Into Asia

Trump at the Imperial Court

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.

Taiwan on the Eve of the Summit

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 So Many Asians Study Classical Music

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.

A Year Inside ByteDance's AI Lab

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.

Takaichi Goes to Washington

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.