The Little Red Podcast

By: Graeme Smith and Louisa Lim
  • Summary

  • The Little Red Podcast: interviews and chat celebrating China beyond the Beijing beltway. Hosted by Graeme Smith, China studies academic at the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs and Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now with the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We are the 2018 winners of podcast of the year in the News & Current Affairs category of the Australian Podcast Awards. Follow us @limlouisa and @GraemeKSmith, and find show notes at www.facebook.com/LittleRedPodcast/
    2025 Graeme Smith and Louisa Lim
    Show more Show less
Episodes
  • China on the Couch: Xi Jinping's Psy-boom
    Apr 1 2025

    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.

    Show more Show less
    48 mins
  • Let's Get Spiritual: State, Digital Spirituality and Feng Shui in China
    Feb 5 2025

    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/

    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Show more Show less
    47 mins
  • Sisters doing it for themselves? Marriage Refusal and Little Milk Puppies
    Jan 13 2025

    China is in the grip of a gender war. While government officials are texting and even cold calling women to urge them have children, the fertility rate continues to drop. Better educated and often better paid their male peers, many urban Chinese women are simply choosing not to marry. To discuss the growing female backlash to the Party’s pro-natal policies, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Chloe Mofei Shen, lifestyle director of Elle China and Qiqi Huang, post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Macau.

    Image: “Marrying late has many advantages”, BG E15/716, Landsberger Collection, 1975.

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

    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Show more Show less
    44 mins

What listeners say about The Little Red Podcast

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.