Sinica comes roaring back in the Year of the Dragon: A chat with Jeremy Goldkorn

Summary

---

Sinica Comes Roaring Back in the Year of the Dragon: A Chat with Jeremy Goldkorn

Date: February 15, 2024
Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guest: Jeremy Goldkorn
Podcast: Sinica Podcast

---

Overview

This episode marks Sinica’s return for the Year of the Dragon. Host Kaiser Kuo welcomes his old friend and co-founder Jeremy Goldkorn for a wide-ranging, introspective conversation. Together, they reflect on the history and legacy of the Sinica Podcast, their years at the China Project (formerly SupChina), and the transformation of China and China-watching since the late 1990s. The episode is warm, self-aware, and shot through with humor, providing listeners with both a behind-the-scenes look at the life of two veteran "China hands" and sharp insight into China’s recent socio-political evolution.

---

Episode Highlights & Key Discussion Points

1. Sinica's Return and New Directions

• Kaiser shares plans for Sinica in the new year, including an intention to focus less on responding to the news cycle and more on deep-dive topics and big questions.

  "Even though this is going to remain a current affairs program, I am going to try not to let the news cycle dictate topics too much." (04:16)

• Jeremy will continue to make occasional appearances, while launching into other projects of his own.

2. Looking Back: Origins of Sinica and the China Project

• They recall meeting in Beijing in the late '90s:

  "You were a famous rock star with Tang Dynasty. I was a fresh-faced editor..." (05:51)

• Sinica's First Episode:
  • April 2, 2010, with Bill Bishop on Google's pullout from China. Format has changed little since those early days.
  • The transition from a hobby to a network under SupChina/China Project in 2016.
• Kaiser recounts the fateful meeting with SupChina’s founders and how Sinica got acquired:

  "Within a week we had a deal. It was nuts." (11:00)

3. Reflections and Regrets

• Pride in Editorial Range & Overton Window Expansion:

  • Jeremy emphasizes Sinica and the China Project’s unique role in broadening the discourse on China:

    "We made people who don’t generally listen to views sympathetic of China listen to views sympathetic to China, and we made people who don’t usually listen to views very critical of China listen to views that were very critical of China." (15:03)

  • Highlights include expanded podcasts and diverse contributors, reporting on LGBTQ and youth culture, China’s relations with less-covered countries, and nuanced, fact-based coverage of Xinjiang.

• Grueling Nature of Media Startups:

  • Jeremy describes the relentless pace:

    "A daily deadline is a bitch. It's the work of Sisyphus, you know?" (20:46)

• Division of Labor and Editorial Balances:

  • Kaiser: "You weren’t able to ever get off... what we internally were calling the editorial hamster wheel." (19:59)

4. Editorial Differences and the "Panda Hugger" vs "Dragon Slayer" Dynamic

• The two co-founders reflect on their contrasting reflexes:

  • Kaiser’s first instinct is empathetic; Jeremy’s is critical (22:01–23:17).
  • Both acknowledge their positions shift depending on the context, serving as needed contrarians.

    "I end up sounding a lot more like you, channel my inner Jeremy Goldkorn..." (23:53)

• The necessity of reassessing assumptions about China and being intellectually flexible.

  "To understand China... you need something like the scientific method. You need to be able to constantly reassess your ideas and sometimes change your mind about things." (24:21)

5. Jeremy Goldkorn’s Media Adventures in China: The "Feral Sinologist"

• Jeremy recounts his trajectory through various Beijing media startups:
  1. Beijing Scene (1997–2000)
  2. Phoenix I in Silicon Valley
  3. Listings mag "R" (became TimeOut Beijing)
  4. Design and advertising firm (hated it)
  5. Dunwei.org—translating and commenting on Chinese media, then research and video production (e.g., Hard Hat Show, Sexy Beijing)
• Key quote:

  "Any idiot can start a website… It was that easy." (32:41)

• Shares stories of entrepreneurial grind, near poverty, and the excitement of Beijing’s untamed media environment.

6. The Shifting Mood in China – Causes of Change Post-2008

• Discussion of the significant changes in China’s attitude and internal repression after 2008–2012.
• Key factors identified:
  • The 2003 Iraq War—“America looked pretty dumb,” a hit to U.S. soft power.
  • 2008 Beijing Olympics and the GFC—Chinese pride and questioning of the West.
  • Internet-fueled protests (Iran, Xinjiang, Arab Spring) heightened Party paranoia.
  • Jasmine Revolution fears in 2011 and the blocking of websites.
  • "Ten grave problems" essay and Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption, "lock-down" approach.
  • The loss of power fragmentation and the rise of centralization.

    "It felt like the start of something." (40:16)

• Nuanced take on power:

  "There was almost a kind of separation of powers...you could play one warlord against the other." (48:22)

7. How China Changed the Hosts (and Vice Versa)

• Kaiser and Jeremy reflect on how their political views changed in China:
  • Kaiser moved from a left-leaning background to supporting market reformers and back.
  • Jeremy’s skepticism of state interference solidified but recognizes regulatory necessity.

8. On the Making of a "China Watcher" and the Value of Immersion

• Qualities for a good analyst:
  • For outsiders: linguistic, cultural, and historical immersion is essential.
  • For Chinese analysts: ability to explain for a foreign audience and recognize the very different worldview.
• The importance of "country feel"—intuition formed through immersion and experience; declining with fewer foreigners now in China.

9. "Chestnuts" About Chinese Mentality and Modernization

• Andrew Batson’s observation: “Chinese people have this fundamental belief that they not only can be the best in any given field...but that they should be the best.” (56:22)
• The difference between American (universalist) and Chinese (particularist) exceptionalism.
• The impact of compressed modernization; the “Tom Hanks in Big” analogy for China’s developmental leap with lingering adolescent insecurities.

  "They have basically never known a time where improvements in their technological lives and improvements in their other lives...haven’t improved in lockstep." (59:57)

10. Challenges of Analysis and Self-Awareness

• Warning against falling into unshakable pro/anti-China camps.
  • "You get people who can't hear the word China without saying terrible things about it." (64:41)
• Both admit to their own cognitive reflexes, and the ongoing struggle for balance and honesty.

11. Advice for the Next Generation of "China Hands"

• Kaiser’s cognitive advice: embrace ambiguity, humility, "country feel," and skepticism of grand pronouncements.
• Jeremy’s practical advice: "You probably won’t be able to make much money out of it, so you better make sure that you’re interested…" (68:58)
• Both note the shift—far fewer foreigners now study/live in China.

12. Generational Reflections: The "Feral Sinologists"

• The pre-2008 "China watcher" cohort were independent, driven by oddity and curiosity rather than glamour; able to immerse deeply.

  "You could just go to China and get a job teaching English and teach yourself Chinese in a dormitory and like, just kind of live in China and study China in the field." (73:01)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On broadening the discourse:

  "We made people who don’t generally listen to views sympathetic of China listen to views sympathetic to China, and we made people who don’t usually listen to views very critical of China listen to views that were very critical of China." — Jeremy Goldkorn (15:03)

• On the pain of daily grind in media startups:

  "A daily deadline is a bitch. It's the work of Sisyphus, you know?" — Jeremy Goldkorn (20:46)

• On their editorial differences:

  "Your first instinct will be to look at it from a sympathetic point of view." "Empathetic, let’s call it empathetic" "...my first instinct...has been to look at it from a critical point of view." — Jeremy & Kaiser (22:01–22:32)

• On the Beijing of the ‘00s:

  "There wasn’t anyone to kind of do a reality check, tell you ‘don’t quit your day job’...you could just kind of go for it." — Kaiser Kuo (36:41)

• On compressed modernization:

  "If you don’t understand Chinese food, you can’t…like the obsession with food…and how good it is. If you don’t understand those, then you…have no way of understanding China." — Jeremy Goldkorn (58:27)

• On the changing ‘China hand’ generation:

  "Certainly in the 90s and early 2000s, the average American...thought you were a complete oddball if you chose to go to China." — Jeremy Goldkorn (71:48)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|---------------| | 00:53 | Sinica’s new year, Kaiser’s thanks, intro to Jeremy | | 05:18 | Wrapping up China Project: origins, regrets, and pride | | 07:41 | The first Sinica episode and its evolution | | 12:20 | Sinica’s acquisition: from hobby to career, China Project years | | 15:02 | Editorial accomplishments and broadening the conversation | | 19:59 | Grind of running a media startup, editorial “hamster wheel” | | 22:01 | Panda huggers, dragon slayers, editorial styles | | 27:47 | Jeremy’s media career: Beijing Scene, Dunwei, etc. | | 36:41 | The entrepreneurial, wild Beijing of the 2000s | | 38:23 | Causes and timeline of China’s post-2008 change | | 48:10 | Systemic and political causes of party hardening | | 51:16 | How China changed their politics and vice versa | | 53:32 | What makes a good China analyst or “watcher” | | 56:22 | Chinese exceptionalism, Batson’s “should be the best” theory | | 59:57 | Compressed modernization and its social effects | | 64:41 | Dangers of ideological camps and the need for self-awareness | | 68:58 | Career advice for would-be China hands | | 71:36 | What shaped their China-watcher "generation" | | 79:27 | Recommendations section: ChinaFile, "Ghosts of Evolution," more |

---

Recommendations

Jeremy Goldkorn

• ChinaFile (chinaphile.com): Shout out to Susie Jakes and the editorial team.
• Book: The Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow

  Explores evolutionary anachronisms in nature, e.g., fruits and trees whose purpose vanished with extinct megafauna.

