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
China-maxxing: Why Young Americans are Rethinking China
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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 episode:
- Why Hasan sees China differently than liberals; growing up in Turkey
- First impressions of China, Tiananmen flag-raising ceremony
- The incident where Hasan got stopped by security at Tiananmen
- Hasan’s thoughts on Chinese (and American) censorship
- Surprising similarities between America and China
- Hasan’s Chinese fan base and how the red pill pipeline is going global
- What Hasan would advise a future Democratic president on China policy