We picture China as a place where no one dares speak out, but the reality is quite different. In 2025, despite one of the most sophisticated censorship machines on earth, workers protested over unpaid wages, homebuyers demanded stalled apartments, and rural communities pushed back against land dispossession.

In this episode, hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Kevin Slaten, who leads Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor, the only public database tracking protests across China, from its office in Taipei. Slaten’s team recorded about 40 to 50 percent more dissent in 2025 than the year before, including the largest pre-Lunar New Year labor protest peak the project has ever recorded.

The twist: US budget cuts had recently knocked the project offline for four months, and it still came back with a skeleton crew to record its highest numbers yet. Fewest resources ever, most dissent ever recorded.

Slaten explains what more than 15,000 cases reveal about the real China beneath the propaganda--an economy under strain, a “social contract” that may never have been one, and why even “local” protests matter politically in an authoritarian system. He also unpacks who protests and why, where Beijing’s red lines fall, and how protest pressure can actually produce real concessions, from policy reversals to quiet legal changes.

Key topics:

• Why dissent is rising even as China tightens censorship
• Who is protesting: workers, homebuyers, rural residents, and more
• How Beijing decides what to tolerate, censor, or crush
• The 2022 White Paper protests: anomaly or symptom?
• A school bullying case that spiraled into crowds chanting “we want democracy”

If you want to understand where China is really heading, pay attention to the people already demanding change.

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• Follow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLight
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• Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

What if the most important strategic relationship of the 21st century is the one Washington is actively damaging? In this episode, hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Kurt Campbell - former Deputy Secretary of State, President Biden's "Asia czar," a key figure in building the modern Quad, and founder of The Asia Group - to ask whether the U.S. and India can move beyond damage control toward something far more ambitious: a new kind of alliance.

Last year, U.S.-India ties hit their lowest point in a quarter century: 50% tariffs over India's Russian oil purchases, a tilt toward Pakistan, and a sharp breakdown of trust. Yet at that very low point, Campbell and Jake Sullivan published "The Case for a U.S. Alliance With India" in Foreign Affairs, warning Washington risked driving India into its adversaries' arms.

Drawing on decades of firsthand diplomacy, Campbell offers a candid insider's read on what went wrong and what might still go right. He reveals why Pakistan has out-maneuvered India in navigating the Trump White House, why his own successor's speech in Delhi drew audible gasps from the audience, and why India's celebrated "strategic autonomy" masks a quiet but unmistakable tilt toward the West.

In this episode:

• Why Campbell calls India America's most consequential 21st-century partner, and what "escape velocity" means
• How he and Sullivan are trying to recast what "alliance" means for a country that will never host U.S. bases
• How Pakistan adapted to Trump-era diplomacy more effectively than India
• The surprising story of how India went from reluctant Quad participant to its driving force
• How India quietly cut its reliance on Russian arms from 80% to under 40%
• Campbell's new Asia Group report on the Strait of Hormuz crisis and why it's hitting the Indo-Pacific harder than markets expect
• His warning that the South China Sea, not Taiwan, is the likeliest flashpoint for miscalculation

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• Follow Kurt Campbell at The Asia Group or on LinkedIn.
• Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn or Facebook
• Follow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLight
• Follow Jim Carouso on LinkedIn
• Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

The day her BYD rideshare driver told her the dashboard screen was a “national secret” … that's when Wall Street Journal correspondent Yoko Kubota knew China had really changed, and maybe it was time to think about leaving.

What does the world lose when fewer foreign journalists are reporting from inside China? In this episode, hosts Ray Powell (35-year military veteran) and Jim Carouso (former senior U.S. diplomat) sit down with Yoko Kubota, who spent eight years in Beijing before leaving China and writing a striking farewell column about a society growing alarmingly suspicious of outsiders.

From that small, telling BYD moment, Yoko traces how a tightening espionage law, national-security messaging, and rising nationalism seeped into everyday life. As a Japanese reporter for an American paper, she also describes the anti-Japanese sentiment she and her family encountered, from a parents' school chat group to the phrases her young son began repeating, and how the 2024 attacks on Japanese children in Suzhou and Shenzhen deepened her fears.

The conversation also digs into her business beat:

• Why on-the-ground reporting from inside China still matters and what we lose as it dries up
• Why China can be both increasingly confident and deeply wary of outside scrutiny
• How China's EV industry went from a punchline to a global powerhouse, and the "zombie" carmakers left in its wake
• Why the race for self-driving cars may come down to regulation as much as technology

With the press corps thinning – underscored by the recent expulsion of New York Times reporter Vivian Wang – this is an on-the-ground account of an increasingly inaccessible country that still, as Yoko puts it, "won't go away from our lives."

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• Follow Yoko Kubota on her page at the Wall Street Journal, on LinkedIn or on X, @Kubota_Yoko
• Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn, or Facebook
• Follow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLight
• Follow Jim Carouso on LinkedIn
• Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific