August 1 – Yemen’s President’s White House Visit and Empty Words on Guantanamo; Snowden’s Asylum and Obama’s Russian Trip; “China’s Long March to the 21st Century”

Full Program

Part 1

Part 2

Then we speak with an expert on post-communist Russia, UCLA professor of political science Daniel Treisman, the author of “Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev”. We discuss growing tension between Russia and the U.S. over the decision to grant Edward Snowden one year’s political asylum in Russia and whether this will lead to a cancellation of President Obama’s planned trip to Moscow in early September to meet with Putin after the G-20 Summit in St. Petersburg.

Part 3

Then finally, we speak with Orville Schell, the co-author of a new book “Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century”. He is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and is now the Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. We discuss the leadership’s fear of political reform repeating what happened to the Soviet Union and the slowdown of China’s growth and efforts to move from an export economy to a domestic consumer economy, and how much corruption scares Chinese consumers from buying local products.