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 "inner emigration."

Readings: 
Ian Buruma: https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/staying-decent-in-an-indecent-society/

The Velvet Prison: https://www.amazon.com/Velvet-Prison-Miklos-Haraszti/dp/0465098002

Brave New World: https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060850523

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 deterrence against Beijing than the current paradigm of "strategic ambiguity" allows called "structured ambiguity."

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 cultural weight in East Asia even as its glow seems to be fading in the West.

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, and why he thinks the gap with American frontier labs is widening.

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-Japan relationship, and the unintended consequences in East Asia of Pax Americana's irreversible deterioration.

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 the author of The Iconoclast, a political biography of Shinzo Abe, and the founder of the consultancy Japan Foresight. He joined us to discuss what Takaichi’s rise means for Japan and the region. 

Follow Tobias Harris at his Substack: https://observingjapan.substack.com/

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

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/policy-institute/neil-thomas

Follow him on X: https://x.com/neilthomas123?lang=en

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.