Into Asia
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
Into Asia
Latest Episodes
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 ...
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 "po...
China's Grand Bazaar of Artificial Intelligence
Chang just returned from a extended trip to China and shares some of his reflections. He visited frontier AI labs and stopped by the World AI Conference in Shanghai, where Xi Jinping spoke and announced a new AI governance body with 29 member c...
How Christianity Shaped North Korea’s Personality Cult
Before Pyongyang became the capital of the Kim dynasty, it was known as the "Jerusalem of the East," a city so devoutly Christian that one American missionary in 1925 declared it "the most Protestant city" they had ever seen. Its most consequen...
The Velvet Prison: Self-Censorship from Berlin to Beijing to New York
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 o...