Into Asia

How should decent people live in indecent societies? Chang and Ian look at historical cases from Nazi Germany and contemporary China to see how artists and intellectuals responded, and resisted, as their societies grew increasingly intolerant of dissent. We discuss the current state of the United States, the rift between exiles and those who choose to stay, and the moral implications of "inne...

Chang and Ian unpack Trump's historic summit with Xi Jinping. They discuss the pageantry, the Taiwan question, the first serious bilateral talks on AI, plus the echoes of Marco Polo and the Macartney Missions: the consistent awe and fear that transpires whenever the West encounters the Middle Kingdom.

Will Trump cut a deal with Xi that concedes ground on America's Taiwan policy? That is the question hanging over the US-China summit in Beijing this week.  To talk through what's at stake, Ian and I are joined by Eyck Freymann, a Hoover fellow at Stanford and the author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China . Eyck makes the case for a more proactive form of US deterre...

Why are Chinese, Korean, and Japanese musicians so overrepresented in Western orchestras? Mari Yoshihara, author of Musicians from a Different Shore , joins Ian Buruma and Chang Che to trace how Western classical instruments, pedogogy and cultural traveled from Meiji-era military bands to suburban living rooms in Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul. We also talk about why classical music still carries cultu...

From 2025 to 2026, Zhang Chi was an AI researcher at ByteDance Seed, the division behind Doubao, China's most-used chatbot. Now a assistant professor at Peking University, he joins Chang for a rare insider account of life at one of China's top AI labs. He talks about ByteDance's two-hour nap culture, the shortcuts Chinese labs take to catch up to the US, the ubiquity of Claude Code,...

The main item on Sanae Takaichi's agenda during her recent visit to the White House, on March 19, was China: to shore up Japan's relationship with the U.S. ahead of Trump much-anticipated summit with Xi Jinping. But the Iran war scrambled her plans. Ian and Chang talk about how Japan has now found itself caught in the middle of Trump's war in Iran, the shadow of China on the US-Japa...

In February, Sanae Takaichi won the biggest electoral victory in the Liberal Democratic Party’s 70-year history. With a constitutional supermajority, an ambitious industrial policy, and a willingness to speak bluntly about Taiwan, Takaichi is remaking Japan’s domestic and foreign policy at a moment when the country’s alliance with the United States has never felt more uncertain. Tobias Harris is t...

In November, the left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker took his first trip to China, live-streaming the trip to hundreds of thousands of viewers on the streaming platform Twitch. Hasan is a self-described socialist and a staunch critic of American capitalism, and he told me he had long wanted to see for himself how a Communist government ran a country. He wasn’t disappointed.  In this episod...

China’s top generals are falling like flies, and at unprecedented speeds. As Xi Jinping dismantles the upper ranks of the People’s Liberation Army, questions are mounting about corruption, loyalty, and the stability of China’s political system. Neil Thomas, an expert on Chinese politics at Asia Society, unpacks the logic of Xi’s military crackdown. Neil's articles: https://asiasociety.org/pol...

As Trump threatens the sovereignty of NATO allies, the leaders of South Korea and Japan appeared together in Nara, playing drums in a highly choreographed display of diplomatic comity. Ian and Chang talk about the historic significance of this unlikely rapprochement, why it is happening now, and the prospect of an East Asian security architecture without the help of the United States.

Across the world, the promise of stable growth that underwrote many economies is unraveling. From Nepal to Bulgaria to Mexico, young people fed up with the status quo are rebelling. While many have turned to populists for help, China's youth are turning to a very different figure. The anthropologist Xiang Biao, who has become a voice for China's "lost" generation in recent year...

Lau Kek-huat is a Malaysian-born documentary filmmaker based in Taiwan. His latest film, From Island to Island , won the prestigious Golden Horse Award in 2024. The film examines the role of Taiwanese in Japan’s Pacific War and explores why memories of World War II diverge across the Chinese-speaking world.  Lau joins us to discuss his latest film and its differing reception across Asia. Follow hi...

Less than a month into Sanae Takaichi’s tenure as Japan's prime minister, she has already sparked a diplomatic crisis with Japan's powerful neighbor. Joining us is Tokujin Matsudaira, a constitutional-law professor at Kanagawa University who grew up in Taiwan. He has written extensively on Article 9, constitutional revision, and the diplomatic challenges that shape Japan–China relations....

In the September 29, 2025 , issue of The New Yorker, the writer Ian Buruma reviews two books that trace the uses and abuses of anti-semitism from late-19th century France to present-day US campus politics. Long before right-wing Israeli politicians to evoke the term to deflect criticism of the war in Gaza, anti-semitism reflected a persistent worldview: that a shadowy group of powerful Jews often...

China, Japan, and South Korea are each confronting plummeting birthrates and  rapidly aging populations, each with worrying consequences for their economies, societies, and political futures. What makes East Asia’s demographic decline different from that of the West? As women entered the workforce in Asia, how did they define and discover freedom and fulfillment between the expectations of the fam...

Japan's first female prime minister, Takaichi Sanae, a hard-line conservative, rose to power on promises of national renewal and a “Japan First” agenda. Her rise follows the stunning breakthrough of the Sanseito, a Trump-style populist party that captured 14 seats in the upper house this summer, drawing support from disaffected youth and social-media activists. Takehiro Masutomo, author of Ru...

From Shanghai’s World AI Conference to start-up incubators across the city, the Chinese tech analyst Rui Ma shares what she’s seeing on the ground, and where China actually stands in the global AI race. Follow Rui on X: https://x.com/ruima Follow her newsletter via Tech Buzz China (Substack): https://techbuzzchina.substack.com Related Links:  https://techbuzzchina.substack.com/p/china-deep-tech-tr...

In September, China staged a boisterous military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of World War II. The spectacle is part of a broader campaign in recent years, from museums openings, movies, and memorials, to elevate its role in what it calls the “victory over fascism.” How accurate is China’s official narrative of WWII — and what political purpose does it serve? How does it differ from the way...