Business and F*cking in China

A Sinica Podcast

"Murdering a guy together is how you really get to know someone...."

So begins our discussion with James Palmer, and you won't know how badly we're twisting his words out of context until you listen to the full show, which starts with us grilling James on "what you have to do to be part of Chinese business culture" and descends from there into stories of the sort of booze-and-ketamine-fuelled business deal-making that seems to consist of a large amount of male business culture in China. But why? And what is happening to the whole industry under Xi Jinping's recent crackdown?

Postcard

02.04.15

The Bro Code

James Palmer
Turning down an after-dinner invite to a brothel is always a social minefield. But the city’s Party Secretary, a 50-something man with baby-soft hands, had been gently fondling my thigh underneath the banquet table for the past 45 minutes, making me...

Haven't heard of our guest yet? James Palmer is one of our favorite long-form writers on contemporary China, who counts among his China-related books The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China (short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2012). James is also the author of a number of fantastic pieces from AEON magazine on China's post-1980s generation and the deliberate marginalization of the disabled.