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.
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The Chinese student experience in America, with Siqi Tu and Eric Fish
How China’s poverty alleviation program works, explained by Gao Qin
China’s authoritarian revival, explained by Carl Minzner
Courts & torts: Driving the Chinese legal system
The China Questions, with Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi
‘Critical’ journalism in China, explained by Maria Repnikova
Kishore Mahbubani on China’s rise and America’s myopia
Gerry Shih on China’s Uyghur Muslims, under pressure at home and abroad
Yukon Huang, the China economy contrarian
Jerry Yang of Yahoo: Why I Believed in Alibaba
Inside China’s AI revolution, with Jessi Hempel
Jiayang Fan on beauty in China
Stephen Roach on the unhealthy economic codependency of China and America
Rana Mitter on studying the Nanjing Massacre
Scott Tong on his surprising family history
Why China needs a #MeToo campaign but won’t allow it: A conversation with Leta Hong Fincher
When American pilots fell out of the Chinese sky
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