Hosted by writers Chang Che and Ian Buruma, Into Asia explores how China, Japan, and Korea are reshaping the world. From memory politics to AI and demographic decline, they connect history and current affairs to reveal the new role Asia will play in the twenty-first century.
Editing by Sydney Watson
Before Jimmy Lai was branded the biggest “black hand” behind Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, he was a child laborer in a glove and textile factory. His unlikely story is chronicled in The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic (2024) by veteran journalist Mark Clifford. Clifford, now the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, sits down with Ian and Chang to discuss Lai’s path from garment factories t...
2 Sept 2026
What Trump’s Military Pullback Means for East Asia
Trump has scaled back military exercises with South Korea and is courting North Korea's president Kim Jung Un. Chang and Ian discuss what this means for Japan and South Korea from discussions of nuclear rearmament to the political consequences of a less dependable United States.
18 Aug 2026
The China Model, ten years on
In 2015, Daniel Bell, then a political theorist at Tsinghua University published “The China Model.” China should be evaluated not by its failure to live up to a Western liberal democracy, Bell argued, but by its own ideals, what he called a "political meritocracy." More than a decade into the Xi Jinping era, Chang asks Daniel whether his views had changed. They also discuss Bell's new book Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters, and whether ancient Chinese wisdom does inform policies l...
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6 ratings
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