Transcript | Talking Past Each Other: Pallavi Aiyar on India, China, and the Case for Cognitive Empathy
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
This week on Sinica, I sit down with the writer Pallavi Aiyar — at her own dining table in Beijing, where in recent months I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of her and her husband Julio’s legendary hospitality. Pallavi first arrived in Beijing in 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and went on to spend the better part of a decade as The Hindu’s China correspondent — for much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country. That period produced Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, still one of the very few sustained attempts to look at China through Indian eyes. After 16 years away — years spent in Brussels, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Madrid — she’s back in Beijing, and turning her gaze inward with her latest book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts. She writes the wonderful Substack The Global Jigsaw, which I recommend without reservation.
Our conversation is built around her recent essay for Noema Magazine, “The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions,” which argues that the deepest problem in the relationship isn’t the border or the trade imbalance but the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other: China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, while India reads China through the lens of betrayal. We talk about the ugly etymology of an ethnic slur, the partial historical memories each country mistakes for the whole picture, her serialized interviews with the Chinese India-watcher Mao Keji, the aporia-inducing impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders — and how her answer to the question she first posed in 2008, “Would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”, has changed, painfully, in the years since.
4:35 – Beijing, 2002: an ad in That’s Beijing, gandhi@hotmail.com, and becoming The Hindu’s correspondent
10:03 – “Beijing and I grew up together”: the aughts as a shared coming-of-age
12:16 – The asymmetry of obsession: why India watches China, but not the reverse
16:39 – The unacknowledged third vertex: Western discursive power in the India-China relationship
18:08 – Back after 16 years: the Liangma River, blue skies, and the panopticon
21:35 – Walks in the park and the “buddy system”: what access looks like now
25:43 – Where did all the foreigners go?
29:59 – The scene at CCG: candor, offense, and the register of truth
33:10 – “Asan”: the etymology of a slur, Sikh policemen, opium fortunes, and China’s colonial lens
40:10 – 1962 and India’s betrayal lens
42:15 – Aporia: the foolhardy task of explaining India or China
47:22 – Shame and indignation: explaining a place you love versus a place you merely know
52:29 – The big question, 2008: born Indian or Chinese?
55:44 – The 2026 answer: “It hurts”
1:00:08 – Kaiser pushes back: cherry-picked comparisons, and can this essay’s very existence complicate its conclusions?
1:04:43 – Twin nations of the exam
1:06:57 – Cognitive empathy: what it would take for ordinary Indians and Chinese to actually see each other
Paying It Forward
Yaqi Li, a young Chinese international relations scholar recently returned to China after a year in Singapore — Pallavi admires the rare self-reflectiveness of his memoir-inflected IR writing on his Substack, New China Literacy, and notes that he makes an interesting case for AI-assisted writing as a way for second- and third-language English speakers to find their voice.
Recommendations
Pallavi: Flashlight by Susan Choi — a novel spanning Japan, the U.S., and North Korea, built around the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s. Also This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin — the first novel from her favorite Pakistani writer, a sprawling, Chekhovian portrait of feudalism and politics in modern Pakistan.
Kaiser: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner — beautiful at the sentence level, painted on a small canvas: two couples who meet as young academics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and their friendship across the decades. Emotionally rich despite the absence of grand drama.
Transcript
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we 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 how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Beijing, though not, for once, from my home, but from the home of my guest at a dining table where, in recent months, I have enjoyed wonderful meals and delicious wine in great company, all due to the hospitality of the guest I’ll introduce to you momentarily.
Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at SinicaPodcast.com. I know there are tons of Substacks out there, including one beautiful one I subscribe to written by my guest. They start to add up — I know they do — This one really, though, does deliver value for money with great content from wonderful partners like Trivium and the China Global South Project.
So, please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and lots more.
Today, on Sinica, I am delighted to welcome the writer Pallavi Aiyar. Pallavi first came to Beijing back in 2002, if I’m not mistaken, taught at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, and went on to spend the better part of a decade here as a correspondent for, much of that time, the only Chinese-speaking Indian foreign correspondent in the country, chronicling China’s rise for readers back home in India.
That period produced Smoke and Mirrors, her wonderful memoir of those years, which remains, I think, one of the very few sustained attempts by anyone to look at China through Indian eyes and India through China-habituated eyes. In the years since, she’s turned that same gaze on Europe, on Japan, places where she’s lived for good stretches as the wife of a diplomat. More recently, she’s turned the gaze inward in her latest excellent book, Travels in the Other Place: Pursuing the Self in Eight Acts.
Last year, Pallavi and Julio, her husband, moved back to Beijing after some 16 years away, long years, agonizing years for me, just months before my own return, which I count as just really one of the great blessings of my move back. The two of them have been convening some genuinely memorable evenings, and they are, simply put, enormously fun to be around. But the real reason she’s on the show is her writing, which manages a balance that I think is actually fiendishly difficult to strike.
