Barbarians at the Gate x China Books Review: The Records of the Grand Historian
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 you enjoyed this tale of commitment, consider subscribing or supporting the Substack. Your subscription will cost far less than what Sima Qian paid. We promise.
In this special episode of Barbarians at the Gate, Jeremiah teams up with China Books Review’s Associate Editor Alexander Boyd to dig into the story of history’s most committed writer. Sima Qian didn’t just compile China’s first great historical work—he literally sacrificed his manhood to complete it after defending a friend got him sideways with Emperor Han Wudi.
Jeremiah and Alexander explore what it means to speak truth to power when the consequences are real, why Sima Qian’s model of moral courage feels especially relevant in our current moment of “spiritual castrations,” and whether anyone today has the stones (so to speak) to make that kind of sacrifice for their work.
Sometimes the classics hit different when the world’s gone sideways.
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Barbarians Remix: Seeking News, Making China
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 1920s, fewer than 8 in 1,000 people had access to newspapers, whereas by the Mao period hundreds of millions of citizens were receiving daily news and information via radio, TV, and shortwave technology.
This book provides an enlightening “meta-historical” account of the evolving communications technologies that fueled the May Fourth Movement, KMT and CCP propaganda campaigns during WWII, and the mass information campaigns of the Mao era, such as the Cultural Revolution. The book describes how the various interlocking information technologies, infrastructure, and communication channels—what Alekna calls the “newsscape”—affected popular opinion, politics, and state power.
John Alekna is an Assistant Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Peking University.
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AI-Laoshi Will See You Now: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Chinese Language Learning
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 teach when near-perfect translations are waiting on students' phones? How do we integrate AI into our work while putting guardrails on classroom use?
AI might be the greatest learning tool since Pleco, but how do we keep the focus on connecting with actual humans, not impressing silicon tutors? An episode for language teachers, students, and anyone wondering if robots will eventually make them fluent in Mandarin.
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Calling all China Nerds
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, Brendan reads a translation from Chinese philosopher Mencius, there's discussion of how to best gloss "laowai," if Xi Jinping is "president," "chairman," or something else entirely, a quick debate on whether Matteo Ricci had an eidetic memory or was just really, really smart, and Brendan's adventures battling ICE.
Come with us for a wild ride of Sinological geekdom and summer-style freeflow scholarship.
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Barbarians Remix: The Year of the Boxers with historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom
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.
Wasserstrom’s reading reframes the Boxers not as an isolated burst of anti-foreign violence, but as part of a cycle of uprisings and reprisals that shaped modern China’s encounter with the West. He discusses why the term “Boxer Rebellion” obscures more than it reveals, and why “Year of the Boxers” may be a better way to understand the crisis—and its aftershocks.
The episode also explores deeper patterns in Chinese history, including the 60-year cyclical mindset that links 1900 to 1960 and, by some accounts, to 2020. It’s a conversation about repetition, media distortion, and the uneasy symmetry between violence and remembrance.
Österreich