Few outside the Chinese wedding banquet circuit have heard of fish maw, a flavourless, unappetising-looking swim bladder found in bony fish. In dried form, a kilo from the right species goes for around $150,000 on the world market, double the price of a kilogram of cocaine. The most prized maw is found in one of the remotest corners of the planet, the Kikori Delta in southern Papua New Guinea, where the once ignored scaly croaker is being targeted on an industrial scale by Chinese fishing companies, transforming the lives of villagers—and the ecosystem. Louisa and Graeme are joined by Jo Chandler, an award-winning journalist and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism who reported on the fish maw trade for Nature magazine.

Image: c/- Jo Chandler, Veraibari Village 2024.

Jo’s fieldwork was supported in part by the Walkley Foundation Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism.

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Writers from Hong Kong face a Kafkaesque decision in the years since draconian security legislation was imposed on the city: to stay and be subject to intense censorship, or to write freely from exile. In this episode, Louisa speaks to two award-winning authors who have chosen different paths. Lau Yeewa is still living in Hong Kong; her book Tongueless, translated by Jennifer Feeley, won the 2024 Pen Translates award. Gigi Leung Lee-chi is now based in Taiwan, and her book The Melancholy of Trees has just won Taiwan's Golden Tripod award.

Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons, Empty Bookshelves, 2014

Transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/

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In our third episode on pig butchering scams, we explore the origins of the Chinese criminal syndicates that enslave people from at least 66 different countries. We examine the institutions supporting this appalling business, from the Thai military to cryptocurrencies, Burmese border guard forces to special economic zones. And the marks for these scam syndicates are not just Chinese lonely hearts—Western countries are now more profitable to scam than China. To ask what can be done to counter this trade, Graeme is joined by Jason Tower, director of the Burma Program at the United States Institute of Peace, and Greg Raymond from the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.

Image: c/- Stefan Czimmek/DW, KK Park on the Myanmar-Thai border

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