Afra Wang on "The Morning Star of Lingao" (临高启明) and the Rise and Reckoning of China's "Industrial Party"

Welcome to the Cineca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

The Seneca podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support. You can reach me at sinecapod at gmail.com. And listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at synecapodcast.com. You'll enjoy, in addition to the pod, the complete transcript of the show, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite China focused columnists and commentators, and of course, you can bask in the knowledge that you're helping me do what I honestly believe is important work. So, do check out the page, see all it is on offer, and consider helping me out.

Today my guest is Afra Wong. I suspect many of you will already have come across her work through her podcasts, through appearances on other China-focused shows, or through the many provocative, beautifully written and fascinating essays she's published. Afra is a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with GovAI and previously with the Roots of Progress Institute. Before going full time as an independent writer last year, she spent six years in Silicon Valley covering AI and crypto, running newsrooms, building developer communities, and absorbing the valley's growth logic from the inside. She writes about China and about Silicon Valley, the latter, sometimes metaphorically, but about neither of these places ever as mere abstractions.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (85 minutes, 14,254 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.