China

Walking around Taipei a couple of years ago, I spotted a familiar sight – a bronze statue of a moustachioed man, cane in his right hand, left leg striding forward. The man is Sun Yat-sen, considered modern China’s founding father. I recognised the statue because a larger version of it stands in the city centre of Nanjing, the mainland Chinese city that I was born and raised in. That one figure can be celebrated across the strait, both in Communist PRC and Taiwanese ROC, is the curious legacy left behind by Sun. March 12th this year is the centenary of Sun’s death, so what better opportunity to look at his

Just before the end of 2024, Chinese state media Xinhua slipped out an announcement – the long discussed mega-dam in Medog County, Tibet, has been greenlit. When built, it will generate three times more energy than China’s Three Gorges dam, currently the largest in the world. The Xinhua write-up gave few other details, but the news has caused reverberations across Asia as the river on which the dam would be built, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows into both India and Bangladesh. The existence of the dam could, as we will hear in this episode, have extensive impact on these downriver countries. To break down the complicated water politics of the region,

Beginning in the first Trump presidency and expanded under Joe Biden, the US has taken a strategy of technologically containing China through restricting its access to cutting edge semiconductors. As Chinese Whispers has looked at before, these chips form the backbone of rapid advances in AI, telecoms, smartphones, weaponry and more. Washington’s aim was clear: to widen the technological gap between the two powers But has this strategy worked? Lately this has become a hot topic of debate as Chinese tech companies such as Huawei and DeepSeek have nevertheless made technical strides. Some even argue that the export controls have spurred on Chinese innovation and self-reliance. In this episode of Chinese

When Chinese spy scandals break, like the latest involving Prince Andrew and his Chinese business associate, one organisation often comes up – the United Front. Mao Zedong had dubbed it one of the Chinese Communist Party’s three ‘magic weapons’. So what is this mysterious ‘United Front’ and how important is it to advancing the CCP’s agenda? Joining the podcast is Charlie Parton, a former British diplomat in Beijing and a special advisor on China to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. He is now chief advisor to the Council on Geostrategy’s China Observatory. ** Chinese Whispers is nominated in the Political Podcast Awards 2025. Vote for it to win the People’s

Why do so many Chinese people choose such curious English names? You must have come across this phenomenon – whether they are names from a past century, or surnames, nouns or even adjectives used as first names, or words that aren’t real at all. I have a particular interest in this because my English name – Cindy – isn’t exactly in vogue these days. You might think this is a bit of a trivial question, but I think the question of English names goes deeper than just some odd words. I think these names reveal something about the China that gave rise to them. So I was pleased to come