Best Stephen C. Weber Podcasts (2025)

In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes infiltrating American academia. In Authoritarians in the Academy, Sarah McLaughlin exposes how higher education institutions, long considered bastions of free thought, are compromising their values for f…

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"Savage Wolves" 8:50

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4d ago8:50

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"A Theology Of Work" (Part 3) 8:58

5d ago8:58

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"A Theology of Work" (Part 2) 8:58

6d ago8:58

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"A Theology Of Work" 7:01

7d ago7:01

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"The Laboring Man's Sweet Sleep" 8:01

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) 50:55

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We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of cen…

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"Knowing Your Teachers" 10:01

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"Be Ye Glad" 6:11

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The end of aid? US, China, and the future of development 52:05

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In early 2025, headlines announced that the Trump administration would move to dramatically slash USAID—the United States’ flagship development agency. For many, the move was surprising, even self-defeating: why would a president so focused on countering China weaken one of Washington’s most effective tools of soft power? At the same time, China’s …

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"Prone To Wander" 8:17

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"A Lesson From Wash Day" 8:27

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Dan Wang, "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future" (Norton, 2025) 1:02:50

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Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, and previously a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Before that, he was an analyst focused on China’s technology capabilities at Gavekal Dragonomics, based across Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Dan is perhaps best known for a series of annual letters, pub…

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"Back To School" 7:51

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"When The Good Becomes Bad" 9:46

18d ago9:46

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"A GPS For Life" 10:31

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Ben A. Vagle and Stephen G. Brooks, "Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China" (Oxford UP, 2025) 49:10

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Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China (Oxford UP, 2025) provides a systematic reevaluation of the balance of economic power between the U.S. and China. The conventional wisdom is that China's economic power is very close to America's and that Washington cannot undertake a broad economic cutoff of China without …

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Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025) 29:38

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I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region. King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cord…

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"Greeters" 6:51

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"God People" 7:36

21d ago7:36

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Chile’s Growing Interests in China 27:47

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Chile holds the distinction of being the first South American nation to forge diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China, as well as the first in Latin America to enter into a free trade agreement with China. Despite the nearly 24-hour journey required to travel between the two countries, this considerable distance has not hindered the exp…

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"The Covered Bridge Rule" 7:36

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Isabella M. Weber, "How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate" (Routledge, 2021) 51:50

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China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path. In the first post-Mao decade, China's reformers were sharply divided. T…

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"Keeping Your Spiritual Fervor" 8:52

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"The Joy Of Being Found" 7:46

27d ago7:46

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"The Man, The Myth, The Legend" 7:46

28d ago7:46

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"Like Newborn Babies" 8:26

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Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021) 47:09

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Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Sha…

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"God’s Reliable Love" 6:11

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

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From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t…

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"Life's Final Breath" 8:01

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Ronald C. Po, "Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" (Liverpool UP, 2024) 1:15:46

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Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding relationship with the sea. Through the lives of pirates, maritime advisors, cartographers, admirals, writers, and travelers, Ronald C. Po brings maritime China to life — revealing a world far more conne…

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"We See Through A Glass Darkly" 7:06

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Professional Chat: Home, Migrant Workers, and Decent Work in Supply Chains, with Bonny Ling 46:29

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Better Innovations, to talk about Taiwan as a home for migrant workers, and decent work in supply chains. After a brief overview of key risks in this area, we touched upon Taiwan’s major legislation to date in a global context, and addressed the importance of economic diplomacy for Taiwan – being seen as a responsible global actor in business and h…

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Toby Lincoln, "An Urban History of China" (Cambridge UP, 2021) 1:31:18

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In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urba…

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"Divine Power Transmission" 8:46

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Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 43:57

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How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehens…

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David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2025) 47:19

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No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and relig…

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"Divine Debt Relief" 7:56

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The Nomadic Origin of the State 1:13:26

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Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as peripheral appendages to a centralized, agriculturalist empire. In his work, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene argues against what he calls “the Sinocentric paradigm” in favor of an interpretation of nomadic pastorali…

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"The Sound Of God" 7:31

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"Back Pain" 7:56

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Scott Pearce, "Northern Wei (386-534): A New Form of Empire in East Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023) 1:14:11

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Emerging from collapse of the Han empire, the founders of Northern Wei had come south from the grasslands of Inner Asia to conquer the rich farmlands of the Yellow River plains. Northern Wei was, in fact, the first of the so-called "conquest dynasties" complex states seen repeatedly in East Asian history in which Inner Asian peoples ruled parts of …

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"Too Little Information" 8:23

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"The Robin Finds A Home" 8:16

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Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022) 48:21

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Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a thoroughly researched assessment of how China’s economic success continues to be shaped by the communist ideology of Chairman Mao It was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterp…

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Ian Johnson, "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao" (Pantheon, 2017) 1:14:16

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Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017), was called "a masterpiece of observation and empathy" by The New York Review of Books, and The Economist, who included the book on its Best of 2017 list, said the book, "Shows how a resurgence of faith is quietly changing the country." The Guardian said t…

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"Generations" 9:08

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Ketian Zhang, "China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion" (Cambridge UP, 2023) 1:11:57

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Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and…