In the latest in our series on belief, we’re looking at China’s official belief system—Marxism. In recent years, netizens have argued China has entered the ‘garbage time’ of history, a phrase borrowed from the dying minutes of a basketball game, which now references a crisis of trust in the Communist Party and its official ideology. To ask whether Marxism still exists in China, and how Marx influences the Chinese state, we’re joined by two guests: Alison Sile Chen Zhao, a University of California political analyst and the author of Her Battles, and Professor Xu Chenggang, a senior research fellow at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and the author of Institutional Genes: Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism.

Episode art: Portrait of Karl Marx. c/- Wikimedia Commons.

Transcripts available at https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

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In our third episode on beliefs and ideologies, we explore China’s newfound enthusiasm for psychiatry. Counselling was only registered as a profession in 2001 yet has seen a massive boom under Xi Jinping. The psy-boom is such that even party branch meetings are doing mindfulness exercises, and practitioners are trying to indigenise counselling practices. There’s plenty to work on; the 2022 China Mental Health Survey found seven percent of the population were suffering from depression, half of them schoolchildren. To explore what’s drawing China to the couch, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Yiying Xiong, a counsellor and associate professor at John Hopkins University, Barclay Bram, an audio journalist at the Economist and fellow at the Asia Society, and medical anthropologist Hsuan-Ying Huang, from Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.

Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons, Sigmund Freud's Couch, London, 2004.

Episode transcripts are available at: https://ciw.anu.edu.au/podcasts/little-red-podcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To welcome the Year of the Snake, we’re launching a new series looking at belief in China. Young Chinese people are increasingly turning to spirituality - even online manifestations of it - and feng shui, in this moment of high unemployment and economic stress. For a Party guided by materialism, this spike in spiritual interest presents a dilemma: how to regulate something you purport not to believe in. To discuss the state's use of spirituality from the Qing to now, we’re joined by Tristan Brown, a historian at MIT and author of Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China and Haoyang Zhai, a researcher at the University of Melbourne.

Image: “May The Snake Be With You” c/- Juliette Baxter

Episode transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/

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