Popup Chinese

So our show this week isn't technically a call-in show given the lack of phones in our studio, but it is as close as we can get it, so thanks to everyone who sent us a pre-recorded question. We had a lot more responses than we expected, and the result is today's weird and wonderful mix of commentary on everything from Beijing's inner-city gang problems to Jeremy's predictably lame go-to KTV song. So if you're a regular Sinica listener, don't miss our show this week as Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn and Gady Epstein field the thorniest of questions from you, the listener. We had so much fun that we're planning on doing it again! Enjoy Sinica? If you've been listening for a while, we're getting you know that you can always download the latest Sinica shows from Sinica RSS feed as well as individually from our site as standalone mp3 files like that one. But do you also know that in addition to following our stuff here, you can also keep yourself in the loop by joining our Sinica page on Facebook? Well now you do....

Timmy needed her! And just like that our faithful collie no longer felt the sting of the ice round her paws, or the frozen wind blowing through the woods. Instead, blood surged through her veins as instinct took command and she drove headlong back to the farmhouse in search of help, her small body throwing itself across the fields and over the old wooden fence in a single bound as she raced home for help. Learning Chinese? At the Absolute Beginner level at Popup Chinese, our focus is on covering the basics of the Chinese language in a series of shows you can cover in any order. In today's episode, join Echo, Brendan and David as we talk about why Lassie never made it big in China, and then discuss an easy way to put your sentences into the Chinese equivalent of the future tense.

Lurking silently behind practically every story on Chinese economic growth over the last thirty years has been the country's unprecedented shift from being an overwhelmingly rural society to what is now a largely urban one, with almost 700 million urban residents now outnumbering their rural counterparts. Joining Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn to talk about the biggest migration in human history is Tom Miller, analyst at GK Dragonomics and author of the newly-published China's Urban Billion. If you find this topic as fascinating as we do, join us for an in-depth discussion of why China has reluctantly embraced urbanization, and how the resulting pressures are forcing changes in China's hukou system, land-usage rights, and ask with us whether these changes are pushing cities like Beijing into a new kind of urban dystopia. ANNOUNCEMENT: This week let us mention as well that we're trying something new next week: a call-in show featuring Kaiser, Jeremy and Gady Epstein from the Economist. Also in the show will be whatever questions and comments you'd like to throw their way. So if you've got any thoughts you'd like to throw into the fray, record yourself asking the question and send it in to us at sinica@popupchinese.com. We'll cover as many submissions as we can. Details on our Facebook page. On a separate note, we usually take a minute before each show to remind you that it is possible to subscribe to Sinica by RSS, as well as share a link you can use to download this show as a standalone mp3 file.

With air pollution off the charts in Beijing, we turn our gaze outwards this week and invite Echo and Amber into our studio for an advanced show about their experiences living and traveling across the United States. Little did we know that we would not get a podcast about the majestic sweep of American wilderness, the dynamism of a working Republic, or even the great American foods like deep-dish pizza. Instead, they both went on about something completely different.... Learning Chinese? At the advanced level, we try to showcase a wider variety of materials than explicit lessons, which means we also have some shows featuring the kind of Chinese-only advanced conversation featured in this podcast. Beyond listening to this sort of listening material, we also encourage advanced students to check out our manually annotated collection of Chinese short stories, our not-as-regular-as-it-used-to-be film guessing game, and our archive of upper-level HSK materials.

Mere months after China's handling of the 18th Party Congress suggested the country would undergo a peaceful leadership transition, the issue of freedom of the press surged to attention this week after a censored editorial in the Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo) resulted in a vociferous protest from the newspaper's editorial staff, and an unexpected ripple of agreement across the country. As this situation continues to play out, we look this week at what brought on these protests, what is at stake, and what the response suggests about the way China's new government will handle media relations. And who are our guests? Joining Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn in the studio to talk about this ongoing constitutional kerfuffle are two guests we are delighted to welcome back to our studio: Ian Johnson, the former Beijing bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal who now writes for the New York Times, and Jeremiah Jenne, the new director of the IES Program in Beijing. Enjoy Sinica? If you use an RSS feed reader like iTunes, you can subscribe to all of our Sinica shows by subscribing to our custom Sinica feed at http://popupchinese.com/custom/feeds/sinica. All listeners are also welcome to download individual shows as standalone mp3 files, as this link to our show for today.

