logo
episode-header-image
Nov 2023
41m 33s

China – its poetry and economy

Bbc Radio 4
About this episode
In the winter of 770 the Chinese poet Du Fu wrote his final words, ‘Excitement gone, now nothing troubles me…/ Rushing madly at last where do I go?’ Looking back at his life and work, the historian Michael Wood retraces Du Fu’s journeys across China. He lived through war and famine, but his poetry found beauty and grandeur in the minutiae of everyday life an ... Show More
Up next
Oct 6
Yanis Varoufakis on Greece’s civil war
The economist Yanis Varoufakis found himself in the eye of the storm as Greece’s Minister of Finance in 2015, at the height of the country’s debt crisis. Now he reflects on his political awakenings and the women who influenced him in Raise Your Soul. It’s a family story that star ... Show More
41m 56s
Sep 29
Steven Pinker on common knowledge
The experimental cognitive psychologist and popular science writer, Steven Pinker delves into the intricacies of human interactions in his latest book, ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage’. From avoiding ... Show More
42m 15s
Sep 22
Contains Strong Language Festival, Bradford
At the Contains Strong Language Festival in Bradford, Tom Sutcliffe and guests explore the history and culture of the city, and nation, through its poetry and stories. From battlefields and royal courts, coalmines to curry houses Start the Week looks at the language and rhythms t ... Show More
42 m
Recommended Episodes
Jun 2021
China's 'Economic Miracle'
Since the 1980s China has witnessed massive economic growth. It’s become known as the 'world’s factory'. The driving force behind much of it has been a vast migrant workforce of millions of people, many from the countryside. But at what cost to village life and rural communities? ... Show More
11m 15s
Mar 2023
How China Went From Economic Superstar to Faltering Giant
In just a few years, the narrative on China has almost completely flipped. The dominant sentiments in America had been awe, envy and a kind of fear. China’s growth seemed relentless. Its manufacturing prowess was lapping ours. It weathered the pandemic without the mass death seen ... Show More
1h 20m
Jan 2023
China's Covid nightmare: Can Beijing bounce back?
China has this week reopened its borders for the first time in nearly three years. There have been scenes of joy and relief for many Chinese citizens after years of isolation. Ed Butler asks whether this is a turning point, as some are describing. What are the longer term economi ... Show More
19m 7s
Nov 2021
Melissa Macauley, "Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier" (Princeton UP, 2021)
“The Europeans raise all the cattle, but the Chinese get all the milk.”This joke, told in colonial Singapore, was indicative of the importance of the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia. Chinese migrants were miners, laborers, merchants and traders: the foundation of many ... Show More
51m 50s
Feb 2024
588 China in African Literature (with Duncan Yoon) | My Last Book with Katherine Howe
Many readers today are familiar with the impact that Western countries have had on Africa, as told through the eyes of writers in both Africa and the West. But what about China and its growing influence in Africa? How have twentieth- and twenty-first-century African writers viewe ... Show More
56m 27s
Jan 2023
There’s Been a Revolution in How China Is Governed
There are few stories that are more crucial to the world’s future than what’s happening in China. Take any of the most important issues of our time — climate change, geopolitics, the global economy, advanced technologies — and China is at the center of them. American politics its ... Show More
1h 19m
Oct 2021
Elizabeth Lacouture, "Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960" (Columbia UP, 2021)
To call the hundred years that straddle the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries as a radical period of change for China is an understatement, moving from the Imperial period, through the Republican era, and ending in the rise of the PRC.Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture’s Dwelling in the W ... Show More
39m 9s
Nov 2019
Lian Xi, "Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China" (Basic Books, 2018)
In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to th ... Show More
1h 18m
Jan 2022
The World According to China with Elizabeth Economy
In this episode of the China in the World podcast, Paul Haenle speaks with Elizabeth Economy about her new book, “The World According to China.” Dr. Economy’s book challenges the notion that China’s foreign policy ambitions are circumscribed by a set of narrow sovereignty interes ... Show More
37m 27s
May 2024
China’s Fortunes
How the Chinese economic downturn is affecting all kinds of people. How real estate meltdown, with enough unfinished empty apartments to fill the population of Germany, is at the center of it all. How tech entrepreneurs are mysteriously disappearing, and how college graduates don ... Show More
38m 6s