Two years after China limited its exports of “rare earth minerals,” unnerving developed countries that depended on them for industrial uses, production is expanding at sites outside China. And as new sources of rare earth minerals have appeared, that has meant new jobs — including in the tiny town of China Grove, N.C., where Japan’s […]
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 […]
Despite the revulsion that Asif Zardari invokes among his detractors, even his most bitter critics are often forced to acknowledge with admiration, if also intense frustration, how Pakistan’s unlikely president has for all intents and purposes outsmarted all his opponents and ridden out all the storms to take the PPP-led coalition to almost the finish […]
Historian Arnold Toynbee likened America to a ”large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over something.” More recent chroniclers have not been as charitable. They ascribe to the United States less innocence, and credit it with a more predatory outlook in its pursuit of global domination […]
If every modern president needs a creation myth, then Xi Jinping‘s begins on the dusty loess plateau of northwest China. It was here that Xi spent seven formative years, working among the peasants and living in a lice-infested cave dug into the silty clay that extends around the Yellow River. Gradually, the selfless peasants and the unforgiving […]
As the Communist Party of China prepares for a once-in-a-decade change of leadership at the 18th Party Congress in November, the country’s foreign relations are in worse shape than they were 10 years ago, especially in East Asia but also in terms of heightened strategic rivalry with the United States. How the incoming leadership chooses […]
It isn’t every day that the finance minister of a major nation mentions a rap star when talking up his economy. But then South Korea (KOSPI) isn’t your average economy and Psy isn’t your usual entertainer. Bahk Jae Wan did that in an Oct. 9 interview. South Korea’s top economic official cited the singer of the global smash hit […]
SINCE the days of Park Chung-hee’s often brutal dictatorship (he seized power in 1961 and was assassinated in 1979), South Korea has transformed itself as a democratic nation. Its politics, enlivened by occasional fisticuffs in the National Assembly, are among the most vibrant in Asia. The bid by the late strongman’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, to […]
The global economy is facing its third major brake on expansion in five years as emerging markets slow from China to Brazil, provoking debate about how much policy makers should respond. Three years after industrializing nations led the world out of the U.S. mortgage meltdown-induced recession, the reliability of the power source is waning as […]
Preparing for a recent trip to Indonesia last week, I came across an article by Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, the editor of the feisty Indonesian daily Jakarta Post, protesting that the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia seemed too much like an attempt to start a cold war against China, with the help of its neighbors. America’s “economic intentions and wherewithal” in […]
looking beyond borders 