Barbarians at the Gate
A semi-serious deep dive into Chinese history and culture broadcast from Beijing and hosted by Jeremiah Jenne and David Moser.
Episodes
Should we view today’s powerful AI language tools as intellectual crutches or as incredibly useful assets? Can they be safely integrated into our existing toolkit for business and academia, or should we approach them with justified caution? And why is the Western world terrified of AI, whereas China is already incorporating it into all sectors of society? Spoiler alert: The West views AI as a possible extinction risk, to be m...
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June 4, 2026 • 26 mins
The Politburo had given Mao Zedong’s personal physician Li Zhisui a direct order: prepare the Chairman’s body so that he can be on permanent display. Li was aghast. It was not what Mao had wanted, and besides, “How to pickle your country’s leader” wasn’t one of the courses he studied in medical school. But after the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s death meant a potential politi...
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May 5, 2026 • 48 mins
On this episode, we sit down with the one and only Jesse Appell—Chinese TV stand-up comedian, blogger, lecturer, tea entrepreneur, and passionate bridge-builder for US–China cultural exchange. In his newly published book, Jesse shares the unlikely story of how a Fulbright Fellowship to study the traditional Chinese humor form “crosstalk” (xiangsheng) launched him from student to television star, with his vid...
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April 21, 2026 • 33 mins
Mike Wester launched the first Burger Fest in Beijing 13 years ago as a scrappy response to the collapse of print ad revenue. Today, burger festivals run in third-tier cities across China, subsidized by local governments trying to drive foot traffic into half-empty malls. Hefei alone has four a year.
In this episode, Jeremiah talks with Mike Wester, co-founder of True Run Media and publisher of the Beijinger, about how burgers b...
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April 7, 2026 • 27 mins
Warning: GEEKY CONTENT
Hosting solo in this week’s episode, David takes a geeky deep dive into the digital revolution in Chinese language learning in conversation with Chinese language pedagogy expert Matt Coss. The Sisyphean task of learning to write hundreds of Chinese characters has long been the bête noire of Chinese language students. The explosion of digital devices and apps for processing Chinese characters is givin...
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In this episode, we reconnect with an old friend of the podcast, Canadian performer Mark Rowswell—better known in China as Dashan, or “Big Mountain.” Mark reflects on his early career in China, where his remarkable fluency in Mandarin launched him from a young foreign newcomer into the world of xiangsheng (相声, crosstalk), and soon after into a highly sought-after TV host and cultural ambassador bridging East and W...
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Lee Moore's new book challenges both Chinese state propaganda and Western pundits on Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy, and Hong Kong with 1400 endnotes, and a drinking game for beheadings.
A historian who writes about Ming emperors getting stabbed in the balls, a drinking game for beheadings in Xinjiang, and why almost everything politicians say about Taiwan’s history is wrong.
In this episode, we talk with Lee Mo...
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It’s another Barbarians at the Gate crossover with China Books Review. This month’s China Archives column covers Decadence Mandchoue by Edmund Backhouse, edited and annotated by Derek Sandhaus. CBR Associate Editor Alexander Boyd and I sat down to talk about all things Backhouse and try to parse one of Sinology’s more controversial memoirs.
Backhouse was the son of a British baronet who dropped out of Oxford, f...
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February 10, 2026 • 61 mins
Welcome to a special episode of Barbarians at the Gate. David and Jeremiah are off this week preparing for Chinese New Year, but as a special gift to our listeners, we are cross-posting this bonus episode about the life and China travels of the American writer Emily "Mickey" Hahn. This episode is from By Their Own Compass, a podcast looking at historical travelers and past journeys co-hosted by Jeremiah with travel expert Sarah Kee...
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January 27, 2026 • 35 mins
It’s high season in Thailand. The weather is perfect. But look around the hotel lobbies and the night markets, and you’ll notice something missing: the tour buses.
For the last decade, Thailand bet the house on Chinese mass tourism. Now, that wager is looking shaky. The numbers are down, and the reasons go deeper than just a sluggish post-COVID economy.
On this episode, David dials in from Addis Ababa and we are j...