Kaiser Kuo

• Family Memoir: Ma in All Caps by Jay Kuo (and the accompanying audiobook narrated by Kaiser himself)
• Historical Novels: Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s Alatriste series—gritty adventure set in Spain’s golden age.

---

Episode Tone & Style

The episode is relaxed, thoughtful, and full of self-deprecating wit. Kaiser and Jeremy’s easy rapport brings out both nostalgia and candor, offering wisdom that’s especially valuable to aspiring China-watchers and anyone interested in the intersection of media, politics, and culture in contemporary China.

---

This summary is designed to give those who haven’t yet listened a rich sense of the episode’s substance, humor, and insight.

Transcript

[Audible Narrator]

Audible's Romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you when it comes to what kind of romance you're into. You don't have to choose just one fancy a dalliance with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire. You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field. And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm. Discover modern rom coms from authors like Lily Chu and Ali Hazelwood, the latest romantasy series from Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, plus Regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander, and of course, all the really steamy stuff. Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30 day trial at audible.com wondery that's audible.com wondery.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to the way we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiserguo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Happy Year. The Dragon to all the listeners. It is great to be back. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. As we kick off this new season, I want you all to know that I won't be charging a subscription for Seneca, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get [e-mail] you can also support me as an individual on patreon.com sinica there will be a link in the show notes and sign up for the new Sinica substack, which I'll tell you more about later on. I also want to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to Anla Cheng. Anla, who was the owner and the founder of the China Project, made it possible for Jeremy and for me and for all of the other people on our team to do the work that we did for seven and a half amazing and memorable years. I'm grateful to her for trusting in our editorial judgment and never at all interfering in the work that we did. I want to thank her for her just incredible generosity, not just in terms of the not inconsiderable amount of money she put into the project, but also just her generosity of spirit, her kindness and her dedication to the mission that we were all a part of. Thank you, Anla. And I really miss these people that I got a chance to work with. You put together a first rate team that I was extremely proud to be a part of in this episode. I wanted to just have a good old heart to heart with my dear friend Jeremy Goldkorn, co founder with me of Sinica in 2010 and who was of course editor in chief of the China Project, which published Seneca from 2016 until the end of last year. Jeremy is actually best known as the evil mastermind behind the Taylor Swift Travis Kelce super bowl conspiracy and is really vexed that not only were his machinations ferreted out by vigilant patriots doing their own research, but were wrongly attributed to the Department of Defense and not to Jeremy Goldhorn. Anyway, glad that we could set the record straight. Congratulations. You pulled it off masterfully. Welcome back.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Thank you, Kaiser. Those stupid idiots, they didn't get the Nashville connection. You know, Taylor's from Nashville, I'm from Nashville, you know, and they just.

[Kaiser Kuo]

The first thing you did, you had her like endorse somebody in lieu of Marsha Blackburn. Right. That's your first coup. Right?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

One of my first moves here in the great state of Tennessee.

[Kaiser Kuo]

That was brilliant. Yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Anyway, enough of this nonsense, Kaiser. Before we get into the meat of the show, I would like to ask you, Kaiser, and I'm sure listeners are very interested in hearing what you're planning for Seneca for the Year of the Dragon ahead. Are you going to change anything about the show or focus on anything in particular?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, I'm sure I've had a whole lot of conversations with people who listen to the show who have been on it. I always think there's ways to improve what I'm doing. The main thing is that even though this is going to remain a current affairs program, I am going to try not to let the news cycle dictate topics too much. And I will try to do more of those in depth, deep dive, kind of big questions, sorts of topics and guests that people really seem to like. And that frankly, I am most interested in doing. Also, never fear, Jeremy will occasionally come back on the program, dear listeners, either as a guest or as a co host. But he's got some other things that he'll be working on which hopefully he's going to spill the beans and tell you about. Not sure he's ready yet, but you certainly have not heard the last of Jeremy Goldkorn on Seneca. So, Jeremy, man, it's just, it's great to see your lovely face.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Thank you so much, Kaiser. I think perhaps you're the only person who would describe my face thusly. But anyway, fortunately this is an audio program, so who's to know? And yeah, I will be delighted to be back as often as I can.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Excellent, excellent. So, Jeremy, let's start with today's show. With the whole demise of this thing that we did for the last seven and a half years, the China Project. Nay sup China. It's all wrapped up now. We have sat shiva and, and mourned its passing properly and hopefully we are both ready to talk about the whole experience. So I want you to start, Jeremy. Regrets, things you wish we had done differently, things you're especially proud of. Maybe we should tell the story for those listening who don't know how it all started or how we got going.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, yeah, I mean, regrets, I've had a few, but I did it my way. I think we should start at the beginning. Perhaps we can go right back to the beginning to Beijing in 1997. I guess it must have been when we first met. Yeah, you were a famous rock star with Tang Dynasty. I was a fresh faced editor working on a startup English print magazine called Beijing Scene. But you were also, aside from being a rock star perhaps at that point, a somewhat washed up rock star. You were an editor for a rival startup on the brand new Internet called China Now.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah, that was in. Yeah. 99. Yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And we had a lot of mutual interests. I guess over the next decade we became friends with a shared love of the city of Beijing primarily. I think what we bonded over, good writing about it, books, late nights in low places, music, food. And then in 2010 when podcasts were just starting to become more and more popular, but they hadn't really gone mainstream yet, you suggested that there was a space for one focused on Chinese current affairs. There weren't any at the time. Yeah, we had a mutual friend named David Lancashire who was running a Chinese learning app, language learning app and podcast called Popup Chinese and he had a studio and he was producing podcasts. So I suggested we could ask him if he might produce a show for us and then we would help publicize his language learning company. And the two of us were already quite well known amongst the journalist and media community in Beijing and in China. You partly for Tang Dynasty and your other music projects, but also for journalism. And me for Dunwei, my website and YouTube channel about Chinese media and urban.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Life, that YouTube channel, the hard Hat show.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

That's right. And I'm just looking at the date now to confirm. April 2, 2010, we published the first Seneca podcast with Bill Bishop as guest about Google's pullout from China. In some ways the perfect topic for the first show.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, it really was. Google's big announcement about its refusal to comply with China's censorship demands had come in January. I think it was like around January 9th, if I remember. But the actual pullout, the other shoe hadn't dropped yet, and it wasn't until the end of March that they took that pretty drastic action. And yeah, Bill was a perfect guest for that as well. And it's weird how we didn't do much planning for it. Right. It just sort of happened and the format just sort of stuck with a lot of thought going into it.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

It's remarkable how similar that first show is to even, you know, the one we're probably going to do today.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah, probably more similar than it's been in the last seven years because, you know, it got a whole lot more formal. But, I mean, it'll stay still, I think more like the last seven years than the six preceding it. But, you know, we started off, I think, with a real focus on news of the week, though. I think after, really after the first year, we started doing shows, I think deliberately with longer shelf life interviews with authors, sometimes taking on historical topics that were completely unrelated to current affairs. But, yeah, the show has evolved a little bit across the years. One thing that we stuck to pretty religiously was having recommendations, and that's definitely going to still remain a part of the show.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I think that's a lot of people really like it. I mean, I have to be honest, it sometimes drives me completely crazy because especially when I was on weekly, I would sometimes feel, it's been a week, the world isn't that good of a place. That I have another good thing to recommend.

[Kaiser Kuo]

But anyhow, it definitely made me read a lot because it's like, Jesus, do I have another decent book to recommend.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah. And there was one I remember. I don't remember the name of the book, but you recommended one that was appalling. So. But I think most of them have been hits and a lot of people write in to say how much they like the recommendations.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

So we did the show. It was a hobby for both of us from 2010 until 2016. I moved to the United States in 2015 and I was still working for Dunway, which by that point had been acquired by the Financial Times. And you were still working for Baidu, but you were about to move to the states and you had to have a change of career because you'd no longer be in Beijing. And you called me up with an idea about doing the podcast. And maybe you can talk about how we initially got involved with the China Project, or Sub China as it was known back then.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Let me just one little correction. I actually didn't have to change careers. Baidu was actually about to move me to California. And it was actually that when Fabfan and I took a trip to California, the House Hunt, and we were just so appalled at how much houses cost, how terrible the traffic was, and I thought, you know, hey, we already live in a city with terrible traffic congestion and really overpriced housing with maybe the sole consolation of excellent Chinese food. So do we really even need to move if I mean.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Right, I see, yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So, no.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

