Over the past few years, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity, especially in the high-tech sector, have been at the centre of great power rivalry between the United States and China. The White House has been pressuring companies from its East Asian allies, including the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, to invest in the United States and open new factories, while American firms like Apple have been accused of helping China build up its industrial capacity. Amid all the techno-nationalistic rhetoric, the people whose lives and livelihoods are directly impacted by these policies are scarcely mentioned; the countries are spoken of like geopolitical abstractions, the companies like balance sheets.
Why did Western capital and companies move to East Asia to set up manufacturing facilities? Who are the people whose labour propelled the industrial rise in China and Taiwan? What are the social costs in these states’ pursuit of technological might, and how do ordinary people navigate their power and powerlessness? For Episode 5 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with anthropologist Anru Lee and sociologist Ya-Wen Lei to discuss gender, labour, industrialisation, and deindustrialisation in China and Taiwan.
Rejecting calls from an unknown number, blocking suspicious accounts on social media, turning down a job offer too good to be true: these days, almost all of us have had some interactions with online scams. With luck and vigilance, this amounts to little more than a nuisance; yet, for the many who fell victim to the schemes, the consequences can be devastating. In recent years, cyber scams have taken on an industrial scale, and Southeast Asia has emerged as a global epicentre. This is the subject of a timely and fascinating new book, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (Verso 2025, with forthcoming editions in Chinese, Bahasa, and Vietnamese). Who works at these compounds, and under what conditions? When the perpetrators of online scams are also victims of human trafficking, how should the authorities deal with them? What are the common misconceptions about the scam industry, and in what ways does it reflect features of legitimate businesses? For Episode 4 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with two of Scam’s co-authors, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li.
In 1947, the acclaimed Chinese writer and linguist Lin Yutang stunned the world with an invention: the first Chinese-language typewriter with a keyboard. Lin poured years of effort and his life’s savings into the design, which he named MingKwai, ‘clear and fast’. Despite its celebrity and Lin’s high hopes, the MingKwai never went into production, and the lone prototype had long been assumed lost—until it surfaced in the basement of a New York resident’s late grandfather-in-law earlier this year.
What happened to the MingKwai? Why was its invention groundbreaking, and why did it fail commercially? For Episode 3 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang speaks with historian Thomas S. Mullaney about the legendary typewriter and the century-old quest to bring the ancient Chinese script into the modern information age.
For some in the West, being a journalist in China—especially one at a state media organisation—is seen as little more than parroting party propaganda. This caricature not only disregards the courage and dedication of many Chinese journalists but also misrepresents the complex realities they navigate as mere state coercion. How does censorship actually operate inside a Chinese newsroom? What new possibilities and constraints have emerged with commercialisation and the rise of social media? And is it possible to produce quality journalism about China without institutional backing or from another country?
To answer these questions and more, for Episode 2 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with legendary TV reporter Luqiu Luwei 閭丘露薇 and celebrated print journalist Fang Kecheng 方可成, both of whom now work as journalism professors in Hong Kong.
For the inaugural episode of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with Jing Wang and Christian Sorace about the legacies of Covid-19, five years after the novel coronavirus upended all of our lives.