On Tuesday, an international tribunal at the Hague ruled that China’s attempts to claim almost the entire South China Sea as sovereign territory had no legal basis.

In a special emergency podcast, Jeremiah and James talk about the implications of the decision at the Hague, the reaction here in Beijing, and the use (and abuses) of history in establishing contemporary territorial claims.

China has a long history of inviting barbarians in when useful, trying to civilize them, and then kicking them out when those barbarians prove difficult to domesticate.

As US-China relations sink to a new low and both powers seem obsessed with scoring propaganda points in the middle of global pandemic, Jeremiah and David discuss their lives in Beijing and what the future might hold for those folks living, writing, and working in China.

First, David looks back at the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of the foreign celebrity and how access has changed for researchers in the PRC. Jeremiah and David then reflect on their time as teachers here working with international university students studying in Beijing and discuss the closing of the remaining pockets of relative academic freedom that once existed. Finally, as the Chinese government expels foreign journalists and some stores and bars in China literally have closed their doors to foreigners, Jeremiah and David ask: Are we still welcome here?

Ps. We're still getting the hang of taping from two different locations. At about 20 minutes or so, Jeremiah's mic levels jump a few decibels. You may want to turn down the volume at that point. We'll get this right eventually.

In this episode, 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 and we discuss his research and the recent controversy over the app Douyin penalizing users who post videos in other Chinese languages, especially Cantonese. What's the point of Putonghua? What is a dialect and what is a language in China? And what's the difference between Mandarin in the Qing Dynasty, Guoyu in the Republican Period, and Putonghua in the PRC? We also get an assist from Zhang Yajun, host of the Wo Men Podcast on Radii China, who talks with David about the differences between the spoken language of Northern China, especially around Beijing, and "Standard" Putonghua.

It's not just for Chinese speakers or students as we also tackle some tricky questions of competing national and regional identities in Chinese history.

Recommendations:

Gina Anne Tam, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016)