Sam Chetwin George

speaker

282 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 25 Jun

Sam Chetwin George’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Pekingology · China Was Ready for the Age of Anarchy · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

Thank you very much for having me.

I've listened to it for several years now, so I'm thrilled to be present.

Well, my relationship with Asia started literally from my birth.

I was born in Hong Kong, which was then late British Imperial Hong Kong.

And so as a result of that, my family and I had a long relationship with Asia, friends there, my parents, ex colleagues there, my parents lived in Hong Kong.

And so we'd often travel back to Hong Kong and broader Asia when I was growing up.

And I also grew up in Auckland, New Zealand.

After we moved back from Hong Kong, which is part of the Asia Pacific.

And I'm not sure if anyone's been to Auckland, but it's a very it feels like a part of Asia.

You have Polynesian populations like the indigenous Maori, as well as other Polynesian peoples from, particularly from Samoa and Tonga, but also a large East Asian population.

And some of them have been there for many generations, but there was a big influx of East Asian.

Migrants in the 1990s.

So when I was at school, I had a lot of friends from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the PRC, Korea.

And so I've always felt like I'm part of the Asian continent in some ways.

As well, of course, as being part of the, you know, the British Empire.

New Zealand was a colony of Great Britain and part of the broader American cultural imperium as well.

So my interest started early.

I didn't actually do my undergraduate studies in Chinese.

I studied the classics of Western thought, but after a couple of quite uninspiring years in a corporate job, I took an opportunity to study Chinese in Taiwan under a New Zealand Prime Minister's scholarship, which was by far the most important decision of my professional life.

I absolutely loved it.

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