In 2019, more than a million people poured onto the streets of Hong Kong, with many returning week after week. The song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ soon emerged as the movement’s unofficial anthem. What began as a protest against an ill-advised extradition bill quickly became, for many, the city’s last stand against Beijing’s tightening grip.

Six years on, those courageous scenes of struggle feel like a distant memory. New legislations have effectively outlawed dissent. ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ is banned. Pro-democracy activists and legislators have been jailed or forced into exile. Was the movement a failure? How should we measure success in a struggle that was, in many ways, quixotic? And how might we situate the 2019 protests within Hong Kong’s unique history of colonisation and capitalist development?

In this episode, Yangyang speaks with sociologist Ching Kwan Lee and historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom about the significance of the struggle, its transnational legacy, and the lessons it carries for this moment of global democratic backsliding.

Over the past few years, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity, especially in the high-tech sector, have been at the centre of great power rivalry between the United States and China. The White House has been pressuring companies from its East Asian allies, including the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, to invest in the United States and open new factories, while American firms like Apple have been accused of helping China build up its industrial capacity. Amid all the techno-nationalistic rhetoric, the people whose lives and livelihoods are directly impacted by these policies are scarcely mentioned; the countries are spoken of like geopolitical abstractions, the companies like balance sheets. Why did Western capital and companies move to East Asia to set up manufacturing facilities? Who are the people whose labour propelled the industrial rise in China and Taiwan? What are the social costs of these states’ pursuit of technological might, and how do ordinary people navigate their power and powerlessness? For this episode, Yangyang spoke with anthropologist Anru Lee and sociologist Ya-Wen Lei to discuss gender, labour, industrialisation, and deindustrialisation in China and Taiwan.

Rejecting calls from unknown numbers, blocking suspicious accounts, turning down job offers too good to be true: almost all of us have encountered online scams. With vigilance, this may be little more than a nuisance; yet for many victims, the consequences are devastating. In recent years, scams have reached industrial scale, with Southeast Asia emerging as a global epicentre. This is the focus of a timely new book, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds (Verso 2025, forthcoming in Chinese, Bahasa, and Vietnamese). Who works in these compounds, and under what conditions? When perpetrators are also trafficking victims, how should authorities respond? For this episode, Yangyang spoke with two of Scam’s co-authors, Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li.