With Jeremy Goldkorn conscripted into family duties as father of lucky newborn, Kaiser Kuo hosts alone this week as we turn our attention to the World Internet Conference last week, when a last minute attempt by Chinese organizers to foist the so-called Wuzhen Declaration on participants provoked an international backlash over concerns it was attempting to make the international community complicit in even sharper restrictions on Internet usage China seems poised to impose under the country's new Internet Tsar, Lu Wei.Missed the news? Joining us to bring everyone up-to-date with a combination of insider-gossip and academic analysis is Rogier Creemers of Oxford University, founder of the China Copyright and Media Blog, and one of the unsung heroes of China-watching given his penchant for producing rapid and accurate translations of important Chinese policy documents and speeches that tend to be ignored by the rest of the press. Welcome Rogier!
Sinica
said on November 25, 2014
Quick note that we've pushed back our regular lesson and pushed up Sinica this week because of the timeliness of the recording. Also a note tha tyou can find the standalone mp3 file for this show here as well.
ididbobe
said on November 26, 2014
Hi there, attempting to download the mp3 file but can't seem to find any file/link. Thanks much!
messicai.gd
said on November 26, 2014
Hi, could you tell me what Kaiser recommended at the end? I didn't quite catch. Thanks a lot!
Sinica
said on November 26, 2014
Hi Missicai.gd, Kaiser recommended this piece by Didi Kirsten Tatlow - http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/when-calls-for-revenge-overwhelm-chinas-courts/and the book Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
dmoserus
said on November 26, 2014
This episode is simply off-the-scale great, guys; two ridiculously brilliant China hands producing a rapid-fire string of cogent insights and analysis. The scope of the conversation was much broader than the title suggests, and every topic touched upon turned to gold. This podcast did what a podcast should do -- it realigned and retuned the very structure of my brain.
wgj
said on November 29, 2014
As for why many, if not most Chinese people don't have any neurosis regarding the death penalty, I don't think it's because they understand "justice to be an retributive system", but rather because their minds are, by and large, not (yet) polluted by the notion of the "sanctity of human life", which, of course, is a cornerstone of Christian ideology.Now, to be clear, even atheists like myself consider human life to be extremely precious -- it's just not sacred （in fact, for an atheist, nothing is sacred）, or an absolute good in a class of its own （for a truly rational person, nothing is absolute except for logic itself [queue random Star Trek joke]）, but can and should be weighted against other goods. Therefore, death penalty is, from a societal point of view, sometimes the most efficient way to minimize the harm certain people would potentially cause, at the (admittedly high, but not prohibitive) cost of his or her life.(The comment above relates in no way to the specific case mentioned by Kaiser, which I am totally unfamiliar with.)
necksbetrim
said on December 1, 2014
Regarding Rogier Creemers comment about young academics tending to focus on the trees rather than the forest when it comes to social issues in China, I think there are two reasons for this trend, if indeed it does exist (although I would agree that my own limited experience as a graduate student suggests that it does):1) Taking on big issues leaves you more open to criticism, particularly to charges of over-generalizing and over-simplifying. Staying a narrow niche gives a young scholar the ability to make declarative statements with the confidence that very few senior scholars know (or care) enough about their niche to question their conclusions. 2) Somewhat ironically, publishing criticism of the Chinese government is less of a risk for established scholars, because they generally already have tenure and a substantial library of primary sources already obtained during their various trips to China. For a young scholar, on the other hand, getting blacklisted could potentially derail their career by preventing them from obtaining archival documents and do other 'on the ground' research in China, not to mention by making them less attractive hires for universities with sister schools and satellite campuses in China.Just my two cents though!
