Transcript: Sinica at the AAS Conference, Seattle 2024

The following is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast, recorded on March 15-17 in Seattle, Washington, at the Association for Asian Studies Conference.

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 the way we think and talk about China. 

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. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com. 

And listeners, 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 — 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, and the outstanding China Global South Podcast, as well as a weekly essay from the brilliant and very deeply informed folks at the China Global South Project. 

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Seattle, Washington. Several years ago, I was asked to speak at a small event, a gathering of people who were advisory board members for a small investment fund, and the convener had a question that he likes to put to people in situations like that, or even at parties, where he simply asks them, “What is something that has become clear to you recently?” So I decided to take that same idea and to put that question to people that I ran into at AAS, at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Seattle in mid-March this year. So, here’s what some of them said. 

Hey, so I just ran into Michael Davidson from UC San Diego, who listeners might remember from the show that we did on emissions trading markets. That was, gosh, Michael, when was that? 

Michael Davidson: It was probably two years ago now. 

Kaiser: Yeah, it’s like two years ago. I mean, might be even older, but anyways, it’s one of the best conversations I’ve ever had about carbon trading systems. So, let me ask you a question here. What is something that has become clear to you recently in the field? 

Michael: Well, thanks Kaiser. That’s a tough question to answer. I think, as someone who studies climate change and clean energy transitions, I think there’s actually an enormous amount of optimism just in the last few years about the scale of development and deployment in clean energy and how much progress we’ve made in deploying some of the important technologies that we need in order to achieve climate change goals, and China is probably one of the leading examples in this front. Last year, they deployed almost 300 gigawatts of wind and solar compared to about 40 gigawatts in the United States, which is still a very substantial amount. And we just had a study out last month, PNAS, that showed what China would need in order to achieve its 2060 carbon neutrality target.