ChinaTalk

Derek Sandhaus is the author of "Drunk in China: Baijiu and the World's Oldest Drinking Culture" and part of the team behind Ming River Baijiu, the first (good) Baijiu created especially for the international market. We discuss AA in china, Baijiu's origins, different varieties of Baijiu, the drink's evolving role in modern China as well as the challenge of bringing such a polarizing drink to Europe and the US.

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John Verwey of the Substack “Semi-Literate" (and formerly of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, U.S. International Trade Commission and U.S. Trade Representative) talks the history and future of China's chip industry. We get into government guidance funds, the CHIPS Act, “Fabs not Labs,” export controls and more.

John's substack: https://semiliterate.substack.com/

In her years as a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent in Hong Kong and Beijing, Te-Ping Chen came across a lifetime of remarkable characters and events. Most of these didn’t make her newspaper articles, so she began collecting them in short stories, which were collected in a book published just last month, Land of Big Numbers. Mara Hvistendahl guest hosts an interview with Te-Ping, where we discuss her writing process, journalism versus fiction writing, and some of the stories behind the stories.

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at Australia National University discusses his new book "Indo-Pacific Empire."

We talk 15th-century Korean maps, the promise of the 1947 Asian Relations Conference, Australia and India's shifting conceptions of their place in the region, the origins of the Quad, China-Australia relations and advice Rory has for the Quad countries as they try to figure out what this "minilateral" should amount to.