About Sinica

Sinica

Sinica is a weekly English-language podcast and newsletter discussing current affairs in China. Founded in Beijing on 1 April 2010 by Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn, it is widely regarded as one of the pioneering English-language China podcasts and, for many listeners, the defining conversational programme about contemporary China. Its format has remained remarkably consistent across more than 400 episodes: a loosely structured conversation, usually between the hosts and one or two guests, focused on a specific topic in Chinese politics, foreign relations, economics, culture or society. For years Sinica was the flagship show of SupChina, later renamed The China Project, where Kuo served as editor-at-large. When The China Project closed at the end of 2023, Kuo relaunched Sinica independently via Substack at sinicapodcast.com, with 2024 support from the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Produced today from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Kuo is based, Sinica averages, by the accounts given in profiles of the show, about one million listeners per year, and its back catalogue functions as an unusually long oral record of how expert discussion of China has evolved since 2010.

Founding in Beijing in 2010

Sinica began, in Kuo's own telling, as a spontaneous decision. He and Goldkorn had been friends for years in Beijing: Kuo had lived there since 1996, with a couple of earlier years in the city as well, and Goldkorn since 1995, so both had been in China for almost fifteen years when the show started. They were acquainted with David Lancashire, then a graduate student who had started a small company using podcasts for Chinese-language instruction, with voice actors recording conversations for distribution. Through that connection to the young podcasting medium, the two decided to try a current-affairs conversation show. On 1 April 2010 they sat down with Bill Bishop — himself later the author of the Sinocism newsletter — in the studio, and recorded a first episode about Google's pullout from China, the defining technology and censorship story of that moment. As Kuo recalled in a 2020 interview with the SOAS China Institute, "The podcast worked pretty nicely. It was very loosely structured and it's basically retained that same format ever since, just a conversation, usually Jeremy and me, with one or two other guests and focused on specific topics."

Format and editorial approach

Sinica's identity rests on conversation rather than reportage. Episodes typically open with Kuo framing a book, research finding, news development or cultural trend, and then develop through discussion with guests drawn from academia, journalism, business, the arts and public life. The University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Contemporary China, introducing its own podcast's debt to Sinica, noted that through some 400 episodes Kuo and Goldkorn had featured "a rich tapestry of 'China watchers' — including from the academy, but also journalists, activists, entrepreneurs, artists, and officials — in an accessible and engaging format that has set the pace for all the China-related podcasts that have followed." The range is visible in the guests cited across profiles of the show: food writer Fuchsia Dunlop on Sichuan cuisine, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd on Xi Jinping's worldview, and translator and writer Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction, alongside economists, diplomats and historians. Kuo has articulated the show's intellectual ethic in his essay "Talking China: Podcasting and pedagogy on Sinica," published in the PRC History Review in August 2019, which conceptualises what he calls "cognitive empathy" — the disciplined attempt to understand how issues look from Chinese perspectives without surrendering critical judgment. His related "Five Precepts for China Watching," presented at the University of Pennsylvania, grew directly out of the habits the podcast had cultivated.

Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo, the show's host and co-founder, brought an unusually varied China career to the microphone. Before podcasting, he played lead guitar in Tang Dynasty, China's first heavy metal band — a chapter of late-1980s cultural history he has retold in talks such as his Fairbank Center appearance "My Life as a Chinese Rock Star." He headed the China bureau of technology magazine Red Herring, wrote a popular column for Beijing's main English-language monthly The Beijinger from 2001 to 2011, and worked closely with some of China's biggest internet companies, including as director of digital strategy, China, for Ogilvy & Mather and, most prominently, as director of international communications for Baidu, China's leading search engine. He lived in Beijing for twenty years before repatriating to the United States in 2016, the year SupChina acquired Sinica. At SupChina he served as editor-at-large while continuing to host the show. Since the independent relaunch he has hosted from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, opening episodes, as a 2025 transcript puts it, with "I'm Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina," and framing the programme's mission as conversations that "shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China."

Jeremy Goldkorn

Co-founder and longtime co-host Jeremy Goldkorn arrived in China in 1995 and became managing editor of Beijing's first independent English-language entertainment magazine. In 2003 he founded Danwei, a website and research firm that tracked Chinese media, markets, politics and business and became an essential source for foreign correspondents; Danwei was acquired by the Financial Times in 2013. At SupChina he served at times as acting editor-in-chief alongside his Sinica role. Goldkorn's own trajectory after The China Project's closure took him to Nashville and then toward Washington, D.C.; he has worked as an editor with ChinaFile at the Asia Society and experimented with a weekly newsletter at thechinaweek.com. He returned as a guest for Sinica's relaunch episode on 15 February 2024 — at the very beginning of the Dragon year, as Kuo noted on air, "one lunisolar year on" from the show's post-China Project hiatus — in a conversation that mixed the show's past with the state of US–China relations. His presence in that episode underlined the degree to which Sinica's identity was built by the pairing of the two founders, even as the relaunched show became primarily Kuo's vehicle.