So North Carolina was a choice and leaving Baidu was a choice.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, you know, it was a scheme, actually. I really, you know, sort of. There were other jobs on the table, actually. I'm very glad. I'm sure if I take in one of them, I'd be very wealthy, but also probably divorced and miserable in other ways. But I almost willed this into existence. Like, we came back from that trip and, you know, went back to work and I got an email from a guy named Amadeo Tumalillo. And Amadeo was the newly hired editor of a little startup out of New York. And he and his partner were in town in Beijing and wanting to meet people who knew something about the media business in China, who knew something about the whole landscape of what they call China Watchers. I invited him out to the Baidu campus. We sat down and started talking. And it was pretty clear to me that they didn't really have any real assets for them except for money. I thought, gosh, maybe they would like to buy an existing podcast that has a pretty sizable listenership already. And two guys who are both kind of eager to quit their day jobs and do this full time. Do you remember we wrote up this little proposal and within a week we had a deal. It was nuts.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. Although it was quite scary because the deal was sort of had back out clauses for them. At that point we both had to jump off the cliff and leave our day jobs to do it. But it worked out.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm really, really thankful. I got 7 and a half years to do this. I mean, to pull down a steady salary and to be able to still pursue some extracurricular things, and most importantly, to try to do the mission. To take something that had been a hobby for both of us and turn it into something serious. Now, I don't think people realize that when we signed on for this thing, we were only obliged to turn in one podcast a week. That was the whole deal. For the same salary that we continued to draw for the next seven years. You stepped up. You decided you wanted to be editor of this thing, you wanted to be editor in chief, and I wanted to expand. I wanted to do a whole podcast network. So, yeah. Anyway, I want to get back to my question about the China Project. You said regrets, right? I mean, what do you wish you had done differently, but also, what are you especially proud of having done?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I don't actually have too many regrets. I think it's easy to look back and say I could have spent more time on this or that rather than something else. But I. I think publishing as a business and editing, and particularly editing and writing about China, it's. It's not. There are no obvious answers to exactly how to do it right, either as a. A business that's supposed to make a profit or in terms of the. The quality and the value of. Of the editorial that you're creating. So I don't really think I have real regrets. I mean, I worked hard. We fun. We published a lot of different things. I. I think what I'm most proud of is. I mean, I. I guess our listeners are probably familiar with the concept of the Overton window, the spectrum of acceptable discourse. And it's often used sort of negatively in American political context recently, you know, that, you know, Trump is. Says these terrible things, and it widens Overton window. So other people feel free to say racist things, but I think there's a. There's. With China. I feel as though we made people who don't generally listen to views sympathetic of China listen to views sympathetic to China, and we made people who don't usually listen to views very critical of China listen to views that were very critical of China.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And I think that's, you know, if I had to sort of say an abstract thing that I'm proud of, I think that's what we did. And, you know, I'm proud of all the podcasts, the podcast network we developed, which, you know, helped encourage a huge range of voices, you know, from cynic itself to. We worked with the China Africa project and the China Global South Project and helped them to grow and a bunch of other podcasts. Some of which are still going and some of which were short seasons. I think we did a really amazing job of covering an enormous range of. Of different types of subjects, from, you know, artificial intelligence and semiconductors to Xi Jinping to, you know, elite politics. We did a lot of really great stuff on youth and Internet culture, feminism. On LGBTQ issues.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Well, we had Jia Yuan as kind of a secret weapon in that. In that regard. She was just so on top of that stuff. That was marvelous to have.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Absolutely.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And, you know, I like our. I liked our coverage of China's relations with countries that don't usually make it much into to the Anglophone press. You know, small countries like, you know, Timor Lest, you know, countries like Sudan, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan. Yeah, we published some amazing columns this week in China's history by Jay Carter. James Carter.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You know, I'm talking to Jay later today about seeing whether we can still, you know, keep his column going in some way.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

That would be fantastic. I mean, that. That was such a wonderful column. And in fact, it wasn't me who found that. It was Bob Guterma, our CEO, who. One who approached Jay about it. And it turned out to be one of the. The best things we did editorially.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Absolutely.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I, you know, I, I really had a lot of fun with Paul French's ultimate China bookshelf.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh, yeah, he's great. Which everything Paul did for us was fantastic.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, there was Queer China, mostly written by Nathan Way, which, you know, was a regular, regular coverage of issues serious and frivolous in China's LGBTQ community. We published a lot of stuff about what's going on in Xinjiang. Uyghur Bulletin and Window on Xinjiang by Darren Byiler, which I think covered the Uyghur crisis and atrocities in Xinjiang with a level of granularity that no other English language media has done, just because.

[Kaiser Kuo]

It wasn't just granularity, but also, I mean, Darren is really authoritative, but also fact based and he's grounded and he's just extremely, you know. You know, I know you hate the word nuanced, but he, he did it with. With nuance.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, I mean, I didn't really hate it. I hate the way it's used a lot of the time. I don't hate the player. I hate the game. No, I don't hate the game. I hate the player. Yeah. So, I mean, another really fun column was Phrase of the Week by Andrew Methven, which took often, you know, a word that was being used a lot on the Chinese Internet and in Chinese media and explained us with a great deal of background information. So I'm probably leaving somebody out that I should mention. But those are some of the things that right now come to mind. We published more than 400 contributors work and almost every one of them I'm extremely proud of.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, there are some people, I think, who even, I mean, after we announced our demise, a lot of them came out and said, hey, this is where I got my start. These people gave me a chance. They were the first people to pay me for my writing. I've now gone on to blah, blah, blah. I mean, yeah, I mean, in our long history, if you look at people who have interned for us who've gone on to pretty, you know, stellar journalism careers, I'm very, very happy with what we've done. Even before we joined, you know, with, with Onla Chang and Sup China, then the China Project.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I wanted to say something about the work that you did there, which I'm not really sure people fully appreciate because you worked your ass off. I got to say. You once said, you get to be the tenured professor of our outfit. Yeah, it kind of was the case. Yeah. I had the leisure to read a lot. I mean, I had to for the show. I wanted to add this thing where I read the book if I'm going to interview an author. But I got to direct a lot of effort into that one show each week. Plus of course, all the engineering and the editing and the production work on the other shows in the network. Sure. But let's just say this. I mean, you had to deal with a lot more day to day aggravation than I did. It's absolutely true. I'm super grateful T for that. But one thing we always talked about, you weren't able to ever get off what we internally were calling the editorial hamster wheel. You weren't actually just the editor in chief, you functioned as a managing editor. I feel like you think that's fair.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, media startups are punishing. It's one of the most difficult businesses in the world and it's incredibly difficult to figure out the right balance between the quantity of output and the quality of output and what your reward is for that, both financial and in terms of emotion. So I mean, I think that was, you know, the company before you and I joined. The initial product was a daily email newsletter and that kind of defined the pace for the whole of the company's life. And a daily deadline is a bitch. It's a bitch yeah, yeah, it's a bitch. It's the work of Sisyphus, you know?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Every day you got to roll the boulder back up the hill or, you know, Bob used to talk about it. Our CEO, Bob Guterma, used to say that it's like running a bakery, the media business. Every day you got to make fresh bread, and if the bread sucks and somebody eats bad bread that day, they'll think you're a bad bakery. Which is different from other kinds of businesses where you don't have to make the product fresh every day.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, man. You know, I think from the very beginning when we started doing this show, there were clear sort of stylistic. Not just stylistic, sort of political differences in the way that you and I approached talking about China. Maybe it's a little bit of a sensitive question, but how would you characterize that difference? I mean, if you. I mean, it's not as simple as, oh, he's a panda hugger. Oh, he's a dragon slayer. I mean, I often get criticized by people who saw me as one of them, you know, like, that they thought I should be in their camp. I'm like, you know, quote unquote, pro China. But, you know, because I had this professional association with you, because I was always defending, you know, things that you would. You would say that were at odds with my own thoughts or beliefs, you know, people would get pretty angry with me, and I'm absolutely sure the same thing happened to you. So how did you answer them, and how would you characterize that difference?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, you know, I mean, I think in some ways it is as simple as a panda hugging a dragon slayer. Or, you know, perhaps to be more accurate, it's that your first reaction to some piece of news about China is to look at it from the point of view of China, which can mean the government, the Communist Party can mean just ordinary Chinese people. But your first instinct will be to look at it from a sympathetic point of view.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Empathetic.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Empathetic, let's call it empathetic. Yeah, that's right. Whereas my first instinct, probably dating back to about 2009 or so, has been to look at it from a critical point of view and to find, you know, because it is a problem in. I think in the. The. The China watching community, the business community about China is that it is a sign of foreign relations. There's a lot of people who like to sugarcoat the truth or slightly tweak what they're saying in order to make it more comfortable for, you know, the Communist Party or our Chinese guests or the Chinese partner.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right. Whereas I would see the problem as being there are more people, you know, who refuse to sort of reach for any additional context, to just sort of look at everything completely out of context and are really, really quick to sort of pass sort of moral pronouncement on things.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I mean, I think the odd thing probably is that both of us, you know, if faced, you know, if I'm in a room full of ignorant people saying terrible things about China, I'm going to sound a lot more like you than I usually do.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I would imagine you're the same.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, absolutely the same. I end up sounding a lot more like you Channel my inner Jeremy Goldcorn when I hear. Yeah, a bunch of just sort of slavish, idiotic, complete tanky talking.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Tanky talk. But, yeah, I think the whole. That the balance worked and I think worked because, you know, even though we would fight, we would have, you know, arguments in editorial meetings all the time, but they were never personal and they were never. I mean, they were always.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

You know, I think we both got quite angry at a few points, but not often. I mean, I think the other thing, though, Kaiser, is that, I mean, I think to understand China, China's history, where it's going, where it is right now, it feels to me like you need something like the scientific method. You need to be able to constantly reassess your ideas and sometimes change your mind about things because it's. It's a complex beast. You know, it's. I mean, you know, the. The elephant parable, right? The five blind men touching the elephants. And the one touches the tusk thinks it's like a spear, and the one touches the leg thinks it's a tree, and the one touches the trunk thinks it's a snake. And it's very easy when looking at China to get some stuck on just the little bit that you're touching. And it's very important to have your assumptions challenged frequently.

