Barbarians at the Gate

The Business of Burgers in Beijing: What Fast Food Festivals Reveal About China's Economy

Mike Wester launched the first Burger Fest in Beijing 13 years ago as a scrappy response to the collapse of print ad revenue. Today, burger festivals run in third-tier cities across China, subsidized by local governments trying to drive foot traffic into half-empty malls. Hefei alone has four a year. In this episode, Jeremiah talks with Mike Wester, co-founder of True Run Media and publisher of the Beijinger, about how burgers became one of China's fastest-growing new cuisines, what the food festival boom reveals about Chinese commercial real estate, and why a generation raised on McDonald's is now opening artisanal burger shops in cities that didn't have a KFC a decade ago. They cover the social-media arms race, producing photogenic and often inedible creations, and 13 years of memorable entries — including a Wagyu patty with goose liver, cinnamon, and apple, and a pig-brain burger from a man who built his fortune on braised pig brains.

Barbarians Remix: Do you really need to learn to write characters to study Chinese?

Warning: GEEKY CONTENT Hosting solo in this week’s episode, David takes a geeky deep dive into the digital revolution in Chinese language learning in conversation with Chinese language pedagogy expert Matt Coss. The Sisyphean task of learning to write hundreds of Chinese characters has long been the bête noire of Chinese language students. The explosion of digital devices and apps for processing Chinese characters is giving rise to a radical rethinking (no pun intended) of the handwriting and dictation components of Chinese language curricula. Matt Coss is on the front line of a new generation of Chinese language educators who advocate a drastic reduction, if not outright elimination, of the handwriting requirement for Chinese language learners. Topics covered include the disturbing drop in the number of American students studying Mandarin, the implications of AI tools such as ChatGPT for Chinese language learning, and the escalating problem of native Chinese speakers forgetting how to write common characters (“character amnesia” tíbǐ wàngzì提笔忘字).

The Many Lives of Da Shan: Mark Rowswell on Chinese Poetry, Performing Live, and Staging Shawshank in Mandarin

In this episode, we reconnect with an old friend of the podcast, Canadian performer Mark Rowswell—better known in China as Dashan, or “Big Mountain.” Mark reflects on his early career in China, where his remarkable fluency in Mandarin launched him from a young foreign newcomer into the world of xiangsheng (相声, crosstalk), and soon after into a highly sought-after TV host and cultural ambassador bridging East and West. He also shares insights into his latest creative project: a series of online videos featuring his recitations of classic Chinese poetry. What began during the pandemic with a relatively obscure Chu Ci (楚辞) poem that went viral has since grown to include well-known works by Li Bai and Su Shi, with Mark’s fresh approach—eschewing the traditional, formal style of langsong (朗诵) in favor of a more natural, conversational delivery—quickly gaining a wide audience. Over time, the project has grown increasingly ambitious, incorporating longer poems and rich musical collaborations, including performances with the Toronto and Winnipeg Symphony Orchestras. Finally, Mark offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at his role in adapting The Shawshank Redemption into a Chinese-language stage production performed by an all-foreign cast. He discusses recruiting Mandarin-speaking actors, translating and culturally adapting the script, and the production’s warm reception among Chinese audiences.

Lee Moore's China Backstory: Why Saying "History Proves" Actually Means "I Haven't Done the Reading"

Lee Moore's new book challenges both Chinese state propaganda and Western pundits on Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy, and Hong Kong with 1400 endnotes, and a drinking game for beheadings. A historian who writes about Ming emperors getting stabbed in the balls, a drinking game for beheadings in Xinjiang, and why almost everything politicians say about Taiwan’s history is wrong. In this episode, we talk with Lee Moore about China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read. It is often said that China is the most talked-about country that Americans know the least about. Lee’s book seeks to enlighten readers with a fresh perspective and a deep dive into four China-related topics that frequently appear in American media: Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Chinese economy, and Hong Kong. Despite his academic credentials, Lee has chosen to write the book in an accessible style that Jeremiah characterizes as “making the complex simple and the simple complex — complicating narratives without complicating the language, and simplifying complicated histories without dumbing them down.” With this lively and occasionally risqué prose style (one chapter is entitled “The Most Important Motherfucker in Taiwanese History”), Lee challenges the simplistic historical narratives that often dominate both Chinese state propaganda and Western commentary on China. Our conversation explores several of the historical questions raised in his book. Was Taiwan always a part of China? It did not even appear on Chinese maps until the 17th century, and the Qing Dynasty did not take control of the island until a year after William Penn founded Philadelphia. Were the Uyghurs the first inhabitants of Xinjiang? The answer is complicated, but the region’s earliest known inhabitants may actually have been Indo-European. And is the Chinese Communist Party’s tight state control over the economy really the “secret sauce” behind China’s rise? Lee takes direct aim at Western pundits who have argued exactly that. Lee also explains how he makes extensive use of Chinese poetry — from Tang Dynasty border verse to Qing-era colonial writing — translated into colloquial English, to convey the emotions and states of mind of the historical figures who populate his book. Lee Moore has a PhD in Chinese literature. He is the founder of the Chinese Literature Podcast and has written for The Economist, the China Books Review, and The China Project. China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read is available from Unsung Voices Books wherever books are sold. Find the Chinese Literature Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Warning/Advertisement: This episode contains explicit language.

Décadence Mandchoue: The wild (and almost certainly fictional) affair between Sir Edmund Backhouse and Empress Dowager Cixi

It’s another Barbarians at the Gate crossover with China Books Review. This month’s China Archives column covers Decadence Mandchoue by Edmund Backhouse, edited and annotated by Derek Sandhaus. CBR Associate Editor Alexander Boyd and I sat down to talk about all things Backhouse and try to parse one of Sinology’s more controversial memoirs. Backhouse was the son of a British baronet who dropped out of Oxford, fled to Beijing in 1898, and spent the next four decades as a fixer, translator, and professional eccentric in the hutongs. He was also a forger, a fabulist, possibly a fascist sympathizer, and the author of what may be the most explicit expat China memoir ever written. His central claim: an extended sexual relationship with Empress Dowager Cixi. His central problem: almost nobody believed him. And there’s a good reason. He almost certainly invented the whole thing.The real question isn’t whether Backhouse was making stuff up. He was. A lot. The question is whether this gifted fabulist, writing from inside (or at least adjacent to) the world he’s fabricating, can still tell us something real about the fall of the Qing Dynasty. Join us as we explore the decadent world of sex, lies, and power during one of the most tumultuous periods of Chinese history.