Transcript | Adam Tooze Climbs the China Learning Curve

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica 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 how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you today from the lovely town of Shaxi in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, where I’m almost three weeks now into a month-long musical retreat with other members of my band, Chun Qiu — Spring & Autumn — which reformed in the spring of this year. We are here working on material for a new album, which we anticipate we’ll record later this year, and hopefully release early next year.

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Well, it just so happens that my friend Adam Tooze has been in China for much of the last month as well for the World Economic Forum event in Tianjin, for various meetings and talks. And, as luck would have it, he was in Yunnan this week. He was able to pop over to Shaxi to visit me here, meet my band mates, and was even able to join us for some early morning mushroom hunting, and in which you were successful. Yes.

Adam Tooze: Yeah, I got a good one.

Kaiser: Yeah. You got a really good one.

Adam: I’m very pleased.

Kaiser: We will be dining on that tonight. Listeners will know Adam from his own podcast, Ones and Tooze, from his fantastic Chartbook newsletter, an absolute must-read, from his many excellent articles and op eds in all sorts of publications, and most of all from his numerous books. He’s also been a guest on this program on three previous occasions. Adam is an economic historian who teaches at Columbia, where he directs the European Institute there. But in recent years, his work is increasingly related to China, and especially to China’s role in the energy transition, something that will be a major focus of the book he is now working on. Adam, it’s just been so wonderful having you here in Shaxi.

Adam: It’s been an absolute pleasure being here and meeting your band. The album is going to be great.

Kaiser: Yeah. Well, thanks. Yeah, we subjected him to a little bit of our rehearsals, and I think you’re going to hear some more later when we’re done here. How do you like the town so far?

Adam: It’s truly a magnificent spot. And one hastens to advertise tourism in China because the flows are so gigantic when they’re unleashed, but this is the most intact medieval-feeling Chinese town that I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of, you know, from an European point of view, it reminds me of Italy, of Tuscany, something like that.