Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
Something different this week. Since I moved back to Beijing, the question I get most often has nothing to do with trade or tech or the 15th Five Year Plan. People want to know what my life here is actually like. So I carried a mic and a portable recorder around for the weekend of October 30 to November 1 and let it roll: a Friday afternoon at Café Zarah with a new friend in from Berlin, Friday night at the Golden Weasel, a Saturday that ran from a China Unicom office to an HKU forum to a very good dinner, and Sunday lunch at Sanyang Cai with an old friend back after eight years. Along the way, conversations with Olumide Abimbola, Michael Cherney, Anthony Tao, Wang Zichen, Wang Feng, Andy Rothman, and Eric Fish, a few words on the word “expat,” and news of a new apartment near Tuanjiehu.
01:19 – Why a weekend edition: what my weekdays in Beijing look like, informal office hours at Café Zarah, and a home full of moving boxes
02:59 – A word about “expats”: why I avoid the word, why I don’t avoid the people, and what a city’s foreign community says about the city
07:16 – Friday at Café Zarah with Olumide Abimbola of Berlin’s Africa Policy Research Institute: building-integrated solar in Baoding, and why Europe needs to say what it wants from China rather than just what it doesn’t
12:40 – Friday night at the Golden Weasel: Michael Cherney on people coming back to Beijing and a creative scene finding its feet again
14:43 – Anthony Tao on the bar as a third space, and why no one can ever paint the complete picture of something like the Mbappé controversy (plus Michael’s Schrödinger’s 猫 pun)
20:42 – Amy on fifteen years in Beijing: the 2012 vibe, COVID, “the brickening,” and how the Weasel became a beacon
23:38 – Saturday: a morning at China Unicom, then the HKU Talent Forum with Wang Zichen and with Wang Feng, the former FT Chinese editor-in-chief now heading up communications at the University of Hong Kong
28:08 – My panel: the Republic of Letters, the CSC-PRC after the Nixon opening, and scientific exchange in an age of weaponized interdependence
30:36 – Andy Rothman on why the government seems less worried than he is about income growth and consumption, the K-shaped economy, and what Foshan tells you about the property slowdown
33:58 – Dinner with economist Zhu Ning and his theory linking the deliberate deflation of the property bubble to China’s push into AI and hard tech; a Halloween-free Saturday at the Weasel and Schwarzman Scholars at Time Keepers
36:15 – Sunday lunch at Sanyang Cai with Eric Fish, back after eight years: what’s changed, what hasn’t, and Chinese students in the U.S. caught between “divorcing parents”
41:21 – Monday-night open mic at Time Keepers
Paying It Forward
Ollie Dieckmann, a former Sinica intern and a very promising young researcher, who was in town last week with Marina Rudyak and her colleague Nadine.
Recommendations
Kaiser: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I’m reading on the recommendation of Marina Rudyak, who was born in Russia and calls it her favorite Russian novel. Terrifically funny, lurching between big philosophical ideas and slapstick. Quite a contrast from the last Russian doorstop I read, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. And if you’re in Beijing: the Monday-night open mic at Time Keepers (叁更) by the Drum and Bell Towers, hosted by Saso.
Mentioned in this episode
Olumide Abimbola, founder of the Africa Policy Research Institute (APRI), Berlin
Michael Cherney, photographer, calligrapher, and painter
Anthony Tao, poet and co-owner of the Golden Weasel; my earlier conversation with him: Anthony Tao: The Poetry and Soul of Beijing
Wang Feng, former editor-in-chief of FT Chinese, now heading up communications at the University of Hong Kong
Zhu Ning, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SAIF), author of China’s Guaranteed Bubble
Eric Fish, author of China’s Millennials: The Want Generation
Joe Studwell, How Africa Works (Profile Books) — my conversation with Joe is coming in two weeks
Marina Rudyak on Sinica: China, Europe, and the Russo-Ukrainian War
Transcript
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we 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 this week from Beijing.
Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. I get how all these Substack subscriptions can really start to add up. So, I try to offer you guys a lot. You get the Sinica Chinese Phrase of the Week from Andrew Methven. You get podcasts and roundups from the terrific folks at Trivium, the indispensable China Global South Podcast. You get historian Jay Carter’s This Week in China’s History. You get the You Can Learn Chinese Podcast. And now, in a new weekly feature, a Europe-China perspective from Limen China’s René Ruschmeier. So, please do subscribe, so I can continue to bring you those conversations and all that other good stuff.
I wanted to do something different this week. In the time since I’ve come back to Beijing, I get asked a lot about what my day-to-day life here it’s understandable. So, I thought I’d bring a mic and a portable recorder along with me for the weekend to give listeners a sense for what it’s like for me living in Beijing again. Weekdays are different. I mean, I just read a lot for upcoming shows. I try to write something. I prep for upcoming talks. Of course, I edit the podcast. I publish the other great stuff on Sinica, and lots more just work stuff. Yes, I also meet for lunch with my daughter or with some friends, and I usually squeeze in a band rehearsal or two.
Weekdays, I hold a kind of informal office hours, I guess you could call it, at one of my favorite cafes in town, Café Zarah. And it seems a number of young people have figured out that they can find me there most days and that, well, I’m more than happy to hear about their work, offer what advice I can about their academic interests or their careers, or just chat with them about what’s on their mind when it comes to China, trade issues, or tech or politics, or the state of the economy, or the discourse, or music, or anything at all. So, this weekend was all about life outside the home, which isn’t typical.
