Transcript: Jonathan Chatwin on Deng Xiaoping's 1992 Southern Tour

Recorded May 23, 2024

Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast interview with Jonathan Chatwin, recorded on May 23, 2024. Thanks to Collins and the great folks at CadreScripts, and to Lili Shoup at the University of Freiburg for the help with the transcription!

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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Today on Sinica, I am delighted to welcome Jonathan Chatwin, a journalist and author whose work has appeared in many publications — none, of course, as significant as the late great China Project, where he was a wonderful contributor. He is the author of Long Peace Street, a book that used the device of an end-to-end stroll down Beijing’s central artery, Chang’an Jie, to talk about that city where I lived for 20 years. He has just published a great new book examining a pivotal event in China’s recent history, Deng Xiaoping’s well-known nánxún 南巡, or “Southern Tour,” which took place in early 1992. The book is called The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and The Fight for China’s Future. It just came out on May 16th, and it’s already gotten deservedly terrific reviews. Jonathan Chatwin, congratulations on the book, and welcome to Sinica.                                

Jonathan Chatwin: Thanks, Kaiser. It’s great to be here with you.

Kaiser: Let me start by asking you what it was that you found especially compelling about the Southern Tour as a subject. Did you have a hunch maybe that the conventional wisdom around it was somehow wrong or off, that something was missing or misleading or overhyped or overly simplified? Or did you just think that it was so pivotal, such a pivotal piece of history, that it just hadn’t been explored sufficiently?