Podcasts by The Little Red Podcast

Cheongsams and Coppers:  Beijing's Stealth Infiltration of Hong Kong from 2022-06-30T05:20:32

It’s now been twenty-five years since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty with a pledge not to change Hong Kong’s way of life for fifty years. In actual fact, Beijing's stealth infiltratio...

Shanghaied: Living with Zero Covid from 2022-06-06T12:18:26

After two long months, Shanghai's brutal lockdown is over in name, but Xi Jinping is telling officials to ‘unswervingly adhere’ to Zero COVID, despite the costs. Shanghai’s loc...

Gimme, gimme, gimme a Han after midnight: China’s masculinity crisis from 2022-05-11T10:23:19

For the past year, China has been in the grip of a crackdown on niangpao, or ‘sissy men’, with the People’s Daily warning that effeminate men are ‘corru...

Kevin Rudd: Is War With China Inevitable? from 2022-04-28T00:33:09

As Australia’s Defence Minister warns his nation to ‘prepare for war’ with China, there’s a growing feeling of inevitability about a future conflict between China and the...

Ukraine: A Win-Win for China from 2022-04-06T09:25:34

How is Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine redrawing the geopolitical landscape?  In this episode, we examine China’s interests in the conflict and explore the limits of their &l...

Elite Capture: A CCP Primer in Making Friends and Influencing People from 2022-03-09T03:30:09

America's elites love to talk about China's '5000 years of civilization', but such language - which could come straight from the pages of the China Daily - serves to amplify Beijing's talking po...

Caste Aside: The Future for China's Peasants from 2022-02-02T23:34

By any metric, China's rural residents face massive disadvantages compared to their urban counterparts.  More than half of rural teenagers are cognitively delayed, and longstanding policies...

Shakeup or Shakedown?  China's New Red Economy from 2022-01-02T21:53:51

As China's economy slows down, Xi Jinping's charting a new economic course that will redefine the country's future.  From reining in tech giants to redistributing wealth in the name of...

The Great Reconciler and the End of Chinese History from 2021-11-21T22:44:35

Become an instant expert on the new historical resolution issued by China's Communist Party for all your cocktail season smalltalk needs. It's only the third such move in the party's century-lon...

The CCP Goes Outback? The Century of Humiliation in Australia from 2021-10-13T06:41:32

China’s Communist Party’s rewriting of history doesn’t stop at their own borders, but has even reached as far as Wandiligong, a town of 453 people four hours north of Melbourne...

The Endless Purge: Reassessing June 4 1989 from 2021-09-20T03:40

The purge that followed the killings by PLA soldiers in and around Tiananmen Square three decades ago has continued into the present, even permeating Western academia.   A host of new ...

Lone Wolves or Xi Wolves? The Evolution of China’s Nationalistic Diplomats from 2021-08-18T05:34:24

Nationalism in China seems to have taken a feral turn, with Chinese netizens viciously turning on Olympic athletes, celebrities and even the über-nationalist Global Times ...

The Little Red Podcast Turns Five: Agony Aunt Edition from 2021-07-19T00:47:17

For our fifth anniversary, we’ve thrown the floor open to our audience.   This month we’re doing an Agony Aunt edition for China nerds. We've gathered your burning China qu...

Jack be nimble: the Party-State Vs. the Tech Titans from 2021-06-21T11:36:02

China’s once untouchable tech billionaires suddenly find themselves in the unfamiliar position of being roughed up the state. Just at the time when the Party needs its homegrown tech firms...

Let's get this party started: China's global propaganda push from 2021-05-10T04:56:14

For a Party chosen by history, the CCP spends a lot of money targeting foreign media outlets and governments. In this episode, a panel of researchers discusses why China—or any autocracy&m...

Out of their league? China’s online gaming conundrum from 2021-04-21T01:20:57

China is home to 661 million online gamers, easily the world’s biggest market. Cities like Shanghai now boast some of the world’s most talented game developers. Yet the Chinese gover...

Remaking Hong Kong: Keep the Fishbowl, Change the Fish from 2021-03-24T00:44:38

China is now remoulding Hong Kong at speed.  Forty-seven Democratic politicians and activists have been arrested on national security charges for participating in last year’s primary ...

