Barbarians at the Gate

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

Perilous Prognostications for China in 2026 with Yajun Zhang

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—for internati...
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Barbarians Remix: Horse Racing, History, and the Final Champion's Day in Old Shanghai

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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The Dowager and the Dynasty: How did Empress Dowager Cixi rule China and should we blame her for bringing down an empire?

December 16, 2025 • 51 mins
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 humiliating looti...
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Barbarians at the Gate x China Books Review: From Heaven Lake

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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The Destruction of the Old Summer Palace (Remix)

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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The Voyages of Zheng He

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 Lankan...
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Barbarians at the Gate x China Books Review: The Records of the Grand Historian

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 number two. If...
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Barbarians Remix: Seeking News, Making China

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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AI-Laoshi Will See You Now: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Chinese Language Learning

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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Calling all China Nerds

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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Barbarians Remix: The Year of the Boxers with historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom

July 29, 2025 • 22 mins
Jeremiah and David are joined by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, historian of modern China and a longtime interpreter of the country’s shifting place in the world. Originally recorded in 2020, this conversation revisits the Boxer War of 1900—not through the usual lens of siege and rescue, but by examining what followed: the punitive occupation, the fractured international memory, and the long shadow cast by a global media frenzy. Wasserstr...
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Is America Beginning to Look More Like China?

July 15, 2025 • 41 mins
In this episode we chat with Shanghai-based author and editor Jacob Dreyer, a China watcher who writes with great insight and nuance about the shifting landscape of China-US relations. We touch on questions such as: Is the China model of governance outperforming Western liberal democracy? Is China winning the AI and technology wars? (Spoiler alert: That ship has sailed.) How do the architecture and logic of surveillance and informa...
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Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

July 1, 2025 • 31 mins
This week on the podcast, we explore the role of the horse in Chinese culture with author David Chaffetz, whose new book Raiders, Rulers, and Traders traces the sweeping impact of horse domestication across world civilizations. Chaffetz explains how equestrian cultures not only transformed warfare and mobility in China, but also reshaped the very boundaries of empire and cultural identity. Our conversation follows China’s long and ...
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Barbarians Remix: Mandarin Mayhem I

June 17, 2025 • 28 mins
In this classic episode from 2020, we look at Putonghua, the spoken language most people refer to as Mandarin. David wrote a book in 2016 on the evolution of Putonghua in China. What's the point of Putonghua? What is a dialect and what is a language in China? And what's the difference between Mandarin as spoken during the dynastic period, "Guoyu" (National Speech) in the Republican Period, and Putonghua in the PRC? We also get an a...
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Emergency Pod: The Trump Administration restricts Harvard International Enrollment as State Department Reviews Chinese Student Visas

June 2, 2025 • 24 mins

In this special episode, we examine the Trump administration's ongoing attacks on higher education in America and their implications for the future of US-China academic exchanges. On May 29, the Department of Homeland Security banned Harvard from enrolling international students—a decision that is now being challenged in the courts even as the educational plans of nearly 7,000 students and post-grads are thrown into jeopardy.

This ...

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The Six: Recovering the Lost Story of the Titanic's Chinese Survivors

May 20, 2025 • 44 mins
In this episode of Barbarians at the Gate, hosts Jeremiah Jenne and David Moser interview Steven Schwankert about his groundbreaking research into the forgotten story of the Chinese survivors of the Titanic disaster. Schwankert, author of The Six: The Untold Story of the Titanic's Chinese Survivors, details how he uncovered the remarkable tale of six Chinese men who survived the sinking in 1912—a story largely erased from historica...
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Dealing with Culture Shock when Studying and Living in China

May 1, 2025 • 31 mins
In this episode, Jeremiah and David explore a topic drawn from their many years of experience with American study abroad programs: culture shock.
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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom with NPR Correspondent Emily Feng

April 15, 2025 • 27 mins
In this episode of Barbarians at the Gate, we talk with Emily Feng about her new book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting for NPR, Emily paints a picture of how state control has intensified over recent years, reshaping Chinese society, politics, and culture. Emily explains how she wove together personal stories into the historical, cultural, ...
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Curating Chinese Internet Culture for Global Audiences with What's on Weibo founder Manya Koetse

April 1, 2025 • 27 mins

This week, we catch up with Dutch sinologist Manya Koetse, the creator of "What's on Weibo," a platform offering in-depth insights into trends, events, memes, and social phenomena on Weibo, one of China's largest social media platforms, often referred to as the "Chinese Twitter."

As a bridge for non-Chinese speaking audiences to understand the dynamics of Chinese digital culture, "What's on Weibo" has evolved over the years, recentl...

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Is this America's Cultural Revolution Moment? with Chris Stewart of the History of China Podcast

March 21, 2025 • 34 mins
In this episode of Barbarians at the Gate, host Jeremiah Jenne speaks with Chris Stewart, the creator of the History of China podcast. They discuss Chris's transition from living in Shanghai to returning to Bozeman, Montana, his journey into Chinese history, and the challenges of podcasting. The conversation also touches on the impact of COVID-19, the cultural revolution, and the importance of historical context in understanding cu...
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