Category: Podcasts

Sweet, sweet ear candy

Chinese Literature Podcast

One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights

Rob Moore

Rob Moore and Lee Moore get up close and personal with Liang Qichao

"If one intends to renovate the people of a nation, one must first renovate its fiction." With these words, would-be reformer Liang Qichao (1873 - 1929) launched his influential literary magazine, New Fiction, in 1902. Living in exile in Japan following the disastrous failure of the Hundred Day's Reform, Liang Qichao belonged to the last generation scholars to pass through the examination system in the final decades of Qing-dynasty. Largely overshadowed by later May Fourth-era figures like Lu Xun and Hu Shi, Rob and Lee discuss why Liang Qichao's work has come back into the limelight:

Chinese Literature Podcast

The One on the Left is on the Right

Lee Moore

Rob Moore and Lee Moore on Zhuangzi and the happiness of fish

They’re one of the best-known duos in Chinese literary history (after than Rob and Lee, of course): Zhuang Zi and his less-than-intelligent foil, Huizi. In this classic parable on how we know (or, ‘Hao’ we know...) what others really feel, nothing is what it seems to be. Check your preconceptions at the door, and get ready to question everything:

Little Red Podcast

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Louisa Lim

Inside China’s secretive United Front – Louisa Lim

The Communist Party's shadowy United Front Work department has emerged stronger than ever after the most recent government reshuffle. This body, which President Xi Jinping referred to in 2014 as a “magic weapon” for achieving the “rejuvenation of the Chinese race,” has now taken over responsibility for all work related to ethnic minority groups, religious management and contact with overseas Chinese, along with its main task of winning hearts and minds overseas.

“It makes clear what was generally the case all along: the United Front Work Department was the arbiter behind the government departments carrying out this work,” says Dr Gerry Groot of the University of Adelaide, who specialises in the United Front Work Department (UFWD), over email. “Though many people researching areas like religion and ethnic affairs knew that the UFWD was the real power or at least important, it is remarkable how rarely this was acknowledged in published work,” he continued. “That pretence of a separation between Party, government and civil society is now over.”

Chinese Literature Podcast

Children of the Revolution

Rob Moore

Rob Moore and Lee Moore on the enduring legacy of Hua Tong's Yan'an Seeds

Pumpkin seeds are the reason Mao and the People’s Liberation Army won the civil war in 1949, and the generations that followed pretty much rocked. Or so says Hua Tong’s Cultural Revolution-era short story 'Yan’an Seeds.' It’s Communist propaganda, so why bother? As Lee argues, it’s some of the best dang propaganda you’ll ever read, providing an invaluable lens on how Mao and the CCP used art and literature to shape the way people thought:

Chinese Literature Podcast

Stranger in a Strange Land

Rob Moore

Rob Moore and Lee Moore take a trip to Lao She's Cat Country

In 1932, Lao She penned a book about a Chinese astronaut crashing into Mars and finding the planet populated with Cat People, and the world of Chinese literature was never the same. Skewering would-be revolutionaries, opium addicts, and self-strengtheners alike, Cat Country provides a prescient look at the upheavals of the 1930s, when many Chinese intellectuals wondered if all was lost, and nothing gained. Let the craziness begin: