The Little Red Podcast

To welcome the Year of the Snake, we’re launching a new series looking at belief in China. Young Chinese people are increasingly turning to spirituality - even online manifestations of it - and feng shui, in this moment of high unemployment and economic stress. For a Party guided by materialism, this spike in spiritual interest presents a dilemma: how to regulate something you purport not to believe in. To discuss the state's use of spirituality from the Qing to now, we’re joined by Tristan Brown, a historian at MIT and author of Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China and Haoyang Zhai, a researcher at the University of Melbourne. Image: “May The Snake Be With You” c/- Juliette Baxter Episode transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried form, a kilo from the right species goes for around $150,000 on the world market, double the price of a kilogram of cocaine. The most prized maw is found in one of the remotest corners of the planet, the Kikori Delta in southern Papua New Guinea, where the once ignored scaly croaker is being targeted on an industrial scale by Chinese fishing companies, transforming the lives of villagers—and the ecosystem. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism who reported on the fish maw trade for Nature magazine.  Image: c/- Jo Chandler, Veraibari Village 2024. Jo’s fieldwork was supported in part by the Walkley Foundation Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In our third episode on pig butchering scams, we explore the origins of the Chinese criminal syndicates that enslave people from at least 66 different countries. We examine the institutions supporting this appalling business, from the Thai military to cryptocurrencies, Burmese border guard forces to special economic zones. And the marks for these scam syndicates are not just Chinese lonely hearts—Western countries are now more profitable to scam than China. To ask what can be done to counter this trade, Graeme is joined by Jason Tower, director of the Burma Program at the United States Institute of Peace, and Greg Raymond from the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. Image: c/- Stefan Czimmek/DW, KK Park on the Myanmar-Thai borderSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After our last episode on an online romance scam operating out of Palau we were contacted by Neo Lu, who was trafficked to work in an online scam camp on the Myanmar-Thailand border, the victim of a $US3 trillion global criminal industry. He joins Louisa and Graeme to offer jaw-dropping detail on life inside a scam centre, the mechanics of pig butchering, who benefits from this new form of slavery and how they launder their profits. Image: c/- Yihao Lu, Scamming equipment, Dongmei Camp, 2022 Episode transcripts are available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For our hundredth episode, there was only one choice in the Year of the Dragon. We tackle the scaly mythical beast, which now finds itself central to the Party’s image. We look at the political efficacy of the dragon for the CCP, which has recently launched a nationalistic rebranding campaign for the ‘loong’ to distinguish it from evil Western dragons. We explore the history of the dragon, its often-fraught relationship to power, and (once common) “official sightings” of dragons in government gazetteers. To get to grips with the most auspicious creature in China’s pantheon, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Australian sinologist Linda Jaivin, author of The Monkey and the Dragon, historian James Carter from St. Joseph's University, and Annie Ren, a postdoctoral fellow of Chinese literature at the Australian National University. Transcripts are available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/ Image: c/- Louisa Lim, Bendigo, 2024See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stand-up comedy looked set to be the next big thing on China’s entertainment scene, with shows like Roast Convention drawing billions of views and comics scoring lucrative commercial endorsements. But comedy now finds itself in retreat. A new wave of feminist comics is struggling with attacks from online trolls and a disapproving state. To ask whether the regime–and China’s men—can take a joke, Louisa and Graeme are joined by three stand up Chinese comedians: He Huang who's based here in Australia, and two members of the London-based 50 Shades of Feminism, Barbie and Elena. Transcript available at: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/the-feminists-have-stood-up-gender-and-comedy-in-china/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The exponential trauma produced by the Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in China, yet has been foundational to a generation. Now the Communist Party is using the experience of its leader Xi Jinping as one of the 17 million young people sent down to the countryside to reframe the movement as showcasing personal sacrifice in the interests of national success. The party would like other aspects to be forgotten, such as the unimaginable violence in Chongqing or the petty brutality that set children onto their parents. In the second part of our series on history and memory, Louisa and Graeme discuss the legacies of the Cultural Revolution with sociologist Xu Bin from Emory University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the author of Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China and Guardian journalist Tania Branigan whose book Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution came out in May. Show transcript: https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/bombard-the-past-exhuming-the-cultural-revolution/ Image: Red Guard, June 1968. c/- Wikimedia Commons and China Pictorial See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.