Ten years after his elevation to General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Jintao remains almost as much of an enigma now as he was on first taking power. What do we know about the man beyond his reputation as a somewhat robotic consensus-seeker, and how will history look back at his time in power? To discuss this question and all the other news that is fit to podcast, Sinica host Jeremy Goldkorn is delighted to be joined for Sinica today with Economist correspondent Gady Epstein, and none other than Kerry Brown, director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and author of the recent book Hu Jintao: China's Silent Ruler.

Trying to keep current on what's happening in China? Stay up-to-date on everything we think is worth mentioning by subscribing to the Sinica show on iTunes. The easiest way to do this is selecting the option "Subscribe to Podcast" from the Advanced file menu once iTunes is running, and then providing the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica when prompted. Alternately, you are welcome to download this show as a standalone mp3 file as always.
 said on
August 11, 2012
Great show!
 said on
August 11, 2012
Thanks, maxiewawa!

Now for our recommendations of the week:

Gady Epstein: Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Kerry Brown: China in Ten Words by Yu Hua

Jeremy Goldkorn: The China Story

“Not chinastory dot org, THEchinastory dot org. The other one leads to yoga hippie site.” --Jeremy

Lastly, Sinica Week
 said on
August 15, 2012
It's incredibly frustrating to see the patently false "Chinese regime spending more money on oppression than on defense" meme propagate as widely as it does -- helped by Western commentators who don't know better (and don't care to know better either), and Chinese dissidents who do know better but prefer to exploit the distortion for political gain.

No matter now obvious it is that "internal security" does not equal "stability maintenance", trivial "internal security" matters like common police and fire department (which falls under the purview of the People's Armed Police in China -- remember that next time you translate "WJ" simply as "riot police") are simply to be ignored.
 said on
August 20, 2012
wgj

I am compiling a post for Danwei.com on this question right now. Do you have any online official sources for budget numbers aside from the reports published at the National People's Congress?
 said on
August 20, 2012
@Jeremy: I don't -- I haven't been looking for it, either, since my interest in Chinese domestic policies are rather limited.
Mark Lesson Studied