It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in Mongolia, the large country of high desert plains sandwiched between China and Russia, and much has changed. Some, education and food supply, is for the better, and a lot – including urban sprawl and rising inequality – is for the worse. Much of the change has to […]
In ways big and small, Asia is still living with the tainted legacy of imperialism. Consider the debate now underway in Myanmar – or Burma to some. Because the imperial tongue found it difficult to pronounce “Myanmar,” the country’s no-nonsense British masters renamed it Burma (redrawing its borders as well for good measure). The new […]
Tensions between Japan and China over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands are continuing, as indicated by continued obstacles to Japanese businesses in China, a drastic decline in tourism, and Chinese patrols near the islands. This is both a Sino-Japanese issue and a part of a broader confrontation between China on one side and the United […]
In the last half century, East Asia emerged as the uber-performer on the global economic stage. The various countries in the region found success with substantially different systems: state-led capitalism in South Korea, Singapore and Japan; wild and wooly competitive, entrepreneur-led growth in Taiwan and Hong Kong; and more recently, what Deng Xiaoping once described as […]
THE Venerable Lobsang Norbu, a 77-year-old monk who presides over one of several Tibetan Buddhist hilltop monasteries in Arunachal Pradesh, in north-eastern India, recalls the “very horrible” war that China launched 50 years ago this week. Flares lit up the night, then gunfire erupted. Terrified villagers and monks fled through the pine and rhododendron forests […]
Fifty years ago, on the morning of October 20, 1962, China’s People’s Liberation Army assaulted Indian military positions along their disputed frontier. The Chinese attack, justified domestically and abroad as self-defense, resulted in the only major armed conflict in modern times between the world’s two most populous countries. The Indian military, poorly prepared and naively […]
Recent rhetoric concerning the East China Sea and the Senkaku Islands, which the Chinese call the Diaoyu Islands, makes it appear that the Japanese government is taking a tougher approach on foreign policy and military affairs. Its decision to purchase the disputed islands in September triggered outrage from China and spawned observations that Japan is […]
This month marks the 50th anniversary of China’s military attack on India, the only foreign war that communist-ruled China has won. Yet that war failed to resolve the disputes between the world’s two most populous countries, and its legacy continues to weigh down the bilateral relationship. While their economic heft is drawing increasing international attention, […]
Myanmar‘s President Thein Sein recently ended his first ever visit to the United States. In late September, he was in New York to participate in the annual United Nations General Assembly. Afterward, he had a much anticipated discussion with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Thein Sein also has a chance to catch up with […]
Mongolia has featured prominently in Western media over the past several months as an important strategic partner for the U.S. “pivot” to Asia. Much of the analysis on U.S.-Mongolian relations has been truncated in that it fails to consider the two states’ relations through the prism of Mongolia’s strategic interests. The end result is an overly […]
looking beyond borders 