While Bruce may simply have been standing in the right place at the right time, the mood in the newsroom was nonetheless elated, with even the interns well-aware that this unexpected scoop would catapult their local paper to national attention, and perhaps even net them a National Newspaper Award for excellence in photojournalism. Learning Chinese? At the intermediate level one of the things we try to highlight is entirely natural and improvisational Chinese as opposed to the sorts of heavily scripted and largely unnatural speech featured on other learning programs and textbooks. And this dialogue is a case in point: the difficulty is not so much in understanding the vocabulary here as simply following what is happening as our native Chinese speakers communicate casually the way you'll hear everywhere in mainland China.

All of you Sinica old-timers might remember a show we ran two years ago on the death of the China blog, in which Jeremy, Kaiser and Will Moss mused about whether the combined forces of Twitter, Facebook and Bill Bishop would manage to drive a stake through the heart of independent China blogging. So how refreshing is it to find that despite the growth of these online collossi, we still find ourselves reading and recommending blog posts from other China hands old and new. How has the China blog scene changed in the last two years? If you're curious about the state of affairs too, join Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn in our studio today as we are delighted to host two of the younger and more influential bloggers writing on China today: Eric Fish from the Economic Observer who gravitates to more analytic pieces at Sinostand, and Anthony Tao from Beijing Cream, who specializes in shorter posts and high-quality snark on Chinese popular culture. Enjoy the Sinica show? Let us take a break from pushing our RSS feed today to remind you that we want this show to be a two-way street. So if you have any recommendations for show topics you'd like to hear us cover, or guests you think would make for great listening, please let us know. Suggestions are more than welcome in our comment section, and please consider yourself welcome to fire an email to us for private consumption at sinica@popupchinese.com. Oh yes, and lest we forget, you can download this show as a standalone mp3 file if the player isn't exactly your thing. Cheers!

Memories of New York were fading rapidly as we pulled over to the first roadside station we had seen in hours, our gas tank hovering a touch above empty after what seemed to have been an interminable drive through the desert. It wasn't clear exactly where we had ended up, but the gas was cheaper than expected and the counter inside sold some of the best falafels we'd ever eaten....

An ongoing battle between the American Securities and Exchange Commission and China over whether Chinese accounting firms can release accounting information required by US law or whether these constitute "state secrets" is pushing China and the United States into conflict in global capital markets, threatening to force the US agency responsible for overseeing capital markets to effectively de-list all Chinese companies. Joining Jeremy Goldkorn to look at this issue, sparked by an SEC investigation into potential investor fraud which wiped out sixty one percent of Chinese and Hong Kong stocks traded in the U.S. markets since 2011, is Paul Gillis, an adviser to the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and professor at Peking University Guanghua School of Management. We are also delighted to have Patrick Chovanec from Tsinghua University come back to contribute to this discussion as well. As always, this show is available as a standalone mp3 file if you'd like to download it instead of listening through our on-site flash player. For those of you looking to subscribe to Sinica through RSS using the new iTunes, the preferred method is now going to the iTunes store, clicking on podcasts, and then doing a search for Sinica. Once the proper page loads you are a click away from having everything automated.

Earlier this month, in an effort to make our advanced shows more interactive, and ensure they address the needs of professional workers throughout the world, Popup Towers invited the staff of the Surgery Department at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital to our recording studios to participate in the making of a dialogue and podcast dedicated to members of their profession. This is a mistake we will not be making again.... Over time, most intermediate students pick up on the basics of medical vocabulary, learning to talk about CT scans and ultrasounds and recount the names of a huge number of virii and diseases that can kill and maim in various horrible fashions. But despite this, most advanced students still have no clue how to talk about sprains, bruises, cramps and other really common ailments, which is why we've put together this lesson today.

