Singapore is a business-friendly, illiberal democracy, or what some political scientists call a “competitive authoritarian regime,” or a “façade electoral” system. So there’s much in that island nation for Americans to learn about their own future.

Kirsten Han is a great guide: She runs We, The Citizens, a newsletter covering Singapore from a rights-based perspective, and is the managing editor of Mekong Review, an Asia-focused literary journal. She is also a key member of the Transformative Justice Collective, which works towards the end of the death penalty and Singapore’s war on drugs.

In this conversation, we discuss:

* Singapore’s political landscape

* The illusion of democracy, media control, and freedom of expression

* Activism and civil society in Singapore

* The LGBTQ community and social change

* Public perceptions of the death penalty

* Cultural context of drug policies, sex work vs. drugs

* The loneliness of activism

* How activists are targeted in Singapore

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you want to support what we’re doing, take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Yuán Shìkǎi 袁世凯 was post-imperial China’s first president. He led China’s first exploration of democracy down a dead end, and his presidency was “disastrous,” says historian James Carter in an essay that inspired this podcast.

Jay is a historian and author of This Week in China’s History, and a number of books on China’s history. Jay is also Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

In this episode, we discuss:

* The Rise of Yuan Shikai

* Yuan’s presidency and early governance

* Political turmoil and assassination

* Yuan as emperor

* The aftermath of Yuan’s rule

* The Warlord Era and personal loyalties

* Yuan’s American advisor, Frank Johnson Goodnow

* Astroturfing, democratic façades

* Challenges in American higher education today

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you want to support what we’re doing, take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Soyonbo Borjgin is from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, where he worked as a journalist at the state-owned, Mongolian-language Inner Mongolia Life Weekly in the last few years of its existence. He later moved to New York, where has peed in a bottle while delivering packages for Amazon and worked for VOA’s Mongolian language service before getting DOGEd. It’s a long way from home: His grandfather was an illiterate shepherd who kept 30 dogs and ate wolf hearts; his father became a professor at Inner Mongolia University, then a prisoner for protesting in the 1989 demonstrations.

The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly went defunct after the Chinese government’s reversal of long-standing policies of encouraging ethnic minority language learning, which resulted in the cancellation of classes taught in Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian languages, shuttering of vernacular media, and removal of street signs. Soyonbo had to attend re-education classes, and his career as a journalist in China was over.

He now writes a newsletter on Mongolian issues and recently published a fascinating piece in Equator that describes his experiences being re-educated in Xi Jinping thought after the crackdown on Mongolian identity.

In this conversation, we discuss:

* Growing up in a Mongolian-speaking community in Hohhot

* Working as a journalist at Inner Mongolia Life Weekly

* Storytelling and navigating censorship

* Scandal and corruption at state media

* Changes in China’s ethnic policies and language rights and the 2020 campaign against Mongolian language and identity

* Shaman curses and creative resistance against language suppression

* End of the Inner Mongolia Life Weekly

* Cultural identity and language among Mongolians abroad

* “Re-education” and the ways authoritarianism affects daily life

* Exile and cultural adaptation

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you want to support what we’re doing, take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Stuart Reid is author of The Lumumba Plot, a rip-roaring read about the CIA plan to assassinate the newly independent Congo’s charismatic prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960.

Stuart is a Senior Fellow for History and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written for many publications including The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, and interviewed world leaders for Foreign Affairs, including former Congo president Joseph Kabila, African billionaire mobile phone entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim, and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

In this podcast we discuss:

* Congo’s independence, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, Belgian military intervention, and the Katanga secession

* The misreading of Lumumba’s Soviet outreach and Cold War paranoia

* Eisenhower’s assassination order

* The poison plot

* The torture and assassination of Lumumba, and the destruction of his body

* The return of Lumumba’s tooth to the Congo

* Mobutu’s three decades of U.S.-supported rule and its legacy

* The Congo today

* A pattern of failed American-sponsored regime change

* Blowing up boats in the Caribbean and the history of failed U.S. covert actions

For more on the Congo, listen to our episode Mobutu: The dictator who wanted to make Zaire great again, with scholar Pedro Monaville.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you want to support what we’re doing, take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Moshik Temkin is the author of The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial, and Warriors, Rebels, and Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X, based on a course which he taught at Harvard University for over a decade. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership and History at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University.

In the podcast, we discuss:

* Defining leadership beyond the Great Men

* Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening—whose names few remember, the lone dissenters against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

* Trump as a product of historical and socio-economic forces, a symptom of the disease

* The rise of authoritarianism in America

* Why historical analogies can be weak toolst o understand contemporary politics; the constructive use of comparisons

* The Democratic Party’s problems and inability to unite behind Mamdani

* Local resistance against authoritarianism

Surveillance and control around the world

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you want to support what we’re doing, take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Clarissa Ward is a British-American journalist who frequently reports on global conflicts and crises as CNN’s Chief International Correspondent, including the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the overthrow of the Assad regime by rebel forces in Syria, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Clarissa is the recipient of multiple Peabody and Murrow awards, and the author of the 2020 book On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist.

