other aspects to be forgotten, such as the unimaginable violence in Chongqing or the petty brutality that set children onto their parents.  In the second part of our series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme discuss the legacies of the Cultural Revolution with sociologist Xu Bin from Emory University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the author of Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China and Guardian journalist Tania Branigan whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution came out in May. Show transcript: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/bombard-the-past-exhuming-the-cultural-revolution/ Image: Red Guard, June 1968. c/- Wikimedia Commons and China Pictorial  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Writing history in China has never been easy; China’s first historian, Sima Qian, was forced to choose between execution and castration and imprisonment.  He chose the latter in order to finish his life’s work, Records of the Grand Historian.  Now China’s keepers of inconvenient truths are put under immense pressure by Xi Jinping’s war on historical nihilism—viewpoints and memories that run counter to official Party history. Fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle against the state, China’s underground historians often make huge sacrifices to keep alive histories that the Party would like to erase. In the first of a two-part series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Ian Johnson, whose book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future is out today.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just as satirical writers struggled in Trump's America, China's sci-fi writers are facing a challenge:  how do you write in a world where reality is more like science fiction than science fiction itself? Added to that are the perils of popularity, with everyone from Netflix to the Communist Party embracing Chinese science fiction. To explore China's metaverse of sci-fi, Loiusa and Graeme are joined by Emily Jin, a science fiction and fantasy translator who’s also a PhD candidate at Yale and translator Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.