The home, as it happens, is currently filled with moving boxes. On the last Thursday of October, just before we did this little weekend, Fanfan and I finally found the apartment that we want to rent for the next couple of years before we ship all of our stuff over and decide whether we’re going to actually buy in Beijing. More on the new place later, but there was a lot of incentive to be out of the apartment for the whole weekend.
Before I dive in, let me address something that I know will raise hackles with some listeners. I know that what follows is a bit heavy on foreigners, on so-called expatriates. I’ve actually long had a problem with that particular word. For some reason, it seems, in the Asian context at least, to have come to mean white people living abroad. I never hear Chinese people living in the U.S. described as expats, despite my efforts to popularize that over the last decade living in North Carolina, where there are a lot of Chinese expats.
For some reason, people don’t even talk about other East Asian people living in China as expats. It’s a super loaded word. It’s bothered me for a long time. I generally avoid it. But I don’t avoid these expats. Now, to be sure, I lament the fact that any group of folks living abroad in a place as interesting, as Beijing especially, would choose only to spend their time with others like them rather than participating meaningfully in the life of the city where they live. Their loss. But honestly, I’m not one of those people. I try to divide my time and hang out a lot with my bandmates who are Beijingers and with other people I know from the rock scene. I am not ashamed that I have lots of friends here too.
Foreigners living abroad in a city like Beijing are not to be shunned out of some notional commitment to authenticity. I know people who’ve been like that. No way am I going to that party. It’s a lǎowài, they’ll say, using a word for foreigners that’s not entirely value neutral. And come on, this is especially silly given the sorts of foreigners who live long-term in Beijing. I rate them, for the most part, an amazing bunch. They live here very intentionally, making a real effort to connect with and understand the city and the country.
If they tend to gather occasionally at the same bars, the same watering holes, I think that can be forgiven. They’re eager, just as I am, you know, to share their observations, to float their various hypotheses, or sometimes just to talk about the books they’re reading or the shows they’re watching or just to gossip. So, yeah, most of the people I happened across during the course of this weekend who were willing to have a mic stuck up in their face, and when it wasn’t so loud that doing so would have been pointless, happened to have been foreign residents.
They also happened to speak English, and, as you may have noticed, this is an English-language show. Yeah, so this all still sounds more defensive than I wanted it to. The fact is, the kind of foreign community that a city draws to it says something meaningful about that city. I am grateful to be part of this community. It gives the place something of a small town feel where you keep running into the same bunch of folks and you kind of know the gossip.
You see them navigating some of the same contradictions that you face, like one that I’ll flick at during the little capsule conversations that follow. So many of us were really drawn to Beijing and to China because of the incredible pace of change. And yet so many of us also feel nostalgia for the place that we initially encountered, which we sailed past long ago already on this swift moving river of time. So, I get a lot of emails, Twitter DMs, and especially LinkedIn messages of late that basically say, “Hey, I’m so and so, and I work at such and such, and I’m a long-time listener to your show. I’ll be in Beijing from this date to that date and would love to buy you a cup of coffee or a beer.” Now, I am a gregarious fellow, and I love Nothing more than meeting people with common interests or even without common interests.
And I do like coffee and beer. So, having never seen a red flag thus far, touch wood, I’ve never said no. The first guy you’ll hear from reached out basically like that. I didn’t say his name very clearly on the recording, so I’m going to do it here. His name is Olumide Abimbola. We seriously vibed on all sorts of stuff -- on books, on politics, on theories of development, on parenting and our parents. And we ended up spending like five hours together, five hours so well spent. I learned, among other things, that Yoruba, his language, is also a tonal language. It has a kind of do-re-mi tonal system. So I think it’s like, o-lu-mi-deh, but I’m probably getting that wrong. Anyway, here we go.
So, it’s Friday afternoon. I’m sitting in my favorite cafe, Café Zarah, on Gulou Dongdajie in Central Beijing. This is where I tend to work most days of the week. And I’ve just been joined here by a new friend, somebody I met earlier, Olumide Abimbola, who comes from Abuja in Nigeria but lives in Berlin now, where he runs a think tank. And he’s not a China guy per se. No. He works on Germany and on issues of development in Africa and naturally is interested in China. Is this your first time here?
Olumide Abimbola: My second time.
Kaiser: Oh, the second time in China. And I met him earlier this week. You know, he’s a listener to Eric and Cobus’ show and to Sinica, and he reached out. I was really curious to hear now, it’s been now five days that he’s been here, mostly about what questions you have about China. What has puzzled or surprised you, and what are you interested in knowing?
Olumide: Thank you very much, Kaiser. What has puzzled me? I don’t really have any puzzles specifically. I’m curious. I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to see what’s next. I’m trying to know how China moves ahead with partnerships around the world, including with Europe, where I live, with Africa, where I work and what I work on, what topics are interesting for the Beijing government, but also what’s interesting for businesses here on both sides, so on the Africa side and also on the European side.
Kaiser: We had a really interesting conversation here last weekend where we talked mainly about Germany’s response to this post-COVID surge in EV exports especially, but in industrial exports of all sorts. You’re in Germany. You had an interesting sort of one-word response to this. I don’t know if you’re going to be too polite to say this on tape, but tell me what your general thoughts are now, having been here for a little while, having sort of witnessed Beijing’s industrial might on display, and what are you thinking now?
Olumide: Okay, so first of all, to talk a bit about that industrial might that you talked about. So I was in Baoding yesterday. I was at a solar manufacturing factory, and I found things that I didn’t know existed. It’s called BIPV, so building-integrated PV, photovoltaic, where you could have a building and have pictures on it, but underneath
