Introducing the Sinica Substack

..and what I've been doing since the end of The China Project

And I’m back! Miss me?

I was gutted by the demise of The China Project, which published the Sinica Podcast between May 2016 and November 2023, and I’m still deeply saddened that such a fine publication, put out by a team of dedicated and talented people I was proud to call colleagues, couldn’t survive the vicissitudes of the media biz.

But as I said back then, I was determined to continue publishing Sinica. So with a little help from the people who value the program and its perspectives, I’m delighted to announce that Sinica will be publishing weekly once again, generally on Thursday afternoons Eastern Time just like we used to.

Huge thanks to David Fields and the great folks at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for East Asian Studies. David reached out in my time of need with an offer of sponsorship, and that put the wind back in my sails and convinced me that I could make a go of this, despite my utter lack of entrepreneurial spirit. If your university, company, or think tank sees value in what I’m trying to do, please get in touch about helping me out.

In addition to the podcast and the transcript, which will be available to subscribers here on Substack, I’ll also be penning a weekly essay on some China-related topic. These will also be available here on Substack and on Patreon in audio form for subscribers.

But wait, there’s more! I’ll also be publishing the amazing James Carter’s column, This Week in China’s History, which was a huge fan favorite over at The China Project. Jay — he goes by Jay — wrote that column for well over three years, rarely skipping a week. I’m thrilled that readers will still get a chance to read his work, which I’ll also be narrating and putting out, again on Substack and Patreon, in audio form.

Three months was a long time to be away, but I’ve not been idle. I recorded an audiobook for my brother Jay Kuo, who writes the fabulous U.S. politics-focused Substack “The Status Kuo” (yes, he uses the anglicized pronunciation of our surname, and not just when making awful puns). The book is called Ma in All Caps, and he describes it as a “Ma-moir,” focusing on my late mom’s side of the family. “Amy Tan meets David Sedaris” is an apt description of it. It’s got a foreword by George Takei of Star Trek fame, and I had a great time reading the thing.

I also started translating a book by my paternal grandfather, the historian Kuo Ting-yee (Guo Tingyi, 郭廷以 ) — his last work, before he died in 1975, called Outline History of Modern China 《近代中国史纲》.

Born in Jiangdianjie 姜店阶 (now 姜店乡Jiandianxiang), a township of Wuyang County 舞阳县 in Henan, my grandfather was the son of an illiterate landowner who, along with his two older brothers, had worked their way up from tenant farmers to become some of the wealthiest landholders in Wuyang. As the first male of his generation to survive childhood, and showing a certain precocity as a boy, he was singled out to be educated — initially in a one-room schoolhouse with a dirt floor (which I visited in 2009, and which still stands today), and later in Kaifeng at Kaifeng No. 2 Middle School. The May Fourth Incident, which took place while he was just 15, nevertheless profoundly affected him, and he embraced its ideals and went on to become quite active politically. He moved to Nanjing, where he finished high school, then enrolled in Southeastern University. During his time there he joined the newly-reorganized Kuomintang, then earned his bachelor’s degree in history in 1927. His best-known mentor in Nanjing, the eminent scholar and diplomat Luo Jialun 罗家伦, secured him a teaching position at Tsinghua in Beijing. After two years he returned to Kaifeng in his native Henan, where he taught at Henan University and where my father was born in 1932.

Returning to Nanjing at the height of the Nanjing Decade, he taught at the Central Political School. He headed the history department at Central University during the war years, when the university moved inland to Chongqing. After the war, in 1947, he was dispatched to Taiwan where he held positions at Taiwan National University and Taiwan Normal University.

He was known initially as the leading scholar of the Taiping Rebellion — or Taiping Civil War, as we’re now calling it — and published major works about the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. But he also faithfully recorded the events of the more recent past: among his works is the Chronicle of Modern Chinese History, a monumental day-to-day account of major events spanning the period from 1829 to 1937.

In 1955, he began work to create what would become the Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History, which formally launched in 1965. (The modern history library attached to the institute bears his name). Alas, despite his close relationship with Chiang Kai-shek — my father told me, growing up, that Kuo Ting-yee had served as personal tutor to Chiang Ching-guo — he found the political climate in Taiwan unconducive to objective historical scholarship, and so he arranged to leave Taiwan, first for the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii and then to Harvard, Yale, and finally Columbia.

My grandfather died in New York in 1975 when I was just nine years old, but I remember visiting him frequently in his Riverside Drive apartment. At the time, my family was living in upstate New York, in Tioga County in what’s called the Southern Tier. We would drive the 200 miles every other weekend, and my grandmother, Li Xinyan, would always have fresh-baked Rice Krispies Treats waiting for us. Their aroma would fade as the weekend went on, revealing the underlying smell of pipe tobacco, old books, and mothballs.

On those weekends, my grandfather would take my brothers and me on walks with him to Grant’s Tomb and around Riverside Park. He was tall, gaunt, and frail. He seemed always to have a cough. I remember the sound of his voice and his odd accent, and how on our walks he often bestowed on me the honor of wearing his short-brimmed fedora.

When he died in 1975, my father was just about to leave for his first trip back to China since he left the mainland in 1949. My father Jenkai was, at the time, a believer in Mao’s revolution, and argued ceaselessly with my grandfather over the merits of the communists. Many years later, when I asked him what they argued about, my father told me that Yeye had been right: “Mao wants to change human nature,” he had said. “But people cannot change their nature overnight,” he had said.

What struck me immediately when I embarked on reading this work, when I was in graduate school 30 years ago, was how salient it all still was, and how my grandfather’s basic historiographical approach was sound enough to have endured many waves of new scholarship. I’m curious to see now how well it still holds up. So far, so good! I’ll be looking for an academic press that might be interested in publishing the translation. So if you know anyone…

Meanwhile, I’ve also been reading a lot, practicing Chinese archery whenever I haven’t been on the road, and managing to bake bread, cook, and re-watch a couple of seasons of The Sopranos with my son Johnny.

I won’t say much about what’s in store for Sinica except to say there’s already a wonderful lineup of guests, and many books on my nightstand that I intend do finish and whose authors I intend to interview.

The first new episode, fittingly, is a kind of retrospective with Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of The China Project and co-founder of the Sinica Podcast back in 2010. Jeremy, sadly, won’t be a regular on the show and is contemplating life beyond China-focused media — which is all he’s done, really, since the 90s! — but he’ll be back on occasionally. I’m going to miss him dearly.

Finally, let me say a word of thanks to the many, many people who’ve written to me, messaged me on Twitter, called, or texted to tell me how much Sinica has meant to them and to encourage me to keep it going. I’m honored and will do my utmost to keep the show at or above the standard that you’ve come to expect.