Transcript: Is the U.S. Experiencing a Narrative Shift on China?
Sinica co-founder Jeremy Goldkorn joins to discuss the possibility
Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup 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 from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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The Chinese New Year holiday is upon us. The Year of the Dragon is over. The Year of the Snake begins, and may it be a prosperous and happy one for all of you listeners. You might recall that on February 15th last year, at the very beginning of the Dragon year, Sinica came back after a brief hiatus following the demise of The China Project. And my guest was none other than Jeremy Goldkorn, co-founder of the show way back in 2010. Well, one lunisolar year on, he is back — still out there in Nashville but planning his move to Washington, D.C., or perhaps to Mar-a-Lago, inspired, as he’s been, by the meteoric ascent of another white South African to the corridors of power. A return to Sinica is clearly a very smart strategic move on your path to power, right Jeremy?
Jeremy Goldkorn: Yeah, that’s right. I know all the people in Mar-a-Lago and in the White House are listening. (laughs)
Kaiser: Anyway, man, welcome back! Greet the people, won’t you? Man, I miss saying that. Greet the people.
Jeremy: Yeah, hello people. I don’t know. You can get other people to greet the people. I’m not the only people greeter.
Kaiser: Yeah, but it’s a you and me thing, right? It’s our special thing, man.
Jeremy: Yeah, hello people. It’s great to be back.
Kaiser: So, Jeremy, before we jump into our conversation, why don’t you tell everyone what you’ve been doing for the last year? I mean, we barely see you on Twitter, which seems a deliberate decision on your part. So, where should people be looking for you on socials these days? And what have you been doing with yourself?
Jeremy: Yeah. Not on Twitter for sure. I don’t really like the way that other white South African is running things over there. (laughs)
Kaiser: Yeah. Neither do I.
Jeremy: I think it’s a cesspit, and I would recommend everybody leaves, like now. You can find me on social media, the only place I really post actively is Bluesky. I’ve been working with the great team at ChinaFile with Suzy Jakes.
Kaiser: Yeah, Suzy.
Jeremy: The Asia Society’s website. So, I’m working as an editor there. And I’m tinkering around with a bunch of other things. I’m playing around with a weekly newsletter about China that you can find the initial experimentations at thechinaweek.com. And I’m not sure where I’ll go with it, but anyone interested in us is welcome to give me feedback or send rotten tomatoes. And I am just really contemplating the dire state of our world and wondering whether I should just lock the gate to Goldkorn Holler and commit to homesteading.
Kaiser: Well, today we’re going to try to talk about something a little sunnier, yeah? A little happier.
Jeremy: Yeah. Some of it. (laughs)
Kaiser: Well, I mean, so yeah, just to cut to it, I wanted to focus our conversation today on whether what we are experiencing right now in China discourse, just in the last couple of weeks, constitutes an actual narrative shift in the U.S. when it comes to China. Listeners are all aware of what I would regard as the two major impetus, “impeti?” for this. I did a show with Ivy Yang and David Fishman about the whole phenomenon of TikTok refugees on Xiaohongshu and how that has popularized this idea that, rightly or wrongly, “Hey, we young people have been fed a whole lot of anti-China propaganda from the U.S. side. We’ve been gaslighted” — gaslit? I don’t know — “when it comes to China. And the media has presented a really one-sided view of China.” Of course, there was that, and then there was DeepSeek-R1, which arguably has been having an even bigger impact.
Let me quickly add that since neither of us are equipped to discuss the finer technical details of DeepSeek, we aren’t going to embarrass ourselves and try to tackle any of these questions that are raised in the aftermath of R1’s drop, questions about whether their team distilled output from ChatGPT to train its model quickly, you know, whether that $5.6 million in training means… Anyway, we can do that another time. And I’ll talk a little later about somebody I’m going to have back onto the show to talk about all that. But we can definitely talk about how this has been perceived more broadly. So, Jeremy, I know you’ve been thinking about this an awful lot, and I’m sure you can put your finger on other major drivers, besides the TikTok refugees and DeepSeek. But what would some of those be for you?
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