[Kaiser Kuo]

It's funny, I just used that just the other day I gave a talk in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the blind man and the elephant was the thing. In the context of these days, it's all tusk. That is. It's that weapon of war thing. Everyone just looks through that one lens of national security and. Right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Tuscan snake.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, exactly. Tusker snake. Right. If you're in the intelligence community, maybe it's snake.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Anyway, I mean, I think. I think it's fair to say that both of us Brought, you know, our own kind of prejudices into it, our own emotional baggage that's, you know, created by our own personal experiences there in China, good and bad. And I gotta say, I mean, I had a lot of really good ones. I'm sure you did too. But you also had some very bad experiences. My bad experiences were relatively few. They've just been, I think they're fun stories to tell. But on balance I was on this hilltop surveying the surrounding countryside and seeing a lot of happiness and a lot of progress and a lot of excitement. I mean, working in the tech industry there and then getting to play with a bunch of really amazing musicians. Yeah, I had a pretty happy time. And you know, you. Not always, right?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

No, I mean, you know, most of the time I was very happy and I, I can't pretend to have, you know, really suffered. But I mean, if going right back to my very first experience, I mean, most of my experience was doing small entrepreneurial things mostly in the media space. So I, I was constantly running into, you know, low level and sometimes high level trouble with the authorities in a way that you simply weren't At Baidu where, you know, you have like some of the smartest, you know, most liberal minded people in China in this beautiful office and you know, it's one of, at the time certainly, you know, one of China's national champions and one of the, the parts of China that when you look at it you think, wow, that's good. You know, whereas I think I often would run into problems of the parts of China where you think that's bad.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, it's as simple as that. I don't know if all of our listeners know your whole storied past. I mean, you just made reference to having been in a bunch of media startups and that goes back all the way to what, 97 or so? Give us a highlight reel. Jeremy, tell us about your involvement. You mentioned Beijing scene at the very beginning.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, that was my first media job. Startup print weekly newspaper modeled on American Alt weekly, started by a guy named Scott Savitt, who was a very gifted publisher in certain ways, but also, you know, got into a lot more trouble than I ever did for a whole bunch of reasons.

[Kaiser Kuo]

And that gave them related to, you know, his passion for, you know, journalistic integrity.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Right, yeah, so, but it was, I mean, Scott kind of taught me how to operate like a startup business in Beijing, which was basically don't listen to any rules, just do whatever the hell you want and say sorry when they come after you. So, you know, in Some ways a curse on him for the rest of my career. But so I quit that just before its final collapse in 2000. And then I joined. It was dot com boom time. So I joined Phoenix I, which was a joint venture between Phoenix TV and some VC people in California. And I lived in Mountain View for a few months.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh, that's right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. Chris Barden and I were the only lawai on the team, so it was quite weird. I moved to America for a little while, but everybody I worked with, except for one guy and everybody I socialized with was Chinese. So it was this kind of weird Chinese bubble in Silicon Valley. And I. I quit that just before it. Its demise because it was, you know, the. The market crashed, that it was a dot com crash and I could see which way things were going. And I went back to Beijing and I started a magazine called R, which was a listings magazine, sort of, you know, like based on the listing section of Beijing Scene, which by then time was long gone and it was bilingual print as well. And we did, I don't know, I think about seven or eight issues. And I sold it to a media company named cimg, started by a lady named Hong Huang, who is sort of relatively well known in China, at least amongst a certain generation, entrepreneur. And she was one of the early group of people to come to high school and university in the United States. Her mother was, you know, Mao's English teacher and translator. So it was a kind of, you know, she knew her way around Beijing and she was starting this publishing company. So she acquired our magazine and for various reasons, we changed its name into Lua, as in, you know, Happiness Zhao Lu.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, I remember that.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And so we ran that for a while, and that eventually was sold and became timeout magazine, which I think is still going in Beijing.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that that was the origin of time out there.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Interesting.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Wow. Just became sort of the Beijing franchisee of the whole timeout empire, huh?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. But then it was no longer with cimg, you know, media business.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh, man, Huang is such a character. My God. I mean, one day we can do a whole show on her.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, I. I have some good interviews with her on YouTube actually, from. Yeah, A little after those days, but. And at that time also we launched a magazine, this was her brainchild called Red Egg, which was, you know, slightly a copy of Red Herring. It was a technology magazine where I.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Happened to be working at the. The time.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, where you were working at the time. So it was Chinese language. And Huang decided to make me the editor in chief now. I mean, my Chinese is self taught. I'm very good at reading state media and I can write in Chinese. Okay. But it was quite an eccentric idea, but you know, it kind of worked. But CIMG was also full of dot com bloat. And as the cash began to wind down, you know, some of the publications closed down. And that included, included Red Egg, unfortunately. And then I worked. I helped Mark Kitto, who was the founder of that's Beijing and that's Shanghai originally, which I helped him launch that's Beijing. That was just like a short job and that's now the Beijing still going, I believe.

[Kaiser Kuo]

But one of the things that you did as the launch editor was you enlisted me as the back page columnist.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Right. And you wrote this for many years, this wonderful column about Beijing. It was really like a love song to Beijing.

[Kaiser Kuo]

The Colum. It's called Ichbinan Beijing.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah. So some of the most lovely descriptions of the city. And in fact, you published a book of the columns, didn't you?

[Kaiser Kuo]

I did, I did in 2009. Not all of them. I mean, if anyone's interested, I have them all. I mean, I can send somebody a PDF of the whole damn thing. I mean, all the columns.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Send it to me actually. Please. I will, I will, I will. Yeah. So. And then I kind of, you know, the media business, I was. Why I should have listened to myself all the time ago. The media business was clearly rather exhausting. So I went into business with a couple of friends.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You're a glutton for punishment, apparently.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Doing advertising and graphic design. We started this little design firm, Mauro Marashali. Mauro Marashali and Jonathan Leon he food and Jacopo Della Rogione for Lawai. We started this design and advertising firm. And I did that for a while, but I had thought that it would offer the same kind of creative satisfaction as media, but it would be more profitable and without the government trying to shut you down all the time. But I hated it. I couldn't work for clients. You know, I think the low point was at one point we did this design for this luxury hotel for some graphic design stuff. And we'd passed through many rounds of approvals and the basic logo was like based on squares and rectangles because it was Beijing and it was, you know, the city map of Beijing is all squares and rectangles. And the big boss came from Hong Kong, Cantonese speaking Hong Kong guy. And he said to us, no, no, we can't have this. This is China, Chinese people like round things, so you've got to change it all. And I think that was the day I thought, you know, I can't do this anymore. And I started a website called Dunway, Dunway.org. it was based on, you know, blogging had become very big and it had become very interesting because 2003 was the year the Iraq war started. So you had left wing and right wing people, pro and anti war people in the United States, blogging. And it suddenly I realized, any idiot can start a website. You know, it's that easy. You just. There was a slight technical hurdle, you know, a bit more difficult than getting on Facebook, basically. But so I started this website and it was initially translations from the Chinese media and commentary on the Chinese media. And then it grew to encompass, you know, publishing a fairly wide range of different kinds of writing. But usually the slogan was media, Chinese media, Internet and urban life.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right. I think advertising was in there at one point.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Advertising? Yeah, advertising at one point. So we covered the advertising business, the media business. Then we started making videos with Luke Mines and Anna Sophie Livenberg called Sexy Beijing.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. So we had the hard hat show where I'd wander around the city with a hard hat, which was a kind of symbol of Beijing at the time, because everywhere was a construction site full of. And I was a migrant worker, like the people wearing the yellow hard hats. And Sexy Beijing, which was sort of a bit of a parody of Sex in the City, which was very popular in Beijing at the time amongst young women. But it was an interview show where Anna Sophie would go around asking people slightly embarrassing questions about romance and. And English names and things like that. So that was a lot of fun and that. But in 2000, you know, it was a struggle. I mean, I was very poor for many years. Often, you know, I'd go out to dinner with like 50 yuan in my pocket and just hope that no, you know, either somebody else would pay for the dinner or, you know, that I wouldn't get stuck, you know, having to admit that I had like, literally my net worth was like 50 yuan, you know, like $10. So. So, I mean, we started doing research work to pay the bills, research on. On Internet and social media for companies and financial institutions. And that eventually grew into a real business, which is basically what the Financial Times was more interested in, in buying as a business anyway. But so we carried on doing that for a while and then, you know, after selling it, I. I had kids and my wife and I wanted to move to the States back for her because she'd come to college here and become an American citizen. And for me, it was the first time to really properly. Well, I emigrated, you know, with a green card.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And that was just before that basically takes up, takes us up to, you.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Know, the beginning when we got acquired.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah. The China Project.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, listening to you recount that, I'm just struck by how Beijing in those years was just this wonderful place where you could kind of instantaneously reinvent yourself, where it just seemed like there were no restrictions on what we could do. You know, if you had a crazy idea, you could just sort of go for it and nobody was going to stop you, nobody was going to tell you, you know, that's a bad idea, you're an amateur. I wrote a column in that's Beijing about precisely this phenomenon. How liberating it actually was to be in this place where there wasn't anyone to kind of do a reality check, tell you, don't quit your day job. You know, a lot of us, we were all, you know, we all had like half written novels and screenplays on our hard drives. You know, everyone's sitting in the bookworm with. Yeah, very different time. But when we started seneca back in 2010, I think that we had an inkling. I mean, I think that it was already fairly clear to us that there was a major shift happening. There was a change taking place. And that became kind of a light motif that threaded through many years of the show. It was noticeable just in the years immediately following the Olympics. It's an obsession with me, actually. I mean, it's something I love to talk to people about, especially people who were there at the time. Just reflecting on that whole crazy chain of causality. What happened? What are the main factors in your mind that you would point to for why you think things changed when they did? Remember, I used to call it the new truculence, but it became something much worse than that. I think we joked it was like, it's the new lens.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this many times and I circle back on the ideas and recently I've been thinking that it really started with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, at least when it comes to Sino US relations. Just because I think for the first time in China, there began to be the sense that the US is really doing a dumb thing. But I don't know about that. I mean, there was also a sense in China that we better develop the military because look at, look at the awesome firepower these people have.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Well, yeah, I mean, that was the Kuwait war. I mean, there was, you know, before that, that.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Even before that.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, sure.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