Today on Sinica, join us for a discussion on economics, politics and geopolitics with Mark Leonard from the European Council on Foreign Relations. Our specific focus is China 3.0, the council's recent compendium of essays on contemporary Chinese approaches to policy issues from leading Chinese intellectuals and thinkers. What is China 3.0? The thinking behind this book is that China’s recent leadership transition in Beijing marks the country's shift into a third stage of its development following the Maoist revolution in 1949 and Deng Xiaoping's embrace of market reforms in the late 1970s. This is a meaty discussion about people, ideas and social change. So join Kaiser and Jeremy as they grill Mark on what he thinks about recent developments in China and what they mean for Sinica listeners worldwide. As always, this show is available as a standalone mp3 file if you'd like to download it instead of listening through our on-site flash player. For those of you looking to subscribe to Sinica through RSS using the new iTunes, the preferred method is now going to the iTunes store, clicking on podcasts, and then doing a search for... you guessed it... Sinica. And let us know if you have any questions or problems.

After watching his guest power-cycle the projector in baffled dismay for five straight minutes, Wang's internal struggle to maintain composure was fast approaching breaking point. Why did every fiscal quarter end like this? Flush with enthusiasm for whatever latest management theory was trending in California, headquarters would inevitably dispatch a fresh graduate with no actual experience in the industry to lecture his battle-scarred team about their own supply chain issues. And now this? Learning Chinese? Our lesson today falls midway between the Elementary and Intermediate levels, and we were a bit on the fence about how to classify it. The reason for this is that while our dialogue is a bit easier than most others at this level, our subject matter and vocab is more professional and stretches beyond the basics into the hinterlands of Chinglish, that hazy region on the linguistic map where the familiar can be surprisingly exotic.

It wasn't very long ago that the Chinese blogosphere became engrossed with two near-simultaneous and very public posts by well-known expats marking their decisions to leave China for greener pastures. While grumbling about this country is nothing new, this event was notable for kicking off a flurry of media coverage internationally on the question of whether China is becoming hostile to foreigners, and when and to where disgruntled expats should hoof it. That is why this week on Sinica we are delighted to be joined by none other than Will Moss of Imagethief, whose own valedictory post earlier this week made for surprisingly sentimental reading, being not the least negative about China and we think it's worth talking about why. Also up for discussion: what if anything does Xi Jinping mean in his public remarks on China's coming "restoration", and where is the best place in Beijing that we've found to date for azure magpie spotting. Have a love-hate relationship with Sinica? Don't forget that you can subscribe to new episodes automatically using iTunes. Just select "Subscribe to Podcast" from the "Advanced" file menu and provide the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica when prompted. Or skip the hassle and download this show as a standalone mp3 file. Links to the other podcast downloads are all available on the individual show pages, which can be found in the Sinica archive.

For most of the evening, Jay had hovered on the cusp of sleep, kept awake by the muted sounds of bossa nova pouring from his flatmate's stereo, its dim beats peppered with the occasional rattling of pipes and a series of strange falsetto screams. And on the few occasions he managed to drift off, his mind was flooded with strange images of his thesis committee at a Cuban beach party, reading his thesis and laughing at it in a series of oddly-familiar falsetto screams. Our latest show is an elementary Chinese lesson. For us the elementary level means that you're able to follow the basics in spoken Chinese, but have difficulty watching television or listening to the radio at normal speed without assistance. This is the level where we like to highlight the basic grammar points we assume everyone knows at our higher levels, where our focus shifts to how and why Chinese people break them. So if you're an elementary Chinese student get started by listening to this show, and then check out our chinese lesson archive for more than a thousand other great shows.

Detective Wilders was coming face-to-face with a world few members of proper society even acknowledged: the underclass of the acrobatic arts. And yet perhaps underclass was not the proper word. For as not unlike members of a secret society, acrobats did not reject the tenets of civil society so much as simply live by a separate code. Theirs was a world not easily entered by outsiders, but one which once entered, must be entered completely.