David and Jeremiah are traveling this week, which means, like the days of summer TV (pre-Internet and pre-InfiniteStreamingNetflixVerse), we are replaying one of our favorite earlier episodes. We hope you enjoy this "one from the vault" and we'll be back with fresh episodes in November.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.This episode was originally posted on October 26, 2020.

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. (https://chinabooksreview.com/2025/09/09/sima-qian/)In this special episode of Barbarians at the Gate, Jeremiah teams up with China Books Review’s Associate Editor Alexander Boyd (https://chinabooksreview.com/contributor/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 from 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.

In our careers as teachers, we have cycled between embracing change while loudly proclaiming that [Insert New Technology Here] will ruin the classroom experience, doom a generation to intellectual oblivion, and possibly lead to the collapse of civilization. What can I say? Teachers can be an excitable lot, prone to excessive consumption of caffeine.Whether it was television ("Students won't know how to read anymore!") or computers ("Students won't know how to write and do math anymore!"), to the dawn of the Internet age ("Students are just going to copy stuff from online and pass it off as their own!"), to Wikipedia ("Students are just going to copy stuff from online written by a guy who lives in his parents' basement and pass it off as their own!"), to AI ("Students are just going to ask the machine to do their work for them!"), to whatever comes next...But in this episode, Jeremiah and David try to do a few deep knee bends and discuss, as soberly as possible with this lot, what the latest technology means for the classroom, research, and language learning. How do we teach Chinese when near-perfect translations are waiting on their mobile phones? How do we as teachers and researchers integrate AI into our professional lives while seeking ways to put guardrails on students using the same technology in the classroom?AI might be the greatest learning tool for students of Chinese since Pleco (https://www.pleco.com/), but how do we keep the focus on the ultimate goal: connecting with actual humans, not impressing silicon tutors?It's an episode for Chinese language students, language teachers, study abroad administrators, those of us who live and work in China, 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 (https://substack.com/@burninghouse) (BlueSky: @bokane.com (https://bsky.app/profile/bokane.org)) 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.

This episode was originally released on May 18, 2020. Jeremiah and David are joined by Jeffrey Wasserstrom (https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5310), 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.We also had the pleasure of welcoming Jeffrey Wasserstrom back onto the podcast last year (https://blubrry.com/barbarians/60736425/Neither%20boxers%20nor%20a%20rebellion...Discuss!/) to the discuss the legacies of the Hong Kong protests, the rise of Xi Jinping's historical narrative control, and how academic engagement with China is evolving amidst growing geopolitical tensions.

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?Recent Articles from Jacob Dreyer:Trump's America is beginning to look more like China (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/opinion/america-china-similarities-differences.html), New York Times, July 1, 2025The Industrial Party (https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-industrial-party-%E5%B7%A5%E4%B8%9A%E5%85%9A/), The Ideas Newsletter, March 30, 2025Why China's Innovation Model is Thriving (https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-025-01927-x/d41586-025-01927-x.pdf), Nature, Volume 642, June 26, 2025AI, China's Invisible Scaffolding (https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/ai-chinas-invisible-scaffolding/), The Ideas Newsletter, July 10, 2025China in 2035 (https://www.noemamag.com/china-in-2035/), NOEMA, June 11, 2024

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: The Horse and the Rise of Empires 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.Link to the book:David Chaffetz, (https://amzn.to/4escJX0)Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

In this classic episode of Barbarians at the Gate from 2020, David Moser and I examine Putonghua (普通话), the spoken language most people refer to as Mandarin, and ask the question: What is the point of Putonghua?(https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1fea8b05-b6d0-4631-a42a-e6f1b06157ea_1026x765.jpeg)We look at the question of what constitutes a dialect, and what defines a language, especially in a country as diverse as China? We look at the historical evolution of standardized speech in China, tracing a line from the Mandarin as spoken during the dynastic period, to "Guoyu 国语" (National Speech) in the Republican Period, and finally to Putonghua in the PRC. We also receive assistance from Zhang Yajun, who discusses with David the differences between the spoken language of Northern China, particularly around Beijing, and "Standard" Putonghua.Recommendations:A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language by David Moser (Penguin, 2016)Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 by Gina Anne Tam (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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 (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/trump-harvard-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 (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/rubio-revoke-student-visas-china-rcna209699) 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 (https://www.thesixdocumentary.com/) 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. Students studying in China often go through a challenging and transformative process of adjusting to a new cultural environment. In this episode, they explore key questions: Are there predictable stages of culture shock? How much does language proficiency influence adaptation? And are some students naturally better at navigating the difficulties of cultural adjustment? The experience of culture shock can lead not only to a deeper understanding of Chinese society but also to new insights into students' own cultural defaults. In today's post-COVID era—when fewer American students are going to China—the value of immersive, first-hand experience is more crucial than ever for building meaningful cross-cultural understanding.Jeremiah's review of Peking Picnic (1932) at China Books Review.

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 (https://www.npr.org/people/705255512/emily-feng), 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 (https://www.whatsonweibo.com/)," 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, Jeremiah speaks with Chris Stewart, the creator of The History of China podcast (https://thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com/). 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.

