It’s about the way academia has been enlisted in the service of not always benign national ends. It’s a novel about so many things, about colonialism, about the Industrial Revolution, about race and gender, about the global north and the global south the circumstances of the opium war. But today, we are going to focus on Babel, which my daughter actually turned me onto, and which was an immediate bestseller, and was named one of the best science fiction or fantasy novels of the year by numerous media outlets and book sellers.

Her trilogy, the Poppy Wars, which draws extensively on Chinese history, from the Sung to the 20th century, won all sorts of awards and is next up on my list of to-reads. She’s now a graduate student at Yale in East Asian Languages and Literatures. Kuang, was born in Guangdong, grew up in Dallas, and was educated at Georgetown, and then at Oxford, where she has an MSc and an MPhil from Cambridge. Today, on Sinica, I am thrilled to be joined by Rebecca Kuang, an amazing novelist and scholar whose latest book - Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution - was one of my absolute favorite books of 2022. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s travails as it struggles to deal with a surging wave of COVID-19. Access to, not only our great daily newsletters, but to all of the original writing on our website at. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get, well, access. Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Rebecca Kuang.

Rf kuang babel