Combining deep sensitivity toward both of the countries she knows best and everywhere else she writes about, combined with an almost brutal candor about each of them. She writes this Substack, which I mentioned, called The Global Jigsaw. I recommend that without reservation. Please go subscribe. And over the past year and a half, she’s published a remarkable series of essays there and elsewhere on India and China as the twin nations of the exam.
We’ll talk about that a bit. Both of them are very much sort of driven by meritocratic or notionally meritocratic exams, on the near impossibility of explaining either country to outsiders. She’s published a serialized interview with the Chinese India watcher, Mao Keji of, the National Development and Reform Commission and the piece that we’re going to build much of today’s conversation around, an essay for Noema Magazine, published by the Berggruen Institute, arguing that the deepest problem in the India-China relationship isn’t the border or the trade imbalance, but actually the distorting lenses through which each side reads the other.
We’re going to be talking about both of those lenses, about cognitive empathy and its lamentable absence in the relationship, about how her answer to the question that she posed back in 2008 — would I rather be born Indian or Chinese? — has changed, and about what it’s like to come home to a Beijing transformed.
Pallavi Aiyar, welcome to Sinica.
Pallavi Aiyar: Hey, Kaiser. It’s so great to be on the show.
Kaiser: We’re so long overdue. I mean, it was a long time ago. Smoke and Mirrors, that was the last time we had you on, right?
Pallavi: I think it was during COVID, and that was in the context of Anand Krishnan’s book on India and China, and I was on there as a discussant.
Kaiser: Oh, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah, you were on with Anand, another lovely human being who will be joining us again on the show, hopefully in the not too distant future. But let’s talk a little bit first about where you started back in 2002, probably. You guys arrived in Beijing. You arrived to teach English initially, like I said, at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. China had just joined the WTO only months before that. The Olympic bid had been won.
The CBD, this jungle of skyscrapers, was still mostly just sort of on a planner’s draft board.
Pallavi: Yes.
Kaiser: So let’s go back to that city. What was it like for a young Indian woman really just off the plane here? And how did teaching English turn into becoming the Hindu’s correspondent here?
Pallavi: So the first time I ever considered coming to China, the idea even crossing my mind, was back in 2000 when I happened to meet my now husband, Julio, with whom I’ve been hosting all these parties that you’ve been the beneficiary of.
Kaiser: Let me just give in a word about your Julio. I mean, he’s been an invaluable person for me to get European perspectives on. We have all sorts of nerd-outs where, you’ve heard all about them, talking about the Thirty Years’ War and talking about Spain and its golden day. It’s been so fun. He’s such a lovely man.
Pallavi: He is. And when I met him in 2000, he was actually already somewhat of a China person, having studied at Renmin Daxue in 1998. In fact, when I first started dating him, I remember at some point looking at him and saying, “Darling, should I start learning Spanish?” Because he’s Spanish. And he turned around and said, “Why would you do that? You should start learning Chinese.” And at that point of time, a foreign Indian with my background, which is really quite anglophone, I had sort of grown up studying in what we call English medium schools, where the language of instruction was in English.
You know, when we thought about abroad, we really thought about the UK or the U.S., these were like, or Canada, or any of the sort of developed English-speaking countries of the world. And China just didn’t really exist on the mental map of an Indian who was born in 1975 and had grown up in Delhi in the 1980s, ‘90s. We’d had a very long 20-year almost diplomatic freeze. We had no direct flights between the two countries. Trade was almost negligible. There was no China in our imagination. A kind of ridiculous situation given that we share almost 4,000 kilometers long boundary, etc., and have a deep and storied shared history, and so on, but it just didn’t exist.
So, when Julio turned around to me and said that, you know, “China is going to be the future, this is what you should be thinking about,” I just thought it was a laughable idea. Like, what would I do in China? Why would I go to China? However, I was in love. And that had a role to play in my eventual China story because he did move to China in 2001. I went off to the U.S. for a year to continue with my education. But I came to visit him in Beijing. And it was actually December 2001. And I remember driving in from the airport into the city, and just looking out of the window. And my jaw was like close to my knees.
Because just the kind of dynamism, the energy, the sort of freneticism of what you could see outside the window in terms of just the construction energy and the jackhammering. And the fact that it really looked like something was erupting, it felt tectonic. And I just kept thinking, how has this somehow escaped my knowledge? How did I not know that this was happening? There was like an epochal change happening over here. It was almost gravity-defying. Things were kind of rising up, shearing up from the ground.
And I sort of realized the weight and import of Julio’s words about, you know, China is the place to be. I, of course, didn’t know how this was going to be possible for someone like me. I’m what I call a passport-backward caste. With an Indian passport, you can’t just up and move to places in the way that a European could. But there was a lot of serendipity involved in that particular vacation. I picked up a copy of That’s Beijing, a magazine that perhaps you’re quite familiar with, Kaiser.
And I looked at the classifieds. And there was an ad in the classified for somebody to teach English news writing at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, the Běijīng Guǎngbō Xuéyuàn at the time. And the address of the person to contact was gandhi@hotmail.com. And I was like, Gandhi at Hotmail.com? Anyway, I sort of reached out to this Gandhi person who turned out to be a Chinese guy. And he was a great Gandhian.