But I mean, the, the, the change, I, I would say, you know, 2008, you had the Olympics and China came out of it looking very, very good globally. I think it really was truly a soft power coup. And perhaps more importantly, within China itself, whatever, if any foreigners thought Chinese people thought that China had arrived. You know, the journalistic cliche of the time was China's coming out party to the world. But it actually, you know, it was a good cliche because it was, in many ways it was the first time the world, many parts of the world woke up to the fact that China was no longer a poor, backward country. And I think Chinese people also felt an enormous sense of pride. And then that was immediately followed by the global financial crisis when suddenly America looked pretty dumb in a way to, to, I think many Chinese people, you know, the, the people who were supposed to understand the whole world of business completely screwed it up. And that year there was also the so called, you know, YouTube or Facebook revolution in Iran where you had an election and then popular protests that were fueled by social media.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. After Ahmadinejad was reelected.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, that's right. And I think that started to provoke a sense of paranoia in the Communist Party, both about how easily it seemed to organize popular movements because of the Internet, but also the fact that they, you know, also being an authoritarian regime, to use a word you don't particularly like, were vulnerable to the same forces that the Iranian government was. And the same year, just a few months, basically immediately following the Iran protests, you had the riots in Uri, deadly race riots essentially, where Uyghurs and Han Chinese people were killing each other, killing each other on the streets with clubs. And that was followed by about six months of the entire Internet being shut down in Xinjiang. And that felt like the start of something. And I have to say, like in my own personal experience, two days before the Urumuchi riots on July 3, Dunwei was blocked in China. And so whatever that means, the whole.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Run up of again, again, it's like the anniversary dates. Like, you know, if you look at when Facebook actually was blocked, it was actually blocked in the run up to the anniversary date of June of 89. Right. So at the end of May of 89, that's when I think Facebook actually finally got blocked.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

End of May 2009.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right, right. And in the previous year it had been spotty, especially after March, after the Tibet riots in 2008. It's interesting though, Jeremy, I notice how much you emphasize the Internet in this explanation. It's not something I hear from a lot of other people and it's something that I completely agree with. I think one of the things that people under index on is the extent to which the party was absolutely terrified of the force of the Internet. I haven't seen a lot of books written about that, but as I've often said, it was impossible in that time to open up to the editorial pages of any broadsheet in America or in the UK and not so see the argument being made that freeing the Internet would bring down authoritarian regimes. Right, yeah, so yeah, they were.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And then, you know, I mean we've, we've kind of taken IT up till 2009. But from end of 2010 was the, the Arab Spring. Yeah, the Arab Spring. So you know, December was the guy, the, with the street stall in Tunisia self immolated. And then January, February was the Arab Spring and there was the people calling for jasmine revolution in China. For jasmine strolls.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. All four or five of them.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, well, yeah, but I mean people did gather and things happened. Like, were you there?

[Kaiser Kuo]

It was like mostly journalists.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, no, there were people that were, you know, people threw down a jasmine flower there. I mean there weren't a lot of them, but there was chat on the Internet. And what happened that you will agree with me, is that then Ambassador John Humphrey Huntsman happened to be coincidence in Wang Fujing the very day that one of the, you know, there was supposed to be this gather Jasmine gathering.

[Kaiser Kuo]

A very handsome bomber jacket.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, the Chinese authorities took note of that and they didn't like what they thought they were seeing. So I, I, yeah, the Internet is hugely important. But I mean, I think the, the other, the last thing I'd like to mention about the hardening of attitudes in China to foreign and liberal ideas is I think one of the most telling pieces of writing over the last 20 years was the 10 grave problems inherited from the Hu Jintao and Wen Jaba administration. An essay written by Deng Yuan, who had been a big shot at the Communist Party Party school, you know, a scholar. He was the editor of Study Times there, the publication. And he analyzed 10 problems that had been left behind that, you know, the next administration, I. E. Xi Jinping would.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Have to be, would have to tackle.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And they were, you know, very real problems. They were, you know, environmental pollution, corruption, inequality in society, you know, all kinds of unequal distribution of resources and the instability that you know, came with these things. And you had Xi Jinping appointed or anointed as the guy who actually had to take care of these things. And they were right. I mean, remember Beijing in the first decade of the century, if you had a black Audi with Wu Jing, like, people's Armed Police plates, you could do anything. You could ride over pedestrians and kill them and nobody would stop you. You could go through red lights, you could park wherever you wanted to. You'd go to the Landmark Hotel, and there was a nightclub there that was notorious for being, like a brothel that everybody in the city knew about. And you had very, very poor people who had to look at these black tinted Audis drive past. I mean, there was a sense that there were inequalities that could lead to a crisis. And I think very much Xi Jinping came along and was like, I'm gonna sort this stuff out. But part of it is that his way of sorting it out is to lock everyone up and sense everybody and beat everybody up. To be glib.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. No, in those days, I remember Ian Johnson joking, audi, the official car of official corruption.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. It was, wasn't it?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. But no, I mean, I think what you just Talked about, the 10 grave problems that really dovetails well, with what Susan Shirk wrote in her book Overreach, which is a really, really excellent exploration of another whole facet of the reasons for China's kind of hardening in, you know, internal repression and external assertiveness. Right. She actually talks about just what you were talking about. The, you know, it was. We thought of it as a feature, not a bug, that China's leadership during that time was collective. We always talk about, you know, we don't talk about the Hu Jintao era, we talk about the Hu and when era. That gives you an idea of how different. Yeah, how different it was, and very collective. But as you say, it gave rise to just really, really rapid corruption. A lot of serious social inequalities and things like that. But it was the corruption and the ability of so many of the powerful Politburo members to kind of ensconce themselves into these power bases. They had these whole industries behind them.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

But I mean, the good thing about it, of course, I mean, the corruption was bad, but. But the good thing about it was that it was almost a kind of a separation of powers in the sense that, I mean, I remember, like, in the publishing industry, you know, at one point, Beijing scene, we had a license from one arm of the People's Daily that allowed us to publish. And you know, we had a rival magazine that had a license from some other government entity that allowed them to publish. And we were both, you know, allowed to kind of struggle against each other because there were two different backers who were both pretty powerful. That doesn't exist now.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, I mean back then in that, those times, if you were like in Internet video. I was working for Yoku at one point, if you'll recall, there were, there was a jurisdictional fight. Does Internet video get regulated by soft.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

The state Administration of Radio Television or the, or is it the Internet authority? Yeah, exactly, the miit. Right. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. That's right. And then there were other people, you know, grasping for, for power, like the Ministry of Culture always kind of impotently try to, you know, get their hands on some of, some of the goodies.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So no, no, your point is very, it's a, it's a good one that, that in that time there was an effective division of. Of power. Separation.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Separation of powers makes it, I think.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Gives one too nice of a. Yeah. Gloss.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

It was like warring states so you could play one warlord against the other.

