Barbarians at the Gate

In this episode Jeremiah and David are pleased to talk with veteran New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Johnson.  Ian is one of our most prolific and wide-ranging China writers, ove…

Champions Day in the city of Shanghai, November 1941. The world was at war but the clubhouse at the Shanghai Race Club (now People's Park) was packed with owners and punters cheering on the pony. The…

Barbarians at the Gate returns to that ever-relevant and contentious topic, language reform in China and the fate of fangyan, the various local speech forms referred to as “dialects.”

Joining us on …

Jeremiah and David welcome historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom to the show. Jeff is Chancellor's Professor of History at the UC Irvine, and is not only a prolific academic scholar, but also one of the most…

Jeremiah and David catch up with China hand and old friend Laszlo Montgomery, who is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the China History Podcast.  Laszlo describes the evolution of the podcast, ho…

In this episode, we look at Putonghua, the spoken language most people refer to as Mandarin. David wrote a book in 2016 on the evolution of Putonghua in China and we discuss his research and the rece…

China has a long history of inviting barbarians in when useful, trying to civilize them, and then kicking them out when those barbarians prove difficult to domesticate.

As US-China relations sink to …

On Tuesday, an international tribunal at the Hague ruled that China’s attempts to claim almost the entire South China Sea as sovereign territory had no legal basis.

In a special emergency podcast, Je…