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’t want to work.  Guests: Keyu Jin, London School of Economics, author of New China Playbook; Elsie Chen, a member of China’s “lying down” generation, now a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Elsie Chen’s New York Times article about lying flat. She interviews Luo Huazhong, the factory worker, who quit his job, went back to his rural village. His post about his lifestyle decision went viral, and inspired a movement dedicated to opting out.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html A roundtable discussion with Keyu Jin at the Fairbank Center at Harvard.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=357QIFs9FXc Sound design, original score, mixing and mastering by Rowhome Productions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Om Podcasten

FACE-OFF is an eight-episode podcast about how China and the United States, once friends, are now foes.  FACE-OFF is hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jane Perlez, former New York Times Beijing bureau chief and current fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. In each episode Professor Rana Mitter, recently of the University of Oxford and now professor of modern China at the Harvard Kennedy School, chats with Jane on what’s at stake.