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Barbarians at the Gate
Barbarians at the Gate
History
Places & Travel
English
A semi-serious deep dive into Chinese history and culture broadcast from Beijing and hosted by Jeremiah Jenne and David Moser.
Website
Episodes
108
05 May 2026
This Was Funnier in China: Jesse Appell's Cross-Cultural Comedy Journey
On this episode, we sit down with the one and only Jesse Appell—Chinese TV stand-up comedian, blogger, lecturer, tea entrepreneur, and passionate bridge-builder for US–China cultural exchange. In his newly published book, Jesse shares the unlikely story of how a Fulbright Fellowship to study the traditional Chinese humor form “crosstalk” (xiangsheng) launched him from student to television star,...
48 min
21 April 2026
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...
33 min
07 April 2026
Barbarians Remix: Do you really need to learn to write characters to study Chinese?
Warning: GEEKY CONTENTHosting 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...
27 min
24 March 2026
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...
45 min
10 March 2026
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...
42 min
24 February 2026
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...
39 min
10 February 2026
Barbarians at the Gate x By Their Own Compass: Emily Hahn's Shanghai
Welcome to a special episode of Barbarians at the Gate. David and Jeremiah are off this week preparing for Chinese New Year, but as a special gift to our listeners, we are cross-posting this bonus episode about the life and China travels of the American writer Emily "Mickey" Hahn. This episode is from By Their Own Compass, a podcast looking at historical travelers and past journeys co-hosted by...
1 h 1 min
27 January 2026
Lost in Thailand: The New Chinese Diaspora from Bangkok to Addis Ababa
It’s high season in Thailand. The weather is perfect. But look around the hotel lobbies and the night markets, and you’ll notice something missing: the tour buses.For the last decade, Thailand bet the house on Chinese mass tourism. Now, that wager is looking shaky. The numbers are down, and the reasons go deeper than just a sluggish post-COVID economy.On this episode, David dials in from Addis...
35 min
13 January 2026
Perilous Prognostications for China in 2026 with Yajun Zhang
Following a tumultuous 2025, we gallop into the Year of the Horse. Tradition says it should be a year of dynamism and progress, but which way is the stampede heading?To help us read the tea leaves, we welcome back our occasional co-host, Zhang Yajun. As a global strategist and former innovation lead at the World Economic Forum, Yajun has spent over 16 years translating complex shifts—from AI to...
47 min
30 December 2025
Barbarians Remix: Horse Racing, History, and the Final Champion's Day in Old Shanghai
Champions Day in the city of Shanghai, November 1941.The world was at war, but the clubhouse at the Shanghai Race Club (now People's Park) was packed with owners and punters cheering on the pony. The funeral of Shanghai's richest widow, Liza Hardoon, was a spectacle that filled the streets of the International Settlement. Japanese occupiers and their Chinese collaborators came together in a...
31 min