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January 13, 2026 • 47 mins
Following a tumultuous 2025, we gallop into the Year of the Horse. Tradition says it should be a year of dynamism and progress, but which way is the stampede heading?
To help us read the tea leaves, we welcome back our occasional co-host, Zhang Yajun. As a global strategist and former innovation lead at the World Economic Forum, Yajun has spent over 16 years translating complex shifts—from AI to cultural narratives—f...
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December 30, 2025 • 31 mins
Champions Day in the city of Shanghai, November 1941.
The world was at war, but the clubhouse at the Shanghai Race Club (now People's Park) was packed with owners and punters cheering on the pony. The funeral of Shanghai's richest widow, Liza Hardoon, was a spectacle that filled the streets of the International Settlement. Japanese occupiers and their Chinese collaborators came together in a bizarre ritual to celebrate the birth...
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How does a teenage girl from Beijing’s hutongs end up ruling the world’s largest empire—without ever technically sitting on the throne? In this episode, Jeremiah traces the improbable ascent of Empress Dowager Cixi, who entered the Forbidden City as a minor concubine and departed as the most powerful woman in Chinese history.
The story begins in imperial catastrophe: the Xianfeng Emperor dies in the wake of the...
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November 13, 2025 • 27 mins
In 1981, the Indian writer and poet Vikram Seth traveled from Nanjing, where he was studying literature, to his hometown of Delhi. Moving by train across China to Gansu, then hitchhiking southwest through Qinghai and Tibet, it was an itinerary that makes sense when a traveler has a surfeit of curiosity but a shortage of funds. Armed with half-decent Mandarin, a fistful of foreign exchange certificates, and a scrap of paper authoriz...
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October 29, 2025 • 42 mins
Yuanmingyuan, the "Garden of Perfect Brightness," commonly referred to as the Old Summer Palace, was a Qing Dynasty imperial residence comprised of hundreds of buildings, halls, gardens, temples, artificial lakes, and landscapes, covering a land area five times that of the Forbidden City and eight times the size of Vatican City. This expansive compound, once referred to by Victor Hugo as "one of the wonders of the world," now exist...
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October 16, 2025 • 33 mins
It’s just two guys talking China's naval history. In this episode, David and Jeremiah dig into the story of Zheng He, the 15th-century admiral who took China's treasure fleets halfway around the world as Western Europe was just starting to figure out ocean navigation.
Here's a Muslim eunuch who went from prisoner to running the emperor's treasure fleets. The man brought giraffes home as diplomatic gifts and offered up Sri ...
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September 29, 2025 • 23 mins
Picture this: You’re 45 years old, halfway through writing the definitive history of your civilization. Writing this history is the family business, and you’ve made a promise to your dying father to finish his work no matter what, when your boss, who happens to be the Emperor of China, gives you a choice. You can be executed or, if that doesn’t work for your schedule, how about castration?
Sima Qian picked door...
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September 16, 2025 • 37 mins
In this encore episode of Barbarians at the Gate, first broadcast in March 2024, John Alekna talks about his fascinating new book Seeking News, Making China: Information Technology and the Emergence of Mass Society. In 20th-century China, the gradual importation and development of information technology had an enormous impact on the way news was disseminated and accessed by the general public. When radio first appeared in the early...
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August 31, 2025 • 26 mins
Teachers are an excitable lot prone to excessive consumption of caffeine and loudly proclaiming that [Insert New Technology Here] will doom a generation to intellectual oblivion. Whether it was television, computers, the Internet, Wikipedia, or now AI, we've seen this panic before.
But in this episode, Jeremiah and David try to do a few deep knee bends and discuss what AI actually means for Chinese language learning. How do we tea...
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August 14, 2025 • 32 mins
Where are our nerds at? David Moser is on summer holiday, and stepping into David's seat for this episode is literary translator Brendan O'Kane. It takes about two minutes for Jeremiah and Brendan to go off the rails, over the edge, and back to the Amilal Courtyard in Beijing ca. 2010 (if you know, you know).
In this wide-ranging conversation, Brendan and Jeremiah rate different levels of dynastic decline on the "fuckery" scale,...
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