About Sinobabble

Sinobabble

Sinobabble is a newsletter and podcast by Edi Obiakpani-Reid, published on Substack at sinobabble.substack.com, whose stated aim is to make it easy to understand the politics and culture of China's past and present in order to realise its future. It combines long essays on Chinese history, ideology and soft power with podcast series that work systematically through modern Chinese history, interviews on subjects such as consumption as identity and politics in China, and a reading community built around a '12 China books in 12 months' book club covering fiction and non-fiction from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The podcast describes itself as a relaxing, educational programme covering China's modern history, current events and academic analyses of China's politics, society and culture in a variety of mini-series. Sinobabble is recommended by peer publications including the RealTime Mandarin newsletter, and its combination of scholarly training, accessible presentation and self-critical reflection on how the West studies China gives it a distinctive place among English-language China publications.

The author: a Sinology background

Edi Obiakpani-Reid writes and presents from an academic formation in Sinology. In his own essays he recounts studying for a Sinology master's degree at SOAS, University of London — including being required to master the Boodberg-Creel debate of 1936 to 1940 on whether Chinese characters evolved as phonetic or ideographic representations — and attending an international conference during his PhD, where the panel that most interested him concerned Chinese anarchists and their foreign counterparts at the beginning of the twentieth century, and their exchange with the Esperanto movement. That training shows in the publication's habits: essays cite academic literature and primary debates, podcast episodes are organised as structured mini-series rather than news reactions, and historical arguments are presented with their historiographical disputes attached. At the same time, the writing is deliberately unacademic in tone — personal, humorous and sceptical of jargon — which is central to the project's stated mission of making China's politics and culture easy to understand without making them simplistic.

The podcast: history in mini-series

The Sinobabble podcast is organised around series. Its foundation is a history of the twentieth century, designed — in the programme's own description — to explore all facets of the history of China, from the major events to the smallest local changes, to give listeners a full picture of the development of one of the world's most powerful nations, and to go on to discuss Chinese art, religion, politics, culture and economics. The archive includes an extended multi-part treatment of the Cultural Revolution, whose episodes examine, among other subjects, the difference between the violence in the cities — perpetrated mainly by Red Guards and directed at culture as much as at people — and the violence in the countryside, which pitted neighbour against neighbour, and the Cultural Revolution Group's attempt to impose new rules on art, literature, theatre and film through the existing cultural producers it distrusted. A modern China series addresses how the Chinese Communist Party exercises control, makes people disappear and encourages loyalty, and includes on-the-ground conversation with people in Hong Kong about their experiences of the 2019 protests. Podcast directories list the show with episodes averaging around thirty-nine minutes, and its host has appeared as a guest expert on other history podcasts, for example retelling the Boxer Rebellion of 1899 to 1901.

Essays on ideology, language and soft power

The newsletter's essays take up the ideas through which China is understood. One essay examines Chinese characters and Orientalism, arguing — through Edward Said's framework — that the foundation of China studies is inherently orientalist, that partial truths circulate from Chinese sources into Western expert work and mainstream news, and that the author is himself implicated in the problem merely by trying to explain China, while maintaining that there is real value in having China explained in terms an audience can understand. Another essay, nominally about Esperanto, traces the movement's surprising Chinese history: the enthusiasm of young Republican-era academics, Cai Yuanpei's view that Esperanto would allow Chinese to present China in a better light in the West, and the movement's survival and growth under Communist rule, peaking in the 1980s with fifty-nine universities offering Esperanto and almost half a million active learners — never banned or maligned despite repeated cycles of rejecting foreign influence. A third major essay treats Confucius Institutes as China's biggest soft power flop, working through the theory that soft power requires an attractive ideology and universalistic language, and recording that at their peak in 2023 there were 496 Confucius Institutes and 757 Confucius Classrooms worldwide, even as many in the West were closed, defunded or investigated.

