Defining Modernity in South-East Asia

This week, Mark Leonard is joined by LuHan Gabel, associate director of the Ideas Workshop at the Open Society Foundations; Ooi Kee Beng, political historian and executive director of the Penang Institute; and Chelsea Nguyen, research assistant in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics.

LuHan highlights how young people in China are increasingly questioning the meaning of development and modernity beyond material progress. Kee Beng reflects on Malaysia’s complex relationship with China, arguing that their growing engagement is reconnecting South-East Asia to older historical patterns of regional interaction. Chelsea explains how, in Vietnam, attitudes towards China have shifted dramatically since the covid-19 pandemic, with young people becoming more curious about Chinese technology and society.

Together, Mark, LuHan, Kee Beng and Chelsea explore whether a post-Western, rather than anti-Western, generation is taking shape across the region. How did the covid-19 pandemic reshape perceptions of China in South-East Asia? Which aspects of Chinese modernity resonate most with younger generations? Is China becoming a new reference point for development and aspiration? And what do these shifts mean for Europe’s role in an increasingly multipolar world?

This podcast episode was recorded on July 10th 2026.

Bookshelf 

A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century, by Tana Li

State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border, by Qingfei Yin

Border Country, by Raymond Williams

The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China, by Christopher I. Beckwith

Adrift in the South, by Xiao Hai

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