Sweet, sweet ear candy
Loud Murmurs is one of the only podcasts in Mandarin that discusses American pop culture. Run by a team of Chinese-American women, the podcast covers topics ranging from deconstructing Netflix shows to discussing Crazy Rich Asians. Afra Wong, one of the key members of Loud Murmurs, tells Lev Nachman what their podcast is about, how she and her team decided to start the podcast, and what some of the ins and outs of running a Chinese podcast are like.
The second season of the Oolong podcast continues with Yangyang Cheng, a particle physicist who in her spare time writes insightful op-eds about science, technology, and contemporary Chinese politics. With host Lev Nachman, she discusses how she got interested in writing for a wider audience, how she became interested in physics in the first place, and some of the challenges she and other Chinese scientists are facing in today's political climate.
Hosted by Lev Nachman, we return for a second season of the Oolong podcast. Our first guest, Leta Hong Fincher, is one of the foremost experts on feminism in contemporary China. She discusses her latest book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, delves into some of the challenges she faced during her writing process, and touches on other details about what feminism looks like in a Chinese context. Listen to the podcast here.
AN EPISODE OF THE LITTLE RED PODCAST
By 2020, less than half a year from now, a social credit scheme will cover people and companies across China, “allowing the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” It’s long been assumed the Chinese state would take the lead, but favored companies will doubtless profit from a database that will house every citizen’s tax records, criminal history, traffic offenses, family background and marriage details. There are signs these companies are likely to export a surveillance-for-profit regime to other regimes keen to keep a close eye on their people. To ask whether China’s future looks like Lei Feng, Black Mirror or Dave Egger’s The Circle, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Gladys Pak Lei Chong and David Kurt Herold of Hong Kong Baptist University. ∎
Post-Umbrella Hong KongLessons, jail and resignation in the wake of the 2014 protests
AN EPISODE OF THE LITTLE RED PODCAST
Hate mail, death threats and shadowy surveillance are facts of life for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists, five years after the Umbrella movement brought a million people onto the streets calling for greater democracy. Since then, 48 legal cases have been brought against 32 different activists, often on colonial-era public order offences. Louisa and Graeme are joined by two leaders of the Umbrella Movement to talk about jail, democracy and political repression. They are Chan Kinman, one of the co-founders of Occupy Central, who faces a verdict in his trial with eight others on April 8, and Nathan Law, the disqualified lawmaker from the Demosisto Party, who is also one of Hong Kong’s first political prisoners. ∎
