The Little Red Podcast
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The Little Red Podcast
The Little Red Podcast: interviews and chat celebrating China beyond the Beijing beltway. Hosted by Graeme Smith, China studies academic at the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs and Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advan...
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102 episodi
Wolf Spirits and Wild Shamans: The Revival of Spirit Mediums
In the latest episode in our series on belief, we’re exploring the surprising revival of shamanism in China, which has made a comeback despite Mao's b...
Man Up: The Rise and Rise of China’s Manosphere
In the latest in our series on belief, we’re examining the emergence of incels in the world’s largest manosphere. China’s growing incel community is...
Karma Chameleon: The CCP turns to Buddhism
Continuing our series on belief in China, we look at the revival of Buddhism, which is being embraced by citizens and the Chinese state. While temple...
The Garbage Time of History: Is China Still Marxist?
In the latest in our series on belief, we’re looking at China’s official belief system—Marxism. In recent years, netizens have argued China has enter...
China on the Couch: Xi Jinping's Psy-boom
In our third episode on beliefs and ideologies, we explore China’s newfound enthusiasm for psychiatry. Counselling was only registered as a profession...
Let's Get Spiritual: State, Digital Spirituality and Feng Shui in China
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 spirituali...
Sisters doing it for themselves? Marriage Refusal and Little Milk Puppies
China is in the grip of a gender war. While government officials are texting and even cold calling women to urge them have children, the fertility rat...
Give me Maw: China's Craze for the Cocaine of the Seas
Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried...
The Centre of the Vortex: Survivors' Notes from Hong Kong Writers
Writers from Hong Kong face a Kafkaesque decision in the years since draconian security legislation was imposed on the city: to stay and be subject to...
Special Criminal Zones: China’s Pig Butchers Pivot to the West
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...
Cognitive hazing: The Disinformation War on Taiwan?
Taiwan is ground zero for cognitive warfare, with the island subject to more disinformation than any other democracy. The targets are political candid...
The Pig Butcher’s Payroll: Inside a Romance Scam
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...
Fraud Factories and Pig Butchery: Chinese Triads go Pacific
Chinese triads have been making a Pacific play, notably in the tiny nation of Palau. There a notorious triad boss - nicknamed Broken Tooth - reinvente...
Here be Dragons: LRP turns 100
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...
Hold my popcorn: Diplomatic war in the Pacific Theatre
China’s largesse in the Pacific is nothing if not visible. From mobile phone towers to gleaming stadiums and government buildings, Beijing’s splashing...
The Feminists have Stood Up: Gender and Comedy in China
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 com...
Full time children or half dead: China’s Gen Z goes to ground
Every generation in modern China has been richer and more ambitious than the one before—until Gen Z. With youth unemployment so high that the governme...
Bombard the Past: Exhuming the Cultural Revolution
The exponential trauma produced by the Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in China, yet has been foundational to a generation. Now the Communist...
The Battle for the Future: The Mission of China's Underground Historians
Writing history in China has never been easy; China’s first historian, Sima Qian, was forced to choose between execution and castration and imprisonme...
Cat Years in Cat Country: Sci-Fi in China
Just as satirical writers struggled in Trump's America, China's sci-fi writers are facing a challenge: how do you write in a world where reality is m...
Gone to ground: China’s rare earths strategy
Beijing's recent ban on the export of two rare metals represents the latest front in the global battle to control chipmaking technology. Now there are...
China’s Best Mate: New Zealand’s Muddled China Ties
New Zealand is in Beijing's good books, attracting state media praise as setting 'a good example' for other countries in its ties, as Prime Minister C...
China Beyond the Ends of the Earth: Welcome to the Internet
In the final episode exploring China's Strategic New Frontiers, we are investigating China's growing cyberpower ambitions. On the National Cyber Power...
China Beyond the Ends of the Earth: The Polar Express
China appears to have restarted construction on its fifth Antarctic station for the first time since 2018. It’s just one sign that Beijing is trying t...
China Beyond the Ends of the Earth: Rolling in the Deep
China's reaching not just for the stars, but also for the deepest ocean depths. It's even parked its deepwater submersible in the Mariana Trench, the...
China Beyond the Ends of the Earth: Space
In a new series of episodes, we’re examining how China is pushing the boundaries of science and territory. First up, China’s space program, the envy o...
COVID infections: The New Bumper Harvest
In a few short months, Chinese officials have gone from COVID cover-up to competing over who has the highest number of infections. After urbanites flo...
The Death of Covid Zero?
Finally, China’s sloughing off the Zero Covid policy it’s embraced for three years. This followed a spasm of discontent, with people taking to the str...
Controlling the future: Inside China’s surveillance state
“Controlling data means controlling the future.” Those are not George Orwell's words, but instead were uttered in 2015 by Jack Ma, founder of tech com...
Spies, Lies and Peaceful Rise
China's political event of the decade - its 20th Party Congress - will confirm Xi Jinping's third term as leader of the CCP and could even bestow on h...
Cambodia: China’s first client state?
The Southeast Asian nation has historically been seen as China's first client state, with the Khmer Rouge's hardline interpretation of Maoism leading...
Herbal Gold: Chinese medicine, COVID and the CCP
Chinese households under lockdown have lacked food, company, and access to medical care. But they’ve had an almost endless supply of a traditional Ch...
Cheongsams and Coppers: Beijing's Stealth Infiltration of Hong Kong
It’s now been twenty-five years since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty with a pledge not to change Hong Kong’s way of life for fifty years. I...
Shanghaied: Living with Zero Covid
After two long months, Shanghai's brutal lockdown is over in name, but Xi Jinping is telling officials to ‘unswervingly adhere’ to Zero COVID, despite...
Gimme, gimme, gimme a Han after midnight: China’s masculinity crisis
For the past year, China has been in the grip of a crackdown on niangpao, or ‘sissy men’, with the People’s Daily warning that effeminate men are ‘cor...
Kevin Rudd: Is War With China Inevitable?
As Australia’s Defence Minister warns his nation to ‘prepare for war’ with China, there’s a growing feeling of inevitability about a future conflict b...
Ukraine: A Win-Win for China
How is Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine redrawing the geopolitical landscape? In this episode, we examine China’s interests in the conflict and exp...
Elite Capture: A CCP Primer in Making Friends and Influencing People
America's elites love to talk about China's '5000 years of civilization', but such language - which could come straight from the pages of the China Da...
Caste Aside: The Future for China's Peasants
By any metric, China's rural residents face massive disadvantages compared to their urban counterparts. More than half of rural teenagers are cogniti...
Shakeup or Shakedown? China's New Red Economy
As China's economy slows down, Xi Jinping's charting a new economic course that will redefine the country's future. From reining in tech giants to re...