Tibet: Colonialism with Chinese Characteristics? from 2021-02-24T00:08

With the world’s attention focused on industrial-scale oppression in Xinjiang, developments in Tibet are passing beneath the radar.  But activists are warning of a full-spectrum assau...

Fandom Untamed: The Business of Boys’ Love from 2021-01-12T00:32:56

This month we’re delving into boys’ love or BL fiction. From niche online novels to TV shows such as the Netflix fantasy epic The Untamed, their storylines revolve around ma...

Inventing China: The Pick and Mix Approach from 2020-12-14T06:49:45

China's five thousand years of history has become a fact, repeated ad nauseum by the state-run media and Chinese textbooks alike, but could it be a national myth?   In his recently pub...

Xi Dada and Daddy: Power, the Party and the President from 2020-11-02T01:54:01

A quick glance at the headlines suggest that only one man seems to count in today’s China – the Chairman of Everything, as he’s been dubbed - Communist party leader President X...

See the difference? CGTN in the dock from 2020-10-06T18:28

Last year China's international state-run broadcaster, CGTN, spent millions opening a state-of-the-art London headquarters. Just one year on, it may already be scrambling for an exit strategy. C...

The New Compradors? Hong Kong's Taipans Face a New Era from 2020-08-26T01:11

Even before they had seen its contents, Hong Kong's family-run firms - including two non-Chinese business empires that have shaped Hong Kong - were lining up to pledge support to the New Nationa...

Trump's F*** China Moment: An Attitude, Not a Strategy from 2020-08-01T10:38:53

China-US ties are in a tailspin, spiralling ever deeper into an abyss. Just one short month has seen US sanctions on senior Chinese officials for atrocities against the Uyghurs, Hong Kong’...

Hong Kong No More: The National Security Law and the Dual State from 2020-06-26T13:44:17

On June 30, Hong Kong will be subject to a new National Security Law. No one, not even Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, knows what will be in the bill, but details are slowly coming into focus...

Hong Kong: Anything We Say Could Be A Crime from 2020-06-04T01:07:01

For the first time since 1989 Hong Kongers are banned from holding their annual June Fourth vigil in Victoria Park. Despite this provocation, Hong Kong establishment figures—from vice...

Inside Job: How China is Changing Global Governance from 2020-05-27T01:01:52

The byzantine rules and procedures of multilateral institutions form the backdrop for China's global power play, following President Xi Jinping's 2018 call for China to “lead the reform of...

Killing Me Softly: the Power Pandemic from 2020-04-21T12:04

China's Covid diplomacy dispatching facemasks and respirators overseas is being hailed as the ultimate soft power play. But is this really soft power? To answer this question, we're joined by th...

Viral Disruption; The Pandemic That's Rewriting the Global Order from 2020-03-28T23:13

COVID-19 isn't just destroying economies, it's also reshaping the global order.  In less than a month, the novel coronavirus has moved from being China's Chernobyl to being an advertisement...

"Round Up All Those That Should Be Rounded Up": State Violence in China from 2020-03-10T10:20:28

The “people's war” on COVID-19 has brought enforcers in hazmat suits onto the streets of Wuhan, where they're bundling ordinary citizens into vans, giving Han Chinese urbanites ...

High Noon for Xi Jinping: The President Vs The Virus from 2020-02-19T03:16

The coronavirus that has infected 70,000 people is being compared to China's Chernobyl in its political and economic fallout, but just how much of an inflection point will it be?  This cris...

Seedy Business: The Future of China's Industrial Espionage from 2020-02-05T09:52:19

Judging by the news headlines China is ramping up its industrial espionage efforts: secret payments to high-profile scientists, massive hacks of foreign universities and clumsy attempts to steal...

Freedom is Restraint: How Core Socialist Values are Changing Language and Remoulding Humans from 2020-01-06T11:03:48

In the Xi Jinping era, China is quietly embedding core socialist values into every aspect of life, including the judicial system.  When core socialist values were introduced in 2013, they s...