The SupChina and China Project years

In 2016 Sinica was acquired by SupChina, the New York-based China-focused news, information and business-services platform, and Kuo relocated to the United States while the show continued to feature uncensored English-language conversations on Chinese politics, international relations, economics, culture and society. Under SupChina, Sinica became the flagship of a growing podcast network that also included the NüVoices podcast, and it recorded live editions, such as a January 2017 session at the University of California, Irvine, on US–China relations under Donald Trump with guest Susan Shirk of UC San Diego's 21st Century China Center. SupChina later rebranded as The China Project. That incarnation ended abruptly: The China Project closed at the end of 2023, and Sinica went briefly silent. The closure was a significant moment in English-language China media, removing one of its main platforms; Sinica's survival, unlike that of its parent, demonstrated the portability of a personality- and format-driven show. Kuo relaunched the podcast independently in February 2024, with Jeremy Goldkorn as the first guest of the new era — a deliberate act of continuity.

The independent relaunch on Substack

The relaunched Sinica lives at sinicapodcast.com and is supported in 2024 by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a US national resource centre for East Asian studies, whose support Kuo acknowledges in episode transcripts. The independent model bundles the podcast with subscriber offerings that extend well beyond a single show: complete transcripts, essays by Kuo, and writings and podcasts from other China-focused voices, including the China Global South Podcast, James Carter's This Week in China's History, Paul French's Ultimate China Bookshelf and Andrew Methven's Sinica Chinese Phrase of the Week, as well as series such as Johns Hopkins SAIS's Studying China in the Absence of Access. In effect, the relaunch converted Sinica from a programme inside someone else's media company into a small subscription platform in its own right, curated by Kuo and organised around the community the podcast had built over fourteen years. The show's own description promises "in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat" — a positioning that distinguishes it from more polemical corners of the China-watching world.

Guests, topics and range

Across its run, Sinica's subject matter has tracked the full breadth of the China story. Political and strategic episodes have covered US–China relations, censorship and the evolution of the Chinese internet — the subject of Kuo's 2017 Berkman Klein Center talk at Harvard — while cultural episodes have taken up cuisine, literature, film and music. The guest list documented in institutional profiles spans a former Australian prime minister, leading historians, economists and legal scholars, working journalists, translators and artists. That breadth is deliberate: the programme treats "current affairs in China" as encompassing intellectual currents and cultural trends as well as Politburo politics, a definition Kuo states explicitly in his standard episode introduction. The result is an archive in which a listener can move from a technical discussion of self-censorship among academics — the topic of the Rory Truex and Sheena Greitens episode discussed by the University of Pennsylvania — to a conversation about Sichuan food writing, without leaving the feed. Few English-language outlets on China sustain that range in a single format.

Influence on China podcasting

Sinica's historical importance lies partly in precedence. Founded in 2010 and originally presented, as one survey put it, from a "dingy room" in Beijing, it was among the very first English-language podcasts devoted to contemporary China, and it demonstrated that a substantial audience existed for long, academically rooted but accessible conversation about the country. The University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Contemporary China credited Sinica directly with propelling the development of its own podcast and with setting the pace for the genre; later entrants — from university shows to the many newsletters-with-podcasts of the 2020s — operate in a space Sinica helped define. Kuo's reflective writing on the practice, particularly the "cognitive empathy" argument of his PRC History Review essay, gave the format an articulated philosophy that hosts of successor programmes have cited. The show has also functioned as a professional crossroads: guests frequently include the authors of the books and papers that structure scholarly and journalistic debate about China, and appearances on Sinica are a recognised milestone for new work in the field.

Sinica today

Today Sinica publishes weekly from the United States, with Kuo as host and a rotating cast of guests and contributing columnists under the subscription bundle. Its audience — about one million listeners per year by the figures given in profiles of the show, spread across the podcast and its transcripts — is concentrated among the professional China-watching community: academics, journalists, officials, investors and students. The programme's longevity is itself part of the record: having begun with Google's 2010 exit from China, it has continued through the Xi Jinping era, the pandemic, the closure of its own parent company and its independent rebirth, retaining the loose conversational structure its founders improvised in a Beijing studio on 1 April 2010. For a directory of China-focused media, Sinica stands as the archetypal long-form English-language China podcast: founder-led, conversation-based, independently relaunched after 2023, and supported since 2024 by the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Center for East Asian Studies, with its full archive and current episodes at sinicapodcast.com.