Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a discussion on current affairs in China from the heart of downtown Beijing. Join us each week as we feature conversations on timely topics with China-watchers from a range of backgrounds: bloggers, historians, economists, political scientists, journalists, and more. This week, for our maiden voyage, we talk about the Google pullout with Jeremy Goldkorn, publisher of Danwei.org, and with Bill Bishop, a tech entrepreneur and blogger at DigiCha.com and Sinocism.com. So enjoy the podcast and be sure to give us your take on things by writing us at sinica@popupchinese.com.This week: what exactly happened earlier this week with Google's inaccessibility? Does Yasheng Huang have the right take on their pull-out of China, or is Tania Branigan from the Guardian more on the money? What are the consequences for Google's future in Asia, and what does any of this mean to the average Chinese user? Also, on the music front, we play excerpts from the song "The Huntsman" (猎人) from Chunqiu's (春秋) first and eponymous album. Both song and album are available on iTunes.About Our Host:
Kaiser Kuo is a Beijing-based writer, rock musician, and commentator on technology and politics. Currently working with China's leading Internet video site, Youku.com, Kaiser has formerly been director of digital strategy for Ogilvy & Mather, China bureau chief for Red Herring magazine, as well as a freelance technology reporter. A 15-year Beijing resident, he is also well known as the co-founder of China's first and most successful heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty, and as regular columnist for the That's Beijing/The Beijinger magazine since 2001. He's currently working on a book about the impact of the Internet on US-China relations.Just as a quick addendum, for those of you new to Popup Chinese, you can find the mp3 file for this podcast available for download right here. All of our MP3 files are available for free download through RSS as well. You can stay informed of new shows (or save yourself the effort of manually downloading existing ones) by subscribing to our general RSS feed (including lessons and HSK tests, etc.) through our dedicated RSS feed for just the Sinica show, or via our free feed on iTunes.
Kaiser Kuo is a Beijing-based writer, rock musician, and commentator on technology and politics. Currently working with China's leading Internet video site, Youku.com, Kaiser has formerly been director of digital strategy for Ogilvy & Mather, China bureau chief for Red Herring magazine, as well as a freelance technology reporter. A 15-year Beijing resident, he is also well known as the co-founder of China's first and most successful heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty, and as regular columnist for the That's Beijing/The Beijinger magazine since 2001. He's currently working on a book about the impact of the Internet on US-China relations.Just as a quick addendum, for those of you new to Popup Chinese, you can find the mp3 file for this podcast available for download right here. All of our MP3 files are available for free download through RSS as well. You can stay informed of new shows (or save yourself the effort of manually downloading existing ones) by subscribing to our general RSS feed (including lessons and HSK tests, etc.) through our dedicated RSS feed for just the Sinica show, or via our free feed on iTunes.
yospan
said on April 2, 2010
hey...any teacher here.??? hey, who can add me.. my msn yospan@live.cn
i can speak chinese ..ha!
trevelyan
said on April 2, 2010
@yospan,There are usually plenty of people around. If you have general comments or questions not about the Sinica podcast, please post them in the chinese forum. Off-topic comments are generally curated to avoid cluttering the discussion space. Thanks for posting and welcome to the site.
paglino9
said on April 2, 2010
Well-balanced discussion. Looking forward to more... Sinica is getting some twitter love.
charlieflint
said on April 2, 2010
Great podcast. Informative, balance discussion by CN market experts, as opposed to a lot of the shrill discussion taking place in the Western media...
luolin
said on April 3, 2010
Nice podcast. I have been listening to these events regarding Google in Chinese and it's nice to hear an open discussion in English.
leesduncanmichael
said on April 3, 2010
A very interesting addition to the site... looking forward to seeing what the next topic will be.
porfiriy
said on April 3, 2010
Is there an RSS feed for this podcast?
trevelyan
said on April 4, 2010
@porfiriy - the RSS feed for the Sinica show is here: http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica
user9786
said on April 4, 2010
Adam Fisk here. Great podcast guys. The stuff surrounding the Falun Gong funding is fascinating. They apparently have an extremely highly paid lobbyist who has been making a lot of waves about discrimination against funding for them, but that doesn't fit reality according to my various contacts.
My understanding is they've already received significant funding, and I'm sure they'll get more. That's unsubstantiated, though, so don't take my word for it. I completely agree with the point that funding this stuff through the Falun Gong is perhaps unnecessarily incendiary, but they do make the best tools up to this point, particularly UltraSurf.
ad_valorem
said on April 4, 2010
I personally know 2 of the speakers, and am very disappointed that they did not touch on real reasons why Google left China or why it wanted to be there in the first place.
The REAL reasons Google left China:
http://bit.ly/bFxplZ
http://bit.ly/cciluu
davidwilljack
said on April 5, 2010
@ ad_valorem I'm intrigued to learn what the 'Real' reasons might be: unfortunately, neither of your links open here in China. Care to elucidate yourself?
MK1977
said on April 7, 2010
Enjoyed this, very interesting, thanks.
saunders
said on April 7, 2010
@davidwilljack,
The articles ad_valorem linked to basically suggest that Google is involved with the CIA and pulled out of China because things weren't working out. The evidence seems weak at best (an association through CIA backed venture capital fund, and a willingness to submit to US data requests but not Chinese ones). Google may be slightly hypocritical in going on about the human rights issues now, but I don't think it personally makes much sense and the "engagement" debate was taken seriously by most liberals in the late 1990s.
There was some interesting news earlier this week from the Monk Center in Toronto though. Professor Ronald Deibert and a team from the University of Toronto used a honeybot to plant tracking software on a computer suspected of being part of a broader Chinese efforts to compromise foreign computers. Worth reading I think:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/science/06cyber.html
Great comment by user7986 too. I wasn't aware of that software. I remember reading about this same Toronto team trying to do something similar.
