China is undergoing unprecedented changes domestically, while also dealing with the challenges of a volatile world. Listen to Qing Wang, host of the popular Chinese-language podcast The Weirdo; Zichen Wang, Research Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization; and Adam Tooze, economic historian and professor at Columbia University offer a global, political, economic, and social context on the State of China.

The discussion is moderated by Finbarr Birmingham, Europe correspondent for the South China Morning Post, and was recorded at STATE OF ASIA, the flagship conference hosted by Asia Society Switzerland last November, in Zurich.

More information on the conference, the speakers, plus videos and summaries, available here.

GUESTS ON THIS EPISODE

Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute there. In 2019, Foreign Policy Magazine named him one of the top Global Thinkers of the decade. 
Adam is the author of several books, including Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (2021). For his books Adam won the Leverhulme prize fellowship, the H-Soz-Kult Historisches Buch Prize, the Longman History Today Prize, the Wolfson Prize and the LA Times History Prize. Chartbook, his newsletter on economics, geopolitics and history, has over 120,000 subscribers. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy, where he also hosts a weekly economics podcast, Ones & Tooze.

Qing Wang is a multi-award winning journalist, podcaster and social media influencer. She has 10 years' experience covering political and economic stories with a cross-border perspective and a human-centered approach. She currently leads The Weirdo, a popular Chinese-language podcast founded in 2019  that has attracted millions of young subscribers. She is also an active participant in Chinese debates on social justice, feminism and globalization. She currently has one million followers on Weibo, where her influence is recognized with multiple awards, including "top 100 young thinkers" and "top 10 young women influencers".

Zichen Wang is Research Fellow and Director for International Communications at the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a leading non-governmental think tank in Beijing. He is also the Founder and Editor of the newsletter Pekingnology. Before joining CCG in October 2022, he worked, in China and Europe, for 11 years at Xinhua News Agency, China's state news agency. He received many internal awards from Xinhua and the Chinese authorities. While at Xinhua, he founded Pekingnology, a China newsletter, as a personal project that he now continues to edit at CCG. Pekingnology now has over 14,000 subscribers and amassed over one and a half million page views in the year to date. He also edits The East is Read, another China newsletter with 10,000 subscribers, at CCG. The newsletters translate, contextualize, interpret, and summarize Chinese leaders' speeches, China's policy documents, and substantive and technical policy discussions mostly from within China.

Finbarr Bermingham is the South China Morning Post's Europe Correspondent and reports on EU-China relations out of Brussels and beyond. Before taking up this role in 2021, he spent three years covering China's trade and political economy for SCMP in Hong Kong. His journalistic background is in the areas of trade and economy, having covered these issues in both Hong Kong and London for around ten years. He regularly appears on broadcast media to discuss major events on his beat, and was previously the host of the award-nominated podcast series China Geopolitics.

STATE OF ASIA podcast

Season 8, Episode 2 – published January 14, 2025

Host / Editor: Remko Tanis, Programs and Editorial Manager, Asia Society Switzerland

Find previous and future episodes here, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or search for 'State of Asia' in any other podcast app. We're also on YouTube.