In this interview we talk about:

* The fall of Kabul and the atmosphere in the city

* The role of women in Afghanistan, and being a female journalist in Muslim countries

* Code switching and reporting

* The end of the Assad regime in Syria

* Lessons the Syrian rebels took from the Taliban

* Reporting from Kharkiv as the 2022 Russian invasion

* Perceptions of war and media coverage of different wars

Challenges for American media

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you want to support what we’re doing, take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Dr. Natalya Chernyshova is author of the book Soviet consumer culture in the Brezhnev era, and the upcoming The most Soviet republic: Belarus in the long 1970s. She is a historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Queen Mary University of London.

In this podcast we discuss:

* A brief history of Belarus and its quarrelsome but dependent relationship with Russia

* Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko’s populist appeal as an outsider and anti-corruption fighter, and his rise to power

* Belarusian national identity; Soviet identity, nostalgia, and legacies

* The 2020 protests, sometimes called the Anti-Cockroach Revolution, triggered by the government’s COVID-19 response, the contested 2020 elections, and pent up dissatisfaction with Lukashenko’s rule

* Jews in Belarus

* Memories, censorship, and internet controls

* Stuck between Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania

* Media and opposition in exile

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Edward Schatz is author of the book Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia, and other influential books and articles in political science, and on Kazakhstan. He is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and directs the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School.

In this conversation we discuss:

* The significant differences between authoritarian regimes in Central Asia

* The Soviet inheritance of Central Asian states

* The hopes of the 1990s and mistaking the whiff of a weak state for the smell of freedom

* What authoritarianism means

* Clan Politics in Central Asia

* The nature of Kazakhstan’s government and responsive authoritarianism

* The 2022 protests in Kazakhstan

* Russia’s role in suppressing the protests and the influence of Russian media

* Acts of resistance

* The shift from pro- to anti-Americanism

* Defending democracy

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

Julia Sonnevend is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024. She is an associate professor of sociology and communications at the New School, and currently a CARGC Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

In this conversation we discuss:

* Viktor Orbán’s political journey and charm

* Defining charm, charisma, and soft power

* Techniques of charm in politics

* Liberal vs. illiberal charm: Jacinda Ardern and Viktor Orbán

* Jacinda Ardern and the perils of charm in politics

* The anti-corruption “zebra protests” mocking the corruption of Viktor Orbán

* Iran’s Mohammad Javad Zarif, Germany’s Angela Merkel, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and other world leaders

* The impact of digital media on political charm

* Gender dynamics in political charm

* Everyday courage in politics

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.

The daily onslaught of outrageous news of corruption, destruction of government capacity, and attacks on science and education in the U.S. right now is dizzying. “What now?” you scream as you scroll through the morning’s news. It’s a little like the world Geremie R. Barmé stepped into in 1974, when he arrived in China as an exchange student from Australia. The late Cultural Revolution was a “constant bombardment of noise and information” that likewise made one dizzy before breakfast.

Geremie is a Sinologist, historian, filmmaker, translator, and author of a number of books on Chinese culture and politics. You can read a recent interview with him on his work here, and find his most recent writings at China Heritage. He was the guest on the first episode of Rhyming Chaos, released on February 20, 2025: How to commit a self-coup, in the U.S. and in China.

In this follow-up podcast, recorded on September 30, the same day Donald Trump told a gathering of senior leaders of the U.S. armed forces that they must target “the enemy within,” we discussed:

* The relentless daily “bombardment of noise and information” in 1970s China.

* The “Hall of One Voice” 一言堂: Deng Xiaoping’s term for when only Mao’s voice mattered, and the sycophants around him ensured he heard nothing that might upset him.

* Snitching in the Cultural Revolution, JD Vance, and Laura Loomer.

* The surveillance state in China and the U.S., and Larry Ellison’s vision.

* Big character posters 大字报 and Twitter.

* Attacks on expertise, science, and learning under Mao and Trump.

* The progress of Project 2025; Russell Vought and Stephen Miller’s radical plans to reshape America.

* Perpetual anger: Why Trumpists remain furious and the maintenance of grievance culture in China.

* The Mao-era disconnect between rhetoric and reality; current American conspiracy theories and inability to distinguish fact from fiction.

* Lin Biao’s militarization of China (1968-1971), and increasing military control of American society.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and if you like what we’re doing, please take out a paid subscription at rhymingchaos.com.