[Kaiser Kuo]

More like that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, and it just reminds me of living in China. I noticed this thing happening with myself in my own politics. Right. I, you know, I'm, I was a 20 something Berkeley graduate, right. When I went to China in 88 to stay there for my first year. Just fresh out of school and feeling, you know, myself very, very left wing politically right. I was really into, you know, things that were egalitarian and distributive and anti capitalist and you know, the usual. In my case though, I think being in China for all that time, I found myself so habitually siding with or rooting for the kind of market reformers for anyone who I thought was on the side of the private sector as opposed to the SOEs, you know, those big bloated state run enterprises, state owned enterprises. And I think I maybe imbibed a little too much of the neoliberal Kool Aid, especially in the 2000s. And I only came to realize once I was like gasping and choking on pollution and seeing the horrific inequality around me and corruption and the materialism eventually just got too much for me and I started being much more sympathetic to the new left and to some of the other forces that were kind of mustering against those social ills that we were seeing. Did anything similar to that happen to you in your own politics?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think I have perhaps just always, how to put it, I went through a left wing phase as a college student and in fact, when I arrived in China, I remember one of the slogans I'd learned the English of that I most liked was Yafei la tuan jie qi la dadao mei di. You know, like Asia, Africa and Latin America unite and, and overthrow the American imperialists. So I mean, we're talking like undergraduate nonsense really that appeal to me. But I never liked being told what to do. And I always found like in China particularly just the state when it decided something was so heavy handed that I think I remained generally on the side of private enterprise. I, I don't think I drifted back leftward much. Although, I mean, I do believe in government regulation. You know, I, I'm not a libertarian. I, I think, you know, pollution is a problem. You know, climate change, just old fashioned pollution is a problem that you can't solve without a heavy handed government approach. So I, I don't know, you know, just listening to me now, you can hear that I'm a little bit all over the place. I don't think I changed in the way that you describe though.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Okay, interesting. I mean, I've shared that experience with some others who were in our cohort there and I have heard people say, yeah, that kind of happened to me too, and I didn't recognize myself.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Maybe a better answer actually is that the opposite happened to me actually. In fact, I think, yeah, a better answer is probably the opposite happened to me because the tough times that we've sort of alluded to, that I've had in China have mostly been because of government interference with what I was trying to do. So I have found, you know, like living in the United States, it's one thing I really like that. It's like, you know, here I am, get off my land.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You know, and at the same time I remember you, you know, in those go go years of the mid-2000s, just really sort of singing the praises for how unfettered and how easy it was for you to start a company and things. Like in China, you, you were absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

You know, I guess what I learned was a very easy to start a company, but to keep a company, no, that's a different proposition.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, so we talked a little bit. I mean, you were saying earlier about how, you know, important it is to not just touch the trunk or the tusk or whatever of the elephant and see it all, but I mean, that's one of those things. I was, I Said I gave this talk about, you know, what I look for in a China watcher. That is to say, I give this talk, and I've given it a few places about what we live in this world where not everybody is going to be able to dedicate all that time to becoming expert. That's a ridiculous word, of course, but to really becoming familiar with all the ins and outs of Chinese politics and American policy, they have to rely on other people. I propose a set of criteria, five things that I think you should look for in a China analyst. Does this person know what they're talking about? Is this person worth listening to? I should emphasize that possessing those five qualities doesn't mean they're going to arrive at the exact same prescriptions that I would. But it's, I think, important for us to know what to look for. What would your list look like, Jeremy?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I don't have a list like you, I don't think. But I suppose the most important thing is if you're coming at it as an outsider to Chinese culture, you require an awful lot of immersion in the language and culture and history to even be able to say anything coherent. And if you're coming at it from as a Chinese person, you have to really figure out how to explain a lot of things that are not very easy to explain to an audience who has no idea where you're coming from. So the dedication to, you know, immersing oneself if you're coming from the outside in the language and the culture and the history of China, I think is, you know, it's a question of time that you have to put in, and if you haven't put in the time, you're just not going to get it. And, you know, if you're coming from China, you have to figure out what are the kinds of questions that people outside of China are want to know about. And you also have to come at it, you know, if you've come from the PRC system, you have to realize that the average American's worldview is fundamentally different.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And you can call those things whatever you want. But there is an amazing reluctance on the part of a lot of Chinese people who attempt to speak to the outside world, to actually figure out what it is the outside world wants to know and how they come at the gaining of that knowledge.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. And for that reason, they've been very, very ineffective. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting. I, I hadn't. I. That's actually a whole nother topic that I should probably address in an essay or something. I Think it's a. Yeah, it's a big, big, big interesting topic. So, Jeremy, I recently listened to a guy I really admire, Andrew Batson. We know. You know him, right. Used to write. Right. For the Wall Street Journal. Great, great.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And he's been on Seneca, I believe.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Back in Chinese days, a couple times, probably. Anyway, he was on Jude Blanchette's excellent Pekingology podcast. And he had. I mean, we're talking about kind of basic observations, things that help you kind of get the way Chinese people think. That's a really super important thing to be able to talk about. And he did a fantastic job. He said, chinese people have this fundamental belief that they not only can be the best in any given field at any given endeavor, but that they should be the best. I thought that was so true. It never really occurred to me to put it so succinctly, but it struck me as it resonated with me right away. I have a couple of those kind of chestnuts that I'll haul out when people ask me, what should I really know about the Chinese worldview or what? What are some of the things, the big picture kind of takeaways for you about Chinese people?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I mean, it's quite difficult to top that one.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, that's a good one.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I mean, I don't really know if I can think of.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You agree with that one?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I do agree with that one. I would add a sort of corollary to it, which is your maxim about the difference between Chinese and Americans. They're both exceptionalist cultures, but American exceptionalism, let me see if I have it right, is the idea that all people on the world should be able to enjoy what Americans enjoy and that this is the right way to live. Whereas Chinese exceptionalism is only the Chinese can do what the Chinese do and no other peoples can do it. Is that. Is that about right?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Kind of, yeah. I mean, yeah. Put it a little differently, I'd say. Yeah. I mean, American exceptionalism is proselytizing. It basically says, yeah, American institutions and values are true for all people in all times, the best. And the Chinese are exceptionalist in a very particularist way. I mean, it's right there in the way they always talk about so and so with Chinese characteristics. Right. There aren't universalist claims being made. The idea is that China's own experiences are unique to China. And so I think there's really something to it when China insists that it's not trying to export a model, a China model, even a development model. I mean, it's just like look at the language thing, right? We would never have a television show in America with people from other countries who, oh, my God, can speak fluent English. Right?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

It just would never happen. Right. So there's this. There's this idea of China itself as inherently inaccessible to the outside. And anyone who does seem to have it, you know, is suddenly accorded this label. Zhonggu tung. Right? Oh, he's a zhonggu tung. Because he can say ni hao. Really?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

He can say ni hao? Yeah, it starts after you learn to say ni, basically. Yeah. I mean, it's difficult to top those two. I mean, food, I think, is like, if you don't understand Chinese food, you can't. Like the obsession with food and how important it is and how good it is. If you don't understand those, then you. You have no way of understanding China. And. And you're also a very sad person.

[Kaiser Kuo]

That I can absolutely agree with.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. I don't know. What, what do you tell me, have you got some other maxims that you, you know, China, you know, one in two minutes. That's how to understand the Chinese mind.

[Kaiser Kuo]

There's the one I always use. I mean, this isn't about the eternal Chinese mind or anything like that, but it's definitely about understanding today, modern China today. I mean, I've probably said this before on the show, but I think the most important thing to keep in mind is just the compressed nature of the modernization experience, how just in one working lifetime, you went in 1978, 1979 to today, it's like one person's lifetime. If you were a graduate from junior high and you started your first job in 79 at the dawn of reform and opening, the per capita GDP was less than 200 bucks. And today it's like 60.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And some people were living just about medieval lives, cooking on fire.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Urban people, people in the hutongs in Beijing, cooking on actual open fires, going to latrine, like non flush, no plumbing. Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So romantic, right?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

So romantic. Yeah. I mean, I think there's. The other thing is the economic dislocation that went with that modernization and industrialization, where when we were first in China, people just assumed we were really rich because we were from foreign countries. And, you know, and in fact, we, in terms of disposable income, we generally were quite rich. And now, like, all our Chinese friends have Lamborghinis. You know, there's a story you tell about in your last years in Beijing in that apartment building, and you're the guy on the electric Moped, Right. And everybody else has a Lamborghini or Ferrari.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, I was a freaking director at Baidu. I was pulling down, you know, good, good money, even.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

But everyone was just. Yeah, it was insane actually. That came from. So Evan, Evan Osnos did that, that, remember that, that, this American Life episode with you and me in it.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Right, right.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So the bumper they used, they didn't have putting it in the show, but the one that they put on like the previous week's show was him and me walking around in the garage and me kind of like pointing to the different vehicles.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Oh, that's right. Yeah, I remember listening to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a Lamborghini. This is a Maserati.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, right, right, right. And then saying, here's my vehicle, you know, little electric bicycle.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I know. So I mean, there's that. Right. Is the incredibly. I, I think when we say like, you know, how do you understand Chinese people? I mean, we are talking about China now. We're not talking about Chinese person that goes 5,000 years or something.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So let me just finish off that thought really quickly. But I think those are basically three things that you should know that come out of that observation about that compressed experience of modernization. One is that they're going to have a different relationship with technology. They have basically never known a time where improvements in their technological lives and improvements in their, their other lives, in their health and their education, in their housing and their income generally haven't improved in lockstep. Right. So they don't have the same kind of fear of technology that seems to be so pervasive now in the West. And the second is that, I mean, this is something that Barry Naughton said a long time ago, but I think it's absolutely true. They're going to have a little bit of faith, a little more faith in the ability of their leadership to steer them through really kind of difficult and very, very rapid change. And the third thing I think is pretty. This is my. I use the Tom Hanks movie Big to illustrate this. You know, in that movie, a young 11 year old, you know, actor who's playing the same guy as Tom Hanks later on he makes a wish at this, you know, fortune telling machine at Midway Carnival to grow up. I wish I were big. And the next morning he wakes up and he's like, Tom Hanks. You know, it was like in his 30s then. That's China. Right. It still has the outward appearance of an adult. You know, you got the gleaming forest skyscrapers and the amazing tech industry. And the amazing high speed rails. But the software hasn't changed that much. It just doesn't because it just doesn't update as quickly. And so in this one lifetime. So that explains the thin skinned nature, why they still have such a chip on their shoulder about so many things. Why it's still, you know, hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