Ten Years Becomes Four as Life Imitates Art in Hong Kong from 2019-12-03T08:07:02

When the Hong Kong film Ten Years (Sap nin) came out in 2015, it was pulled from cinemas after Chinese state-run media described it as a 'virus of the mind'.   Once seen as dy...

Power Projection: China’s Hollywood Dream from 2019-11-13T06:17:38

With cinema takings in the United States at a 22-year low, Hollywood moguls are looking to an unlikely saviour: China. With box office revenues growing at 9 percent, Hollywood is scrambling to f...

Hong Kong Burning: The Rise of a Nation from 2019-10-03T23:46:56

As China's leaders gathered in Beijing to survey troops, fireworks and their latest missiles, a different scene was unfolding in Hong Kong.  Police shot an 18-year old protestor in the ches...

Big Bad China? The New Cold War from 2019-09-30T11:21:27

On the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, has CCP Chairman Xi Jinping overreached? He's facing blowback everywhere from Hong Kong to Xinjiang amid an escalating ...

Should I stay or should I go now? Inside the Solomons’ Big Switch from 2019-09-09T10:49:11

The South Pacific nation of the Solomon Islands may be on the verge of switching diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China, which would leave only sixteen nations recognising Taiwan.  ...

Be Water: Hong Kong vs China, with Denise Ho, Badiucao and Clive Hamilton from 2019-09-05T16:51:12

As the news broke that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam had withdrawn the extradition bill that had sparked three months of unrest in Hong Kong, Little Red Podcast co-host Louisa Lim...

Desperate Hong Kong: The Movement Behind The Mask from 2019-08-20T18:34:25

As Hong Kong enters its eleventh week of turmoil, we hear voices on the ground.  From 15-year olds who can hardly remember how many times they have been teargassed to thirty-somethings read...

Chose Your Own Dystopia Part Two: Cashing in on Social Credit from 2019-07-24T12:39:47

By 2020, less than half a year from now, a social credit scheme will cover people and companies across China, “allowing the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard...

Hong Kong’s Dirty Little Secret: Is One Country Two Systems Dead? from 2019-07-02T20:24:59

Our third Hong Kong emergency episode comes in the wake of the storming of the territory's Legislative Council on the 22nd anniversary of its return to mainland China. Louisa reports from the fl...

Sing Hallelujah: The Miracle of Hong Kong’s March from 2019-06-17T18:18:14

We’re bringing you a second emergency podcast from Hong Kong, which has seen more record protests over the weekend. According to organisers, two million people—nearly one-third of Ho...

Hong Kong's Darkest Hour from 2019-06-13T17:07:16

We bring you an emergency podcast from Hong Kong, one day after extraordinary police violence saw 79 people injured by baton charges, rubber bullets and over 150 rounds of tear gas. This dark tu...

Tiananmen's Final Secret from 2019-06-03T02:50:10

Tuesday June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the deadly crackdown ordered by Deng Xiaoping, which killed hundreds – maybe thousands – of people in Beijing and Chengdu. While the...

Choose your own Dystopia Part One: Social Media and Surveillance Capitalism from 2019-05-06T10:53:37

With Chinese citizens’ lives increasingly coded into data streams, the question of who owns this data and how it gets used is largely up to private companies. They control massive volumes ...

Resignation Syndrome? Democracy and Jail in Post-Umbrella Hong Kong from 2019-04-07T23:52:24

Hate mail, death threats and shadowy surveillance are facts of life for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists, five years after the Umbrella movement brought a million people onto the street...

Leveraged to the Limit: Power Shifts in Xi Jinping's China from 2019-03-25T03:08:50

The Chairman of Everything Xi Jinping has emerged from the annual parliamentary meetings facing a rough year ahead.  China's economy is growing at its slowest in nearly three decades, amid ...

Step Up or Be Overrun: China’s Challenge for the Pacific from 2019-03-05T10:32:01

The Pacific is seeing a flurry of diplomatic activity: Australia is ‘stepping up’, New Zealand has ordered a ‘Pacific reset’ and even Great Britain is reopening missions ...