Current affairs and the deglobalisation debate

Sinobabble also engages contemporary geopolitics, characteristically by interrogating the framing rather than simply reporting the event. A two-part podcast treatment of decoupling argued that it is impossible to decouple from China at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of production, and the accompanying essay pressed the argument further: that decoupling and deglobalisation are the same thing, that the attempt amounts to the West delinking itself at the moment China's economic and political power has grown through integration, and that under realist logic such measures can still make sense to their authors if they hurt China more than they hurt the United States, whatever their absolute cost. The essay dwells on the obstacles to China's own adjustment — continued reliance on overseas consumption in developed nations, a slow and difficult turn to domestic consumption, low interest rates and rising youth unemployment — rather than treating either side's strategy as costless. This willingness to argue a position explicitly, while documenting the counter-considerations, distinguishes Sinobabble from neutral-summary newsletters.

The book club: twelve China books in twelve months

The '12 China books in 12 months' book club is the publication's community centrepiece. Created, its author explains, kind of on a whim to encourage his own reading, the club invites everyone to read along — one book a month, no specialist knowledge required, no obligation to read every title — with discussions published as podcasts and livestreams at the end of each month. The list deliberately spans fiction from the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong alongside non-fiction covering China's politics, culture, economy, people and future. Titles discussed include Joseph Torigian's biography of Xi Zhongxun, The Party's Interests Come First, read as both a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and a personal story about identity within a political system; Martin Jacques's argument that China will not become more Western but the world will become more Chinese, with its concepts of the civilisation-state and contested modernity; and Dan Wang's Breakneck, reviewed under the question 'Engineering or Authoritarianism?', which contrasts China's engineering-driven state with America's lawyerly one. Yan Lianke's novel Serve the People! anchored a month prepared by re-uploading the archive's classic Cultural Revolution episodes. The club turns solitary reading into a structured, public curriculum in China literacy.

Interviews and conversation

Alongside the essays and history series, Sinobabble publishes interviews that import other practitioners' expertise. A representative conversation with Yaling Jiang — a former journalist who founded the research agency Aperture China and writes the Following the Yuan newsletter — examined consumption as identity and politics in China: what makes a consumer trend, how brands hold more social power than anticipated in Chinese society, how Chinese people see themselves as consumers first and political citizens second, the Party's attempts to influence the consumer market, the link between China's soft power and trends such as 'Chinamaxxing', and how movements such as involution, lying flat and feminism present in people's lives. Other conversations have covered China travel and ghost cities with David Fishman. These interviews extend the publication beyond its author's own specialisms and place it within a network of independent China writers and researchers who cite and host one another — the same network through which recommendations in newsletters such as RealTime Mandarin bring Sinobabble new readers.

Heritage, authenticity and the culture beat

A recurring Sinobabble subject is China's relationship with its own past as a physical and cultural inheritance. Podcast episodes have asked why so many cultural heritage sites in China are fake, why the architecture all looks the same, and why no one seems to care that the old towns were built in the past twenty years — taking a deep dive into the history of the cultural heritage industry in China and the role of the Party-state within it. This interest connects the newsletter's historical and contemporary halves: the reconstruction of heritage is treated neither as simple fraud nor as simple preservation, but as a policy-laden industry whose products reveal how the state and the market jointly manufacture a usable past. Combined with the essays on language — characters, Esperanto, the vocabulary of Orientalism — this coverage gives Sinobabble a cultural-history depth unusual among current-affairs newsletters, and it reflects the author's conviction, stated in the Orientalism essay, that how China is represented is itself a political question.

Format, audience and significance

Sinobabble is published on Substack as a combined newsletter and podcast, with essays, episode posts, archive re-uploads and book-club material sharing one feed, supported by readers and by affiliate book links that, as the author notes, help support the channel. Its audience is the intellectually curious general reader — the person who wants to understand China deeply but is not served by either wire-service headlines or academic journals. Its significance lies in its method and its honesty about that method's limits. At a time when English-language China commentary often polarises between advocacy and alarm, Sinobabble offers historically grounded explanation that openly examines its own orientalist inheritance, cites its academic sources, and builds a reading public through a book club rather than through hot takes. The result is a small publication with an outsized educational function: a standing invitation to learn China's past and present slowly, in series, and in company.