It's why you know, Messi didn't play in Hong Kong. Hu Xijin is having a fit.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Exactly. It's this, this quick, this readiness to feel offense and yeah, I think that. Yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

So now here's the interesting thing because I think, you know, we are going through the next decade is going to be different and you know, there's an economic slowdown and no matter what happens, it's not, we're not, I mean I, I don't think anybody serious thinks we're going to suddenly go back to the go, go years of, you know, 8% growth or whatever. So everybody's going to have to get used to much slower growth, slower technological progress, slow, slower material progress. I mean when you go from a latrine toilet to like a, you know, apartment that looks like a five star.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Hotel room, where do you go from there?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

How do you make it feel better tomorrow? You know, so I think the next.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Few years you played it with gold.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

You played it with gold. That's right.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Hey, so what about, what about some of the ideas that you find to be especially pernicious but commonplace among people who actually do work on contemporary China? Are there some things that are common? Kind of. Everyone seems to believe this, but not me.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I don't know. I don't think there's any one thing in particular I, I can say, I think, I would just say that there's a tendency which I have to guard against my, in myself to settle into certain views about China and once you're in, you know, a certain camp to not be willing to get out of that camp. And I think it goes both ways. You get everyone, you know, get extremely defensive about how wonderful the Communist party is and you get people who can't hear the word China without saying, you know, terrible things about it. I think that's the most dangerous trap. And it's, you know, different people are guilty of it. Some people all of the time. Some people just some of the time. I think all of us probably can be a little bit guilty of it if you.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh yeah, none of us, none of the time.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

It's an incredibly frustrating place to engage with, you know, no matter what your views are so, yeah, I think that's the thing.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I can readily confess to feeling this instinct to be defensive. Right. I mean. Yeah, of course.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I mean, I think that's fairly obvious if you know your work. Right. And as it's probably equally obvious that my first instinct is to be critical.

[Kaiser Kuo]

But I can fight it down. You can fight it down. I mean, it's. It's possible to do. It's just we have to be conscientious about it.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. And sometimes you don't want to fight it down. Right. Because sometimes that's the right instinct. So, I mean, that's the tough thing. I think you've got to. You can't just relax, and if you want to be honest, you can't just relax and settle into a way of thinking about China.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, you know, obviously, because of my own ethnic roots, because of, you know, my. My own socialization, you know, because I'm married into a Chinese family. Because, you know, I. I. Yeah, it's like. Like that's my mother you're talking about.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean. Yeah, I get it. I mean, in some ways, me too. Right?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, you did. You did. You were like 23 to 43 or something like that. Is that.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, Roughly.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. Wow.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. 23 to 43. Yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Gosh, I remember thinking that because. Because I. I once just came up with a little song to the. The Ballad of Davy Crockett to introduce you on the. And I had to think, 20 years in China from the age of 23 and no one knew his friends.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Now he moved to the greenest state in the land of Tennessee.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, that's. That's the. Yeah. I'm gonna miss, you know, not having you on the show as much, so I can't come up with those stupid intros. Those are.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, I mean, every week would be a bit much, so it's probably better this week.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I could do it.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. No, I know. You're good.

[Kaiser Kuo]

American. Paul. Politics.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Let me turn the tables on you, because you've mostly been questioning me. You must get asked a lot by younger people who have studied Chinese, who are interested in China, lived there for a little bit, who are interested in pursuing a career that relates to China in some way. Do you have any stock advice that you give?

[Kaiser Kuo]

Well, I mean, I have a stock. A thing that I tell them, which is like, don't look at me. I lucked into freaking everything. I. I never, like, deliberately set out to. I got, I mean, phenomenally lucky. So I'm the Worst person to look to as sort of a model for how to plan career success when it comes to China. But I mean, I don't think I can offer much advice except kind of the cognitive advice. I mean, the old things that we always say, like you have to be able to keep two ideas in your head that are totally contradictory at the same time and they can both be true. And I can rattle off a bunch of things that I know both to be true. These are things that kind of roll off my tongue now with real ease. I know, for example, with absolute confidence that Chinese are more freighted and burdened by their history. They suffer from such inertia because of that great burden of history than anyone else in the world. And also Chinese are the people who are like most capable of instantaneous self reinvention in the whole world. I mean, those things are both true to me and they're completely opposite. Right. So yeah, I mean, it's the cognitive stuff like that. I mean, you know, I give them my, hey, you got to be really, really humble. You have to know what you don't know. You have to be totally aware of your epistemic limitations when it comes to China because it's freaking opaque, right? There's just a lot of stuff you're never going to know. So don't believe those people who make these grand conclusions based on cherry picked quotes from some Xi Jinping speech because somebody can do the exact same to prove the exact opposite point. I tell them the important thing is country feel. You just have to have this sort of intuition. And the only way to acquire that is by prolonged exposure. And of course the really tragic thing is that nobody, there's single digit hundreds of people now, now studying in China and you know, there were a hundred, a hundred thousand of them when we were there. Right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, it's, it's a very different environment for, you know, lots, lots of different reasons. I mean, my advice is much more practical. I just say to people, you know, you probably won't be able to make much money out of it, so you better make sure that you're interested and yeah, engage with it. Because it's not like a career choice to do Chinese of stuff really. It's a choice of interest. And you know, in many cases like ours, you have to kind of make up a career if you want to, you know. Yeah, do it.

[Kaiser Kuo]

We're both doing that. Yeah. Speaking of which, what, what career are you going to make up now?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, you know, I'm, I need to have a bit of a Break from regular publishing. I mean, having basically been doing it since 1997, I need a break from the, like, weekly or daily media production life. So I, I, I'm go. I'm working as an editorial fellow for China File.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

So I'm doing editing work and I'm doing a bit of other writing and fiddling about and just trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up, really. And spending a lot of time with my children.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh, that's good.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Because they're still at an age where they actually like me, so. Or so. So they say. So, yeah. I mean, I, I need to just think a bit, I think.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, Yeah. I understand you've been fishing and depleting the fish stocks in your little pond.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, I actually, I restocked it before the winter with catfish, so hopefully that's, you know. Yeah, yeah. And they're good. It's different. We had this fish in South Africa called barbell, which is a kind of catfish, but they, they, they weren't very good. But these Southern American catfish are very good.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, catfish is really great in schwagel. You, so you get. Yeah, yeah. So I can, I can recommend you a really good schwagel. You kind of like prep mix that is just absolutely delicious.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, like spicy food. So we can.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Good, good. You know, we were just talking about, like, our, our generation back then. What was special to you, do you think about our generation of China analysts? You know, people who are now in their, I guess, 40s, 50s, maybe even early 60s. Right. Who went to China, let's say in their 20s or 30s and back, you know, in the 80s, in the 90s, maybe even, you know, anything post pre Olympic, really, there was, I feel like there's a different flavor to them than the people who went after. What do you think are the common experiences that molded us and gave us our approach and insofar as there is that shared kind of particular character?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, I think one thing is that before 2008, I mean, maybe it was already changing post WTO, but before 2008, let's say China wasn't a glamorous place to go. Really?

[Kaiser Kuo]

No, not at all.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Certainly in the 90s and early 2000s, the average American or South African or Brit thought you were a complete oddball if you chose to go to China. It was a hardship posting for multinational companies. So people who went at that time that, you know, it attracted us, and it wasn't people who went to Thailand and, you know, chilled out on the beach because China was never like that. I mean, even if you're in Hainan island, it wasn't like that. So you had to be driven by something aside from the search for an easy life or, you know, prestige. You were driven by.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Right.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Some. Some other weird thing. So, I mean, there were a lot of, you know, oddballs and eccentric people and characters and people who may not particularly eccentric, but certainly were driven by something a little unusual. I think that's one factor. I think the other thing that sort of started in the 80s in a very small way, and then really gathered speed in, like, the 90s and early 2000s, was Brendan O', Kane, who's a scholar of Chinese literature and translator and friend of ours. He used to have this thing. What did he call it? Feral Sino.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Feral Sinologists.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Feral Sinologists, right. And I guess the idea was that Whereas before the 90s, you. If you wanted to study China, you actually had to do, like, get a really formal job or you had to go through some very limited channels, you know, studying at a university. Whereas from the 90s, you could just go to China and get a job teaching English and teach yourself Chinese in a dormitory and like, just kind of live in China and study China in the field. Right, yeah.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You are the. The archetypal feral Sinologist.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yes, absolutely. I didn't study Chinese at university because there wasn't any Chinese classes in South Africa when I was at university. And then I lived in a workers dormitory and learned Chinese from migrant workers. So, you know, that was a rather different experience than was available really much before then, because, you know, you couldn't, I mean, from, you know, I mean, Jeremy Bombay, my friend, was in the Cultural Revolution, the later years of, you know, in the 70s at university in. In China, and they weren't allowed to associate with Chinese students too much. And that lasted really, until the early 1990s. You know, the universities were segregated, whereas if you got a job and lived in a workers dormitory, there was no segregation. You could actually learn more language than was available to university students. So it was, you know, I mean, a lot of people learned a lot of good stuff at university, too. I'm not deriding it in any way, but there was a lot of ways to learn about China that suddenly opened up to us.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly what I would have said. I mean, that's. That's what it is, is that we had the ability to go to China and just actually sort of live there and absorb it and get that country feel that I keep talking about. I Don't know what else to call it. I'm sure there's a good German word for it. It's. It's just a kind of set of intuitions and. And I mean, part of it obviously is. Is linguistic facility and all that stuff, but anyway, yeah, man.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I think it's also just getting into problems. Like, you know, when you're on tour with Tang Dynasty or like me, you know, doing media startups and you have, like, problems in society and you have to solve them in some way, and then you start to see patterns that you can also see in sometimes the way the government behaves.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I had that. I keep thinking about how many times we ran into the same sorts of problems and the very creative solutions that we came up with. Like that venue operator who just decided to escape through the bathroom window rather than actually paying the band.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

We saw that happen in other circumstances. Right.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Or having. Yeah, the hotel won't let you leave because your bill's not paid. So you learned how to tie sheets together with knots good enough to lower Marshall stack heads out the window.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

And.

