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.
Chris Buckley: The China journalist’s China journalist
Big Daddy Dough: Hip-hop and macroeconomics in China
Jane Perlez: Chinese foreign relations in a new age of uncertainty
Rhino horn and organized crime, from Africa to China and Vietnam
Africa-China journalism
Susan Shirk: The fragile superpower and trepidation over Trump
John Zhu retells the Three Kingdoms story
Sidney Rittenberg on solitary confinement and more
Sidney Rittenberg: An interview with a revolutionary
Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction
Talking ’bout my generation: Alec Ash and Chinese millennials
Ian Johnson on the Vatican and China
The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: Part Two
The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: a conversation with John Pomfret on his new book
Beijing Meets Banjo: Wu Fei and Abigail Washburn
Edward Wong on foreign correspondence and dealing with censorship in China
Books, podcasts and the history of science in China with Carla Nappi
The delights of cooking Chinese food: A conversation with chef and author Fuchsia Dunlop
How has China changed in the past four decades? A conversation with John Holden
How will Donald Trump’s victory impact China and U.S.-China relations?
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