Hotpot Wars: Tensions bubble in the battle for China’s Culinary Soul from 2019-02-04T12:42:58

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#XiToo: Chinese Feminism and The Party’s Hyper-Masculine Reboot from 2019-01-08T06:19:16

China is becoming a more unequal place for women, in 2018 slipping for a fifth consecutive year in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap index.  Chairman Mao may have proclai...

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Keeping the Faith? Xi's Deal with the Holy See from 2018-12-05T05:50:47

The Vatican and China have signed a deeply controversial agreement on the appointment of bishops, ending the cold war that has frozen ties since 1950.  That deep freeze led to schisms betwe...

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Xi Jinping’s War on Uighurs. Part 3: The Endgame from 2018-11-06T11:40:22

"Domestically I don't think the Uighur culture will survive." China now acknowledges the existence of mass indoctrination camps in Xinjiang - which it calls 'vocational training centres' - after...

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Xi Jinping’s War on Uighurs. Part 2: The New Frontier from 2018-10-16T06:18:33

The language used by the Chinese state in Xinjiang pathologises Islam, seeing it as an "ideological virus" which needs eradication by transformation through education.  In recent days, Chin...

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Xi Jinping’s War on the Uighurs. Part 1: The Witnesses from 2018-09-24T10:02:04

‘We seem to be normal, but we are not.’ A United Nations human rights panel says it has credible reports that more than a million Uighurs are being held in reeducation camps in the n...

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Stranger than Fiction: China’s Espionage Industrial Complex from 2018-09-04T03:37:33

“Use your spies for every kind of business.” This 2500 year-old stratagem from Sun Zi's Art of War still informs Beijing’s modern day approach towards intelligence gathering. T...

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The Han-Opticon: Social Credit and AI in the Surveillance State from 2018-08-07T02:27:53

China today is Black Mirror through the Looking Glass. A national video surveillance network is promised in just two years, while new technologies are being rolled out at speed on the front...

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Come Dance with Xi: Who Can Resist the Belt and Road's Embrace? from 2018-07-11T12:21:20

There’s no escaping China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It’s been written into China’s constitution, and more than 70 countries from Pakistan to Papua New Guinea have signe...

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All Maxxed Out: The Biggest Ponzi Scheme The World Has Ever Seen? from 2018-06-12T04:02:02

China's recent impressive economic growth has been built largely on massive debt. According to some estimates, in just over a decade China has managed to rack up debt in excess of 300% of its GDP,...

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Shaken But Not Stirred: The Chinese State and the Sichuan Earthquake from 2018-05-11T10:26:24

On 12 May 2008, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit Wenchuan in Sichuan, claiming more than 85,000 lives, many of them schoolchildren whose classrooms collapsed. It was a paradoxical moment of great tra...

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Tinker, Tailor, Student, Spy? Inside Australia's Chinese Student Boom from 2018-05-08T12:34:05

Universities in Australia have an addiction: overseas student fees. Nearly half of overseas students in Australia are from China, rising to 60% at some institutions. Against the backdrop of new le...

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How To Make Friends And Influence People: Inside the Magic Weapon of the United Front from 2018-04-09T11:27:32

The Communist Party's shadowy United Front Work Department has emerged stronger than ever before after the most recent government reshuffle. This body, whose job has historically been to win hearts...

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Policing the Contour Lines: China's Cartographic Obsession from 2018-03-08T09:53:46

China's preoccupation with cartography now seems to be reaching into classrooms, websites and academic journals around the world, with an increasing number of demands for retractions and apologies...

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Bitter Medicine: China's New Pacific Frontier from 2018-02-06T10:10:15

China’s aid and growing influence in the South Pacific is causing alarm with an Australian minister recently complaining about Chinese-funded 'roads to nowhere'. In this month's episode, Louisa a...

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Lies, Damned Lies and Police Statistics: Crime and the Chinese Dream from 2018-01-08T10:45:12

Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream has a dark side exemplified by the emergence of villages specialising in a single type of crime from 'hand-cutting' pickpockets to 'cake-uncles' specialising in accountin...

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BDM: Not As Sexy As The Shark from 2017-12-04T10:48:13

Reviled in the West, the slimy bottom-feeders known as sea cucumbers or bêche-de-mer (BDM) have recently been described as the ‘the gold of the sea’. Skyrocketing demand for this prized feature of ...