[Kaiser Kuo]

How many symbols you could put into a single bed sheet. Yeah. What a hoot and what a blast it's been talking to you about this stuff. I mean, that little scroll down memory lane. But I think there's useful and maybe even wise pearls that you've helped dispense here.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I hope it's not too much of a wank.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I look forward to getting you back on and chatting some more about this stuff because we have not even come close to exhausting what we could talk about.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, it's been fun.

[Kaiser Kuo]

So, Jeremy, one more time. Yeah. Before we go to recommendations and all that stuff, tell me, I hear you might be working on a book. Is that possible?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, I'm writing some scribbling some things down. So, yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to. How to make that.

[Kaiser Kuo]

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like for somebody who can't touch type to actually write a book. I mean, you learn Chinese by yourself in a dorm. I mean, maybe you could learn to touch type. It would save you a lot.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

I type at the right speed for thinking.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Ah, I see, I see. Okay. Yeah, you could do the same on, like, on a phone, right? You could do thumb. All right, man. Hey, listen, I want to make it a quick appeal for you listeners for help. When I learned about the impending demise of the China Project, I really resolved that I was going to keep Seneca going in some way. I had to wait A little bit for the dust to settle. But I've known all along that I wanted to continue producing what I believe are really high quality conversations that explore what is behind the news. I'm still driven primarily by that mission, but I also have a family to feed. And as of this fall, I'm going to have two kids in college, most likely two kids out of state for college. So I need your help. So consider supporting my work in one of three ways. You can sign up for Patreon, where I'm asking for just 10 bucks a month, or subscribe to the new Seneca Substack, which I will be launching in time for the release of this program. Either way, you will get the transcript to the show, you'll get a weekly essay by me or some other China related subject, something near and dear to my heart. I'm talking to some of your favorite contributors from the China Project about maybe including some of their writing as part of that offering. You will also get bonus podcast episodes, recordings of things like talks that I'm giving, public talks, audio versions of essays, all much more than that. I'm working on some really cool translation projects that I'll hopefully be keeping you abreast of. I also plan to take the show on the road. So subscribers are going to have big discounts on admission price for live Seneca shows and the mini conferences that I'm hoping to put on. And so if you run a company or a center, if you work at law firm or run a law firm or a think tank or something, please consider sponsoring Sinica. Every bit makes a difference. So shoot me an [e-mail] and let's talk about what we might do together. Or if you're interested in having Sinica come to your town for a live event, let's talk about how we can make that happen. All right, Jeremy, you ready to go on to recommendations?

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yes, I am.

[Kaiser Kuo]

All right, well, you're up first, as is our habit.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

So first thing, obviously I'm just going to plug what I'm doing now. China file.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. Wonderful stuff. Susie Jakes.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah. Yeah, Susie Jakes is amazing.

[Kaiser Kuo]

She really is.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

So that's just chinaphile.com and then my book recommendation is a book called the Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow. And this is something I discovered because a couple of years ago in the fall, I was walking through the woods near my home in the hollow Western.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Asheville, storied gold corn holler.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

That's right. And I came across this large, like, fruit thing that was shiny and then a pattern Sort of like a walnut. Looked like a brain, almost a bright green, like lime. Bright lime green. And I looked it up, and it's something called an Osage Orange is one of its names, and it's got a bunch of other names, and it's this enormous fruit that is inedible. So in other words, there's no reason for it to be a fruit. Nobody eats it. No animals eat it. So. And. And I discovered that it's what they call an evolutionary anachronism. So there used to be megafauna, like mammoths and giant sloths used to eat this fruit. That's why the fruit evolved and poop it out and then distribute the seeds. And then those megafauna died off. But the fruit is still around. And it was used for a short time by the tree. The Osage Native Americans used to make bows out of it because.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Because it's. Yeah, it's great wood for bows.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

It's the best in the world. Very high work to tension or I don't know what the right word is. And. And then the settlers, the, you know, European settlers who, you know, made farms in the US Used it to fence off, like, cattle fields, but then barbed wire was invented, so they stopped doing that. And, you know, nobody was hunting with bows in large numbers, so nobody was using the tree anymore. And it's. It's still around anyway, this extraordinary bright green fruit. Monkey Brain is the other name for the fruit, which is quite evocative. And so I wanted to learn about this. And there's this book called the Ghosts of Evolution by Connie Barlow. And it's all about these kind of evolutionary anachronisms, things that evolved for a certain reason and that reason no longer exists. And among them is the ginkgo tree, which is probably familiar to all of us.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. I actually take ginkgo, an extract of ginkgo leaves. Use. Supposedly good for my neurological condition.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

The supplement business is the biggest business.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. Especially if you're Chinese.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

It's a big business.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Yeah. No, I mean, it's always like, all the Chinese people in that supplements aisle at Costco.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Well, I think Americans actually have that in common with Chinese people. Have you be. Have you looked at the supplement section of your local market?

[Kaiser Kuo]

It's insane. Yeah, I mean, I take. So, all right, great recommendation, Jeremy. That's really, really cool. So Connie is like, C, O, N, N, I, E. Or is it.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

That's right. And Barlow. B, A, R, L, O, W. Oh, cool.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Excellent. I'm gonna get that. Yeah. All right. So one thing That I can say for having taken all this time off is that I have accumulated a good long list of recommendations. So I'm gonna do one that's very self serving and then one that's just plain fun. So the self serving one is my brother Jay, who is a Broadway writer and producer and a lawyer actually by training. He puts out this substack called the Status Quo. K U O. Check that out. But he wrote a book called Ma in All Caps, which is sort of a family memoir. He calls it a Ma moir focused on my mom and on the distaff side of our family. And it stretches back over a whole century. It's got quite a bit of history in it. He describes it as Amy Tan meets David Sedaris. Because, yeah, it is very. It's funny. It focuses on the sort of humorous things that have happened and, you know, it's about as accurate a description as I could come up with. Amy Tan meets David Sedaris. Around Thanksgiving, I started doing the audiobook recording of that book and it is now out on audible.com. i have to say it was very challenging to do all the accents I had to do like this German missionary and Italians and. And then of course, you know, lots of different Chinese accents rendered into what he believed were kind of the English speaking world's equivalent. So I have kind of like this 1920s Mid Atlantic that I'd use for. For my maternal grandmother. Anyway, check it out. The audiobook is. Is a lot of fun. I think you'll actually enjoy it and learn something about the crazy family that I come from. The other recommendation I have is for the novels of a Spanish writer named Arturo Perez Reverte. They're called the Alitriste novels about Captain Alitriste. There are seven of them available in English so far. I have devoured them all during this hiatus. They are set in Spain's golden age, during, you know, the earlier part of the Thirty Years War, like the 1630s. And they're told in first person from the perspective of this young Basque soldier whose father is killed fighting in Flanders. And the dead father asks his best friend, the Captain Altruiste of the title, to raise his son. So it's, you know, Altruiste is the central character and it's written by his, you know, his young ward. He, Altruiste is like this mercenary, he's like this deadly swordsman, but with like this poet's soul, you know, he's just the coolest cat. Actually in the movie version of this, he's played by Viggo Mortensen, if you can get an idea of how cool he is. Viggo Mortensen, by the way, who grew up in Latin America, speaks fluent Castilian Spanish, and it's really, really cool to watch him. But Ala Triste is or, you know, this whole book series, like any good historical fiction, it's a vehicle for learning about that time period. So this is, you know, Spain at the height of its decadence, but also, you know, where the culture is at its full flower. You know, Cervantes, the playwright, Lope de Vega are characters in it, or Cervantes is in there a lot, but the poet, actually, Francisco de Cavedo, is a major character in the book and it is shot through with all sorts of really great humor. They are just a blast. The English translations are by this woman named Margaret Sayers Peden, and they are extraordinarily skillful because of the way she presents the many, many poems in the book. All tons of poems, and they're rendered in the original rhyme and meter. They're all preserved really well. So it's quite a skill. Yeah. So Arturo Perez Reverte, the Alitruste novels. That's my recommendation. Jeremy, man, what a blast.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Yeah, what a blast for us. I hope the listeners don't think it's too much of a wank, but I had fun.

[Kaiser Kuo]

All right, off I go then.

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

That was fun. Kaiser, thank you.

[Kaiser Kuo]

You've been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show at patreon.com sinica [e-mail].

[Jeremy Goldkorn]

Or.

[Kaiser Kuo]

Email me at senecapodmail.com if you have ideas on how you can help out. Thanks to the University of Wisconsin, Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care, Sam.