Lying in a Beijing military hospital in 1990, General Wang Zhen told a visitor he felt betrayed. Decades after he risked his life fighting for an egalitarian utopia, the ideals he held as one of Communist China’s founding fathers were being undermined by the capitalist ways of his children — business leaders in finance, aviation […]
Khin Yu Waddy Myint is manager at Pyrex Trading and Distribution, a Burmese pharmaceutical company that employs 250 people across the country. Part of her job is to source and import medicines from India and Australia, a task she concedes she doesn’t know enough about. “It is the first time for me to learn many […]
SOUTH KOREA has elected Park Geun-hye, a 60-year-old conservative, as president for the coming five years. The candidate is from the same party, the Saenuri party, as the incumbent, Lee Myung-bak. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the dictator who set South Korea on the path of break-neck development, seizing power in 1961 and […]
The Liberal Democratic Party, which was badly defeated in the Lower House election in August 2009 and had to give up power to the Democratic Party of Japan after ruling the nation almost without interruption since 1955, made a comeback in Sunday’s general election. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the current LDP chief, will regain […]
Large oilfields often don’t fall neatly within national boundaries. Intent on securing underground or undersea reserves, nations contest territorial claims. China battles Japan for the Diaoyu/Senkakku Islands and ASEAN members for large sections of the South China Sea. Settling disputes quickly is in the interest of all claimants, particularly those with less technological expertise, suggests […]
Last winter, a wave of mass demonstrations suddenly broke the surface calm of Russian politics. A new middle class, born of the oil-based prosperity of the last decade, took to the streets to voice its opposition to the perceived corruption of the political elite, especially United Russia, the ruling party of then Prime Minister Vladimir […]
An understanding of demographic trends can assist governments in targeting policies for the future and saving money for education, retirement, taxes, healthcare, distribution of natural resources, and more. More importantly, targeted policies can ease resentment emerging over demographic imbalances. The globe can anticipate an additional 1 billion people by 2025 – a total of 8 […]
When Google established its international tax scheme, it followed a path well worn by other multinational companies. The company booked its sales from outside the U.S. at its international headquarters in Ireland. Most of that profit was then sent on to the Netherlands, largely free of tax. From there, the money went on to a […]
That Wal-Mart Stores spent $25 million on lobbying in the United States over the past four years on such issues as whether India would open its own retail markets to the global behemoth should surprise no one, much less shut down India’s parliament, as it did. Wal-Mart is one of the largest companies in the […]
The United States is a nation of immigrants. Except for a small number of Native Americans, everyone is originally from somewhere else, and even recent immigrants can rise to top economic and political roles. President Franklin Roosevelt once famously addressed the Daughters of the American Revolution – a group that prided itself on the early […]
