The topic: Producing any podcast series is a journey featuring plenty of twists and turns. And producing a series on U.S.-China relations can be especially challenging considering such a vast intertwined history to be addressed, on top of all the modern divergent views, outright disputes, and key players. As we near the end of our own podcast series, “Searching for Common Ground,” Professor David Skidmore and I thought it made sense to compare notes with another duo who recently published their own U.S.-China podcast just over a year ago.

Our guests: Matt Sheehan and Holly He are the team behind “Heartland Mainland: The Iowa China Podcast,” a 2020 production of the Chicago-based Paulson Institute’s think tank, MacroPolo. Matt is a nonresident fellow at MacroPolo who has served as a foreign correspondent in China and previously lived on the mainland for more than five years. He researches and writes on the Sino-U.S. technology relationship and ties between California and China. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, studied political science at Stanford, and in 2018 was shortlisted for the Young China Watcher of the Year Award. In 2019 he published “The Transpacific Experiment,” a book exploring the pre-pandemic ties and tensions between Silicon Valley and China. Holly is a research associate at MacroPolo, where she also works in web analytics and multimedia production. She previously worked as a multimedia fellow for the Texas Tribune, scripted and edited documentaries for CNN International, and worked with the Kindling Group in Chicago. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Full episode transcript: https://david-skidmore.medium.com/kyle-munson-and-david-skidmore-interview-with-matt-sheehan-and-holly-he-961eb903d708.

The series: David Skidmore and Kyle Munson produced this podcast series in conjunction with Skidmore's Spring 2021 U.S.-China international relations course at Drake University.

Your hosts:

David Skidmore is a Professor of Political Science at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he has taught since 1989. Skidmore’s teaching and research focuses on U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-China relations. During the 1996-97 academic year, he taught at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China. He also served as a Fulbright Scholar based at the University of Hong Kong in 2010-2011. He is past Director of the Principal Financial Group Center for Global Citizenship (2002-2017) and the Nelson Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs (2012-2017), both at Drake University. Skidmore is author, co-author or editor of six books including a monograph titled The Unilateralist Temptation in American Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2011), and has published numerous articles or chapters in various academic journals and books. His most recent research focuses on China’s Belt and Road Initiative. His editorial writing has appeared in Fortune, U.S. News and World Report, Salon, The Conversation, the Diplomat, Global Times and the Des Moines Register.

Kyle Munson is a journalist, writer, podcaster, and content strategist who currently works in content marketing and financial services. He previously spent 24 years with The Des Moines Register/Gannett in a variety of roles, including eight years as columnist. In 2017 he was awarded a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to report on U.S.-China relations early in the Trump administration as Amb. Terry Branstad began his tenure in Beijing. That resulted in the project “Iowa in the Heart of China.” Munson also reported on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2012 visit to Iowa. He has volunteered and served as a board member w