This week, we explore a topic close to our hearts: the world of jazz in China. Jeremiah and David bring their respective musical experience to the table—Jeremiah as a rock and blues keyboardist, and David as an active pianist in Beijing's jazz scene.David takes us back to his experiences in the 1980s, a period of renaissance for jazz in Beijing, when Chinese rock musicians began to discover—or rediscover—this intricate Western genre. During China's early "Reform and Opening Up" era, musicians with little prior exposure to jazz and scarce recordings embarked on the challenging journey of mastering its fundamentals: the elusive "swing" rhythm, the art of improvisation over complex harmonies, and the pursuit of a unique musical "voice." For them, jazz represented a liberating contrast to the structured pop music of their youth, offering a sense of artistic freedom and boundless creativity.David reports that a new generation of post-millennial jazz musicians has emerged who, having grown up with the genre, are quickly ascending to world-class status, gracing stages at prestigious international festivals.In a previous podcast, we covered the origins of the jazz scene in 1920s Shanghai in our interview with Marketus Presswood about his award-winning documentary "Yellow Jazz, Black Music." (https://blubrry.com/barbarians/81109224/yellow-jazz-black-music-with-marketus-presswood/)David's article on Jazz in Beijing: The Book of Changes: Twenty-five Years in Chinese Jazz Spotify Playlist of Contemporary Chinese Jazz (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/71JYFNfQr3ObHvZeOtfyTv?si=07500a95adb844a0)

In this episode of 'Barbarians at the Gate,' hosts Jeremiah Jenne and David welcome Jane Perlez, former Beijing bureau chief for the New York Times, to discuss the evolving challenges of reporting from China. Jane shares her experiences from her tenure in Beijing (2012-2019), where she served as bureau chief for the New York Times. She describes the gradual erosion of press freedom, the increasing difficulties foreign journalists face under Xi's leadership, including the expulsion of journalists in 2018, and the ongoing obstacles that news assistants working for foreign media encounter in China. The conversation explores how reporters have had to adopt creative strategies to conduct investigative journalism, given the current lack of direct reporting from within the country. Additionally, Jane discusses her latest podcast project, 'Face Off: The US vs. China,' which examines the dramatic deterioration of U.S.-China relations in the 21st century.FACE-OFF: The US vs. CHINA (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/face-off-the-u-s-vs-china/id1734890307)The Great Wager (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/02/07/the-great-wager-podcast)On the Trail of Xi Jinping (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-trail-of-xi)China Books Review, Graham Peck: Two Kinds of Time reviewed by Jeremiah

Happy Year of the Snake!In this archive episode from January 2024, we chat with Andrew Stokols, who is researching varieties of digital urbanism globally, with an emphasis on China.We briefly compare notes on the urban development of Beijing in the 21st century, including the contradictions between Beijing as a technologically advanced urban center and an ancient capital city. Andrew also provides updates on the progress of Xiong’an, the digital “smart city” being constructed in Hebei province, as a showcase for Xi Jinping’s vision for urban development. The urban plan was initially unveiled in 2017 to relieve pressure on Beijing and promote the coordinated regional development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, but what Xi has called a “thousand-year plan of national significance” has run into numerous setbacks and controversy.We also hear from Andrew about how the Party is merging Marxist ideology with traditional Chinese culture in recent urban architectural projects, particularly the mammoth National Archives of Publications and Culture (Zhongguo guojia banbenguan 中国国家版本馆), described as a “seed bank” of Chinese civilization. These mammoth archives, being constructed in the four geographically significant locations of Beijing, Hangzhou, Xi’an, and Guangzhou, will house original and digitized editions of imperial archives such as the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (the Siku quanshu四库全书), as well as historical artifacts, music, and literature from the Mao era, thus effecting the goal of “two combines” (liangge jiehe 两个结合), Xi Jinping’s goal of “combining Marxist theory with China’s outstanding traditional culture.”Andrew's own online archive: https://www.andrewstokols.com/

In this episode, we are thrilled to welcome Jean Hoffman Lewanda back to the podcast to discuss her new book, Shalama: My 96 Seasons in China, published by Earnshaw Books. Listeners may recall Jean's previous appearance, where she shared insights about her father, Paul Hoffman's memoir, Witness to History: From Vienna to Shanghai—A Memoir of Escape, Survival, and Resilience. That captivating memoir details how Paul fled Vienna at the age of 18 to escape the rise of Nazism, arrived in Shanghai in 1938, and became part of the historic wave of Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in China during World War II. Jean's new book enriches this family saga by recounting events from her mother Shalama's perspective but presented as historical fiction. Drawing on firsthand accounts, including her mother's, Jean tells the story in Shalama's voice, tracing the family's journey from Harbin to Shanghai during the war-torn decades of the mid-20th century. The book interweaves the family's history with major historical events, including the Sungari River flood of 1932, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist takeover of China. Links: Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Jewish_Refugees_Museum) Historic Shanghai (https://www.historic-shanghai.com/) (Host of the Shanghai Book Club) Dan Ben-Canaan, Tombstone Histories: Tales of Jewish Life in Harbin Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present Dara Horn, "Cities of Ice: A dispatch from frozen Harbin, where Jews once flourished—and melted away (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cities-of-ice)," Tablet, April 19, 2019