Shortly after Deborah Seligsohn was last on Sinica, in April, the lab leak hypothesis seemed suddenly to gain traction — at least in American media. This week, Kaiser invites Deborah back to the show to talk about why the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a notion long regarded by virologists as less probable than zoonotic transmission, has burst back into the conversation. Deborah served as the State Department’s Environment, Science, Technology and Health Counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007. She is an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Philadelphia.
3:00: The persistence of the lab leak theory
11:40: Navigating the political and institutional landscape within China
25:36: A view from Beijing’s perspective
31:02: Eliciting cooperation from Beijing, and what should our priorities be
Recommendations:
Deborah: The podcast This Week in Virology, particularly episodes 760 and 762, which touch on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kaiser: Richard L. Watkins, a candidate running for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina.
The fight over Inner Mongolia's "bilingual education" policy
U.S.-China relations in 2020 with Susan Shirk
Online vitriol and identity with The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan
Sinica celebrates the 500th episode of the China in Africa Podcast
Mary Kay Magistad - On China's New Silk Road (Episode 1: The China Dream)
Black voices in the China space
Poverty eradication by 2020: A reality check
Rapper Bohan Phoenix and DJ Allyson Toy on hip-hop in China
Rerun: Guo Wengui: The extraordinary tale of a Chinese billionaire turned dissident, told by Mike Forsythe and Alexandra Stevenson
U.S. Foreign Service Officer Leland Lazarus on China-Caribbean relations
Global Governance 2020: A discussion with Kaiser Kuo and Susan Thornton
Adam Tooze on the geopolitics of the pandemic
Sir Danny Alexander on AIIB in a time of crisis
‘Superpower Showdown’: A conversation with authors Bob Davis and Lingling Wei
Huawei and the 5G ecosystem
Standoff in Ladakh: Ananth Krishnan on the China-India border conflict
The controversy over Fang Fang’s ‘Wuhan Diary’: A conversation with the translator, Michael Berry
Why doesn't the China bubble pop? A conversation with Bloomberg’s chief economist, Tom Orlik
Censored: Molly Roberts on how China uses deterrence, distraction, and dilution to control its internet
‘Superpower Interrupted’: A conversation with veteran China journalist Michael Schuman about his Chinese history of the world
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