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Party Poopers: Can Art Bring Down the Government? from 2017-11-06T02:41:25

A new brand of Chinese political artists is using the once borderless expanse of cyberspace as a virtual studio, a collaboration space and a digital museum, crowdsourcing and sharing work about Chi...

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Muzzling the Academy: Policemen, Spooks and Vanishing Archives from 2017-10-04T12:23:10

Beijing's failed attempt to force Cambridge University Press to censor its own catalogue is just one prong in an escalating campaign to tighten control over China's recent historical record. Weste...

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Haters Gonna Hate: Nationalism on Demand in China and Japan from 2017-09-05T13:37:23

Under Xi Jinping, history in China is a moving feast. This year, China’s Ministry of Education increased the length of the Second World War by six years, to ‘place a greater emphasis on China’s ‘re...

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Cooking the News: Xi’s Digital Future from 2017-08-07T11:50:45

The Chairman of Everything is tightening his grip over the media, pushing control into new spheres ahead of the 19th Party Congress. As the state-run media – traditionally the tongue and throat o...

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Class: the new dirty word from 2017-07-09T08:57:24

Chairman Mao urged the Chinese people to never forget class struggle. But they not only forgot, they stopped using the word at all. Louisa and Graeme talk to Wanning Sun from the University of Tec...

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Hong Kong: the new Tibet? from 2017-06-11T10:11:22

As Hong Kong gears up to mark the 20th anniversary of its return to Chinese sovereignty, the country's number 3 leader Zhang Dejiang has made clear Beijing's intention to tighten its control over H...

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Feng Chongyi: Research Is Not A Dinner Party from 2017-05-03T11:12:18

Sydney academic Feng Chongyi, whose detention in Guangzhou created international headlines, warns that his experience is designed to intimidate academics researching topics deemed sensitive by Beij...

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The best officials money can buy: China's crony capitalism from 2017-04-18T04:05:25

Is President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign working, or is it simply driving corruption underground? This episode we're joined by Minxin Pei from Claremont McKenna College, who's released a...

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To Be Demolished Is Glorious: China's Resettlement Industry from 2017-03-14T04:18:01

China is a world leader in resettlement, having resettled 80 million people since 1949. Before 2020, a further 100 million people will be moved for environmental protection, poverty relief and dev...

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China's Little Emperors: Art Vs Science from 2017-02-20T04:08:20

In this episode we visit a theatre, a prison and an analyst's chair to ask: are China's little emperors really spoiled and lonely, or is this just lazy stereotyping? We meet Wang Chong, who's direc...

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China, East Timor and the New Great Game from 2017-01-16T04:20:37

In this episode, Graeme and Louisa talk with Michael Leach from Swinburne University about China's increasingly close military and diplomatic ties with Asia's newest country: East Timor or Timor Le...

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Trashing The Brand? Australian universities and the lure of Chinese money from 2016-12-14T11:38:10

Graeme and Louisa are joined by James Leibold, Paul MacGregor and Louise Edwards to discuss the impact of mainland Chinese money on Australia's higher education sector. What happens when a cash-str...

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Control and Capture: Taming Overseas Chinese Media from 2016-11-02T05:30:02

“China’s not trying to influence, it’s trying to change Australia.”
This week we hear from insiders about the range of strategies used by the Chinese government to tame the Chinese-language med...

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The Politics of Language on the Tibetan Plateau, Remastered from 2016-08-25T07:22:22

Gavin, our sound maestro, couldn't live with the distortion on the intro music any long, so here's an updated version. It's even catchier than the first time around!

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The politics of language on the Tibetan plateau from 2016-08-18T12:50:18

In this episode, Graeme and Louisa talk with anthropologist Gerald Roche about the prospects for the survival of non-Tibetan languages in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. You can follow Gerald's resea...

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Have China's greenhouse gas emissions peaked? from 2016-07-21T04:55:32

For the first episode of The Little Red Podcast, Graeme interviews Fergus Green, former research assistant to Prof. Nicholas Stern, who explains how changes in the Chinese economy are affecting Chi...

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