China and the World Program's Podcast

About China and the World Program's Podcast

The Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program, was founded in 2004 and and seeks to integrate an advanced study of China's foreign relations into international affairs, politics, economics, regional studies, IPE, IR, Policy, etc.

Publisher

China and the World Program

Category

government

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

23 Oct 2023

Latest episode

21 Apr 2026

Latest episodes

10 of 20 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   21 Apr 2026

   Episode 53: EP53 - Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China with Eyck Freymann

   Taiwan is where the uneasy peace between the United States and China will be tested--and possibly broken. Beijing believes that "reunification" is inevitable. American military strength has preserved peace and stability for decades, but its advantages are eroding. Beijing has found critical gaps in U.S. strategy and is working to squeeze, isolate, and coerce Taiwan into submission without firing a shot. If deterrence fails, the consequences of a Taiwan crisis would be catastrophic--plunging the global economy into chaos, shattering U.S. alliances, and allowing China to dominate the region and reshape the world order.

2. 

   15 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Episode 52: EP52 - 'Foreign Agents: National Identity Politics and the Making of China’s External Others, 1895-Present' with Yinan He

   In June 2019, as massive street protests shook Hong Kong, Chinese state media framed the opposition not as legitimate domestic dissidents, but as a “traitorous gang” and “scum of the nation” colluding with “Western anti-China forces.” This rhetoric reflects a century-long pattern in modern China: political elites’ strategic linkage of internal adversaries with external foes to consolidate power during critical phases of state- and nation-building.In this talk, based on the forthcoming book Foreign Agents, I introduce the concept of “national Othering,” a distinctive form of identity politics. While traditional scholarship focuses on differentiation between the self and a foreign “Other,” this research examines the construction of a dualistic Other: a domestic figure whose patriotic credentials are undermined by real or contrived ties to an external adversary.Drawing on a systematic investigation of China’s national identity discourse, from the late Qing through the Mao era to the current Xi Jinping administration, the talk investigates why and when elites choose to amplify or mute these internal–external linkages, and how such discursive shifts reorient China’s attitudes toward the world. I argue that elites use national Othering to navigate domestic power challenges and redirect dissatisfaction, and in doing so, they actively exploit external shocks and historical memory to deepen its public resonance. This, in turn, makes individual elites’ nationalist visions, threat perceptions, and strategic calculations central to how the discourse is articulated and mobilized.More broadly, national Othering serves as a meta-mechanism of autocratic entrenchment, providing a narrative rationale for the marginalization of dissent. By uncovering the domestic identity dynamics that drive the rise and fall of ethnocentrism, this research suggests that as performance legitimacy wanes, the CCP’s deepening reliance on national Othering further entrenches authoritarian rule and locks China into an adversarial self-image, making a collision course with the West increasingly difficult to avoid.Yinan He is an associate professor in international relations at Lehigh University. Her research focuses on politics of memory and reconciliation, national identity and nationalism, and East Asian international security. She is the author of The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since WWII (Cambridge University Press). She was previously a fellow in the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program.

3. 

   9 Dec 2025TRANSCRIPT

   Episode 51: How did Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening end in the revival of totalitarian rule - with Prof. Pei Minxin

   The transformative socioeconomic changes China has experienced since Deng Xiaoping launched "reform and opening" in 1979 have turned an impoverished society into a global superpower. But instead of a freer and more open society fully integrated into the existing liberal international order, economic modernization under one-party rule has only revived totalitarian rule and triggered an escalating geopolitical conflict with the U.S. Although this tragic and potentially catastrophic outcome is not inevitable, Deng's strategy to save the Chinese Communist Party with capitalist tools made the return of strongman rule under Xi Jinping and reversal of reform an accident waiting to happen.-Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. In 2019 he was the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on U.S.-China Relations. Prior to joining Claremont McKenna College in 2009, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as its director of the China Program from 2003 to 2008. He was an opinion columnist for Bloomberg (2023-2024) and the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (1994); China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (2006); China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016); The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (2024); and The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (2025).Minxin received his Ph.D. in government at Harvard and taught at Princeton University (1992-1997). He is the recipient of the National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Robert McNamara Fellowship of the World Bank. His op-eds and columns have appeared in the New York Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, FT, Nikkei Asian Review, Project Syndicate, the Economist, Bloomberg, and other publications.

Inside a recent episode

Episode 52: EP52 - 'Foreign Agents: National Identity Politics and the Making of China’s External Others, 1895-Present' with Yinan He

Published 15 Apr 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Okay, smaller figures here. And all of these actors seem to be linked to one another with these strings here, one here and multiple ones here. I have a few strings here. Okay. And at the same time, this towering figure in the center, which stands for Chinese people, is crushing all of these hostile forces in one single block. This poster actually delivers a stark political message. It does not just depict a foreign enemy, it collapses domestic and foreign enemy in one united political battlefield. To me, this image provides a vivid illustration about the strategy of national othering. By that, I mean strategies through which elites try to link their internal and external enemies in order to consolidate power, especially during critical moments of nation and state building. […]

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 28 / 100

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Quality

24

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

81

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