Why So Many Asians Study Classical Music

China’s tech rise seemed to debunk an old Western belief that free speech drives innovation. Yinfi (Yin Lu), a music composer turned YouTuber, thinks the old Western view should be revisited. For five years he wrote music for China’s biggest video games. Now, from Britain, he makes video essays reflecting on his time there, among which is the observation that China innovates not despite its censorship but because it tolerates freedoms selectively. He now believes that censorship is driving Chinese into the fantasy worlds of games and anime, an industry Yinfi helped build.

Before Jimmy Lai was branded the biggest “black hand” behind Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, he was a child laborer in a glove and textile factory. His unlikely story is chronicled in The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic (2024) by veteran journalist Mark Clifford. Clifford, now the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, sits down with Ian and Chang to discuss Lai’s path from garment factories to founding Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s loud, gossipy, fiercely pro-democracy tabloid, and his effective life sentence, meted out in February. 

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 of a less dependable United States.

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 "political meritocracy." More than a decade into the Xi Jinping era, Chang asks Daniel whether his views had changed. They also discuss Bell's new book Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters, and whether ancient Chinese wisdom does inform policies like Xi's anti-corruption campaign and his criticism of "lying flat" youths.See Bell's book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691279800/why-ancient-chinese-political-thought-matters

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 countries. Chang and Ian discuss what the AI talks between the US and China might produce, what the Chinese worry about as they develop stronger and stronger models, and why Chinese generally feel much more optimistic about AI than Americans.

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 consequential resident was a Sunday school teacher named Kim Il Sung. Ian and Chang are joined by Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal's China bureau chief, to break down how a child of the church turned a nation into a nuclear-armed religious society. He is the author of Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's Personality Cult (Knopf, April 2026)

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/0465098002Brave 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.