Heartland Mainland: The Iowa China Podcast

About Heartland Mainland: The Iowa China Podcast

To take the pulse of the US-China relationship today, many would look to the coasts.

On the east, Washington, DC is ground zero for high-stakes trade negotiations and hardened attitudes toward China. On the west, America’s largest state California is playing a pivotal role in US-China competition and cooperation across technology and climate.

But in 2020, the pulsating beat of the bilateral relationship is best heard somewhere in the middle of the American heartland: Iowa.

Today, the Hawkeye State—best known for its caucuses and corn fields—stands at a critical junction between the world’s two superpowers. Iowa’s relationship with China is ripe for examination because it’s both a typical Midwestern state and one with unique—and uniquely important—historic and present connections to China.

In 1985, during his maiden trip to the United States, a young Chinese official named Xi Jinping spent two weeks in Iowa. On that trip he visited Iowa factories, stayed with Iowa families, and learned how to drive a car for the first time. Twenty-seven years later, Xi returned to Iowa on his way to becoming the Chinese president.

In Iowa, a local economy that had suffered from an enormous rise in Chinese imports 15 years ago finds itself caught in the crosshairs of punitive tariffs in the latest trade spat. What’s more, the state’s public universities that had relied heavily on Chinese student enrollment to balance budgets now see those revenue streams dry up as national policy takes a different turn.

And this year, like every four years, Iowa reprises its role as the epicenter of US politics. Presidential hopefuls are descending on Iowa, listening to the bread and butter concerns of ordinary Iowans and pitching their agenda and leadership. Those concerns—from farm subsidies to trade policy—will continue to determine which way the state swings in the general election. China invariably seeps into some of these conversations.

Indeed, flanked by the Mississippi River to its east, Iowa today sits squarely amid the ebb and flow of both the potential and tension between America and China.

The state is part Rust Belt, part Farm Belt. Across all these dimensions—manufacturing, agriculture, education, and politics—these Iowa-China ties encapsulate the new reality of US-China relations. While policymakers in Washington, DC have largely coalesced around a tougher stance on China, at the state and local level no clear “China consensus” exists.

How these local actors—mayors, farmers, professors, artists and entrepreneurs—grapple with China’s impact can determine the trajectory of the most consequential bilateral relationship as much as linkages between those inside the Beltway and the Second Ring Road.

For example, actions by Midwestern universities play their part in shaping geopolitical competition, while decisions made in the White House are trickling back down to impose new constraints. The timing of soybean harvests now also figure into trade negotiations, and the outcome of those negotiations directly affect American grassroots democracy: the Iowa Caucuses.

That’s why we’ve spent much of the past year driving thousands of miles around the state documenting these ties. The result is our new series: Heartland Mainland: The Iowa China Podcast.

Over hundreds hours of interviews, we talked to Chinese students trying to fit in at Iowa State University, and the school administrators trying to balance educational missions with financial realities. We spoke with the people who welcomed Xi Jinping to Iowa 35 years ago and explored the small town leveraging that old connection into new investments.

We sat down with the Iowa farmer who became an agricultural celebrity in China, but who now finds his crops embroiled in the middle of a trade spat. And we met the artisan factory workers in Iowa’s rust belt who found their jobs endangered by the rise of Made in China goods.

These stories reveal an Iowa-China relationship that is firmly grounded in the lives of ordinary people. That doesn’t make these stories uniformly positive or negative, just more nuanced and complex. It is a nuance that emanates from the voices of the people directly involved.

Each of the five episodes of the podcast will focus on a different dimension of the relationship: education, politics, agriculture, and manufacturing. The series finale will air the week of the Iowa Caucuses in early February.

Please subscribe to Heartland Mainland on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or you can listen to individual episodes on SoundCloud.