Podcasting about China
Department: Intl. Center for Writing and Trans.
Date and Time: February 25, 2022 | 12:00 PM-1:00 PMEvent Location: HG 1030 (live and in person, also live streamed via ZOOM)
Event Details
This event, co-sponsored by UCI’s International Center for Writing and
Translation and Forum for the Academy and the Public and co-moderated by
UCI doctoral students June Ke and Shiqi Lin, will focus on how global
understanding of issues related to Chinese cultural issues can be
expanded via podcasts that take different kinds of approaches to the
topic. The panel features two experienced podcast hosts who were both
born in China but as now based in other parts of the world: Cindy Yu, a
graduate of Oxford now working as a journalist in London, and Afra Wang,
a UCI alum working in the world of news and tech in the Bay Area. Also
featured will be Yangyang Cheng, a physicist and cultural commentator
currently a fellow at Yale Law School who often guests on podcasts. They
will discuss the role that podcasts can play in discussions of topics
ranging from protests to propaganda, music to medical crises,
cross-cultural misunderstandings to the Korean wave’s impact around the
world.
Afra Wang is a California-based podcaster and tech enthusiast. She works full-time in an AI-driven news company, where she chases the intense U.S. news cycle and spends most of her time in product management. When she is not on Slack and Notion, she channels her free time and creative energy into Loud Murmurs, the Chinese-language podcast she cofounded in 2018, focusing on culture, movies, and society. She studied at UCI from 2012-2016, majored in History and Film & Media Studies.
Cindy Yu is broadcast editor at the Spectator, where she also hosts the magazine’s Chinese Whispers podcast. The podcast is a deep dive into all the intriguing themes of Chinese politics, society and history that often go under the radar of traditional China reporting.
She was born in Nanjing, China. She read politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Oxford, where she also read for a master of science in contemporary Chinese studies. She has written extensively about China for the Spectator, with recent pieces looking at the country’s vaccine diplomacy, Peng Shuai and China’s mistress culture, and China’s Zero Covid policy. She is a frequent commentator on China issues for the BBC, RTE News, Channel 4 and GB News.
Yangyang Cheng is a fellow and research scholar at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, where her research focuses on the development of science and technology in China and US-China relations. Her essays on these and related topics have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. A frequent guest on radio and podcast programs including BBC, NPR, and ABC Australia, she is interested in diverse forms of storytelling that reaches the public and policymakers in addition to academic audiences. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her PhD in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor's from the University of Science and Technology of China's School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.