And not only that, he had just applied to do the course that I was finishing studying for. It was a combined degree in the UK and the U.S. So, I mean, there were just all these things. And he immediately offered me this job. And suddenly I had this ability to like wash up in Beijing as a foreign expert, as a waiguó zhuānjiā. And I thought I’d be coming for a year. And like many other people at the time, the rest is history — We stayed.
Kaiser: Yeah, you stayed. And you’ve said before that you feel like you and Beijing grew up together. In your farewell column, that was, I think, in 2009, that line has really stayed with me. So, you and Julio were married here. Your son, Ishan, was born here. What do those years give you that really…? I mean, you clearly developed a special place in your heart for Beijing.
Pallavi: Absolutely.
Kaiser: You’ve lived in Jakarta. You’ve lived in Tokyo. You’ve lived in Madrid. You’ve lived all over the place. Something about Beijing has held on to you.
Pallavi: Yeah. So, I think, you know, a lot of how you respond to a place has to do with that place. But it also often has to do with you as an individual and where you are at that moment. And I came here straight out of university, you know, very much in love. It’s where I developed my voice. It’s where I discovered my vocation. I became a foreign correspondent here. I got married in 2005. My first son was born over here. Now, it feels a bit hubristic to say that Beijing and I grew up together. China is an ancient civilization.
And while I am getting on, I wouldn’t claim to that kind of age. However, in some ways, while it’s an ancient civilization, the early 2000s were also a new iteration for China, given that it had joined the WTO in 2001. It had just won the bid to host the Olympic Games.
Kaiser: You couldn’t have picked a better time.
Pallavi: You couldn’t have picked a better time. They were tearing down huge parts of the city to sort of rebuild it. So, it was a new old city and was also in some ways going through its adolescence or early adulthood in the post-reform era.
Kaiser: Certainly a growth spurt, right?
Pallavi: Right, a growth spurt. Yes. And in many ways, you know, it was the geography in which I grew up as well. And I also think that I learned, as all people who are sort of young adults learn, to negotiate certain contradictions in their lives. And to also, you know, begin to understand that there are a lot of shades of gray. And there’s a lot of nuance to life and these kind of early teenage certainties that you have of black and white. China was also going through that, and it helped me, I think, to develop a more nuanced way of understanding myself, society, other people.
Kaiser: But it still sort of surprises me that as somebody who grew up in a prominent Indian intellectual family, that China wasn’t more on your radar by 2000, just prior to your December 2000 trip here. And the reason I say this is because I remember distinctly reading in The Economist, it must have been around then, how the Indian intellectual national pastime was obsessing about China. That line really just sort of stuck with me. And I bounced it off a lot of my Indian friends at the time. I said, “Is this true?”
I mean, it sure seemed to be that way. I remember a few years later writing on the website Quora, I noticed I was answering a question about why there’s this asymmetry of interest, why it seemed that Indians were so much more interested in learning about China, asking so many China-related questions on Quora, where the equally populous Chinese population there asked almost no questions at all about India and would only sort of answer perfunctorily, was not interested in engaging.
And it’s sort of this asymmetry still that’s going to form a lot of our conversation this morning. What do you think explains your particular blind spot? And was it a blind spot? Was it already a national obsession by that time?
Pallavi: Actually, I think there was a huge difference between the 80s, 90s, and the 2000s. So, I think that, you know, basically we had a massive rapprochement around 2001, 2002, which was the time that I moved here. So, I was really in the right place at the right time. We had the first visit by a high-level visit. So, we had the Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee visit China in 2003.
Kaiser: The prior one had been in 88 or 89. I remember meeting him.
Pallavi: Exactly. So, after this like 15-year-long deep freeze, we had some kind of movement at the highest political level. We had the direct flights being reinstated in 2003, 2004. And at that point of time, we also eased trade restrictions, which then began to kind of grow exponentially. Like, they were almost doubling year on year. So, there was a sudden interest in China around the time that I came, which I think coincided, to some extent, with all of this WTO Olympic Games, because Indians really know China through the Western media.
And, as there was an uptick in the Western media about China, China, China, all of this happening, this hope that China was going to become one of us, was kind of entering the fray of Western nations by sort of joining the WTO and was going to become a different kind of power that was going to mirror the liberal West in some ways, at least that was the hope. I think that there was this surge of interest in India as well.
So there was a big difference even between the time when I first announced to people that I was leaving in 2002 for China when there was like, why would you do that? To say, a few years later, when I got married in 2005, when people were agog with what was going on in China. And suddenly China had emerged as a kind of benchmark. I think Manmohan Singh, the then Indian Prime Minister, when he came to China in 2006 said that he was going to make Mumbai into Shanghai. That was like the first explicit benchmarking of an Indian city with a Chinese city, rather than, say, a Western city.
And there was really this sense that China had suddenly become something of interest, which it should have been, given that it was a much more reasonable
