Transcript: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jane Perlez on her new podcast series, Face-Off
Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast recorded on April 17. Thanks to the great folks at Cadre Scripts for the transcript, and to Lili Shoup at the University of Freiburg for going over it and formatting it!
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. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support, just as Wisconsin-Madison has. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com.
And listeners, please, please, please support my work on Substack at sinica.substack.com. There, you will find, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show, a weekly essay from me, and now a wide range of offerings, including James Carter’s This Week in China’s History; Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf; Andrew Methven’s Chinese Phrase of the Week; The You can learn Chinese Podcast from Jared Turner and John Pasden, and, of course, the outstanding China-Global South Podcast, and an essay each week from our friends at the China-Global South Project.
Today on Sinica, I am delighted to welcome Jane Perlez, former Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with many years of experience in China, Jane left China in 2019 and has joined my profession, such as it is, by creating a couple of podcast series on China — The Great Wager, which was about the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China and its fate, and now the series, Face-Off, produced in her capacity as a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. You may recall Rana Mitter plugging Face-Off in his recent appearance on Sinica.
Today we’ll talk about this new podcast, which looks at the troubled U.S.-China relationship from multiple angles, from technology to nuclear war, from the Taiwan issue to cultural exchange. We’ll also chat about the state of American reporting on China and the challenges of trying to cover a country as enormous and consequential as China with a pitifully small number of reporters on the ground, following the expulsions of so many of them. And we’ll talk about what insights Jane has gleaned in the past several years as she’s focused her reporter’s eye on China’s president and CPC General Secretary, Xi Jinping. Jane Perlez, welcome back to Sinica. It’s been a long time. When were you last on?
Jane Perlez: Well, it’s great to be here. And Kaiser, I don’t know if you recall, but we were last on in Beijing in 2013, I believe.
Kaiser: Oh my God.
Jane: And it was on the fourth floor of a walkup. And you were in front of the mic and there was beer on the concrete floor. And Ananth Krishnan from The Hindu was there. And I’m embarrassed to say, I think we even talked about Xi Jinping’s wife and how she was going to join Xi Jinping on some overseas trip. I mean, it seems so trivial.
Kaiser: It must have been India, yeah.
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