Conversations Among the Ruins
CATR is a podcast hosted by Charles and Peter Erickson, published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon EST. Episodes run about an hour and cover geopolitics, economic history, and the fracturing of the post-Cold War world order.
Peter Erickson brings an uncommon biography to these conversations. Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1962 and raised in Berkeley, he began studying Chinese in 1986 — first in Beijing, then Taiwan. He spent 25 years as a professional Chinese-English translator, working across legal, technical and intelligence contexts, including a period translating for a division of the CIA. He has a daughter who has lived in Russia for the better part of six years. He visited Palestine. He has appeared as a guest on The Duran. He reads widely and trusts almost nothing at face value.
Charles Erickson spent a decade in Shanghai, built a business there, traveled through the West Bank in 2013, and gradually stopped finding mainstream Western geopolitical commentary convincing.
After each episode, topic-specific segments of the transcript — typically 20–30 minutes of discussion — are edited into standalone articles with AI-assisted formatting. The analysis and arguments are entirely those of the speakers. AI handles structure and readability, not content or conclusions.
The Expat Edit
The Expat Edit sources its content from Zhihu — China's largest question-and-answer platform, roughly analogous to a more intellectually serious Reddit. With over 100 million registered users, it's the primary forum where educated Chinese people discuss politics, economics, history and current events.
Western coverage of China tends to focus on what the government says. Zhihu shows what ordinary people actually think — and the gap is often significant.
Articles are selected based on relevance and discussion quality, then translated and adapted for English-speaking readers with the help of AI. The views expressed reflect Chinese public discourse, not the editorial opinion of Ruins Report. The goal is to surface perspectives that rarely reach Western audiences, not to endorse them.