China’s top security official has made the first high-level trip to Afghanistan by a senior Chinese leader in nearly half a century, meeting President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, state media said Sunday. Zhou Yongkang made the four-hour visit on Saturday, in a secretive trip aimed at shoring up ties between the neighbours, Xinhua news agency reported. […]
China and Japan are beginning to show two-track tactics toward their latest territorial row over a group of islands in the East China Sea. On the one hand, China is taking a hard-line; a flotilla of 16 Chinese surveillance ships on Tuesday entered Japanese territorial waters off the islands, known as Diaoyu in China and […]
Yoshihiko Noda will doubtless win his party’s leadership race this week. There’s little certainty, though, that Japan’s prime minister is up to putting his country, the world’s No. 3 economy, on stronger footing. For starters, Noda’s victory may be Pyrrhic. He is under pressure to dissolve parliament and hold national elections, perhaps as soon as November. […]
China’s economic slowdown may persist into next year amid a lack of funding for approved infrastructure projects, according to an academic adviser to the nation’s central bank. Expansion will be 7.3 percent to 7.4 percent in the fourth quarter and 7 percent to 7.5 percent in the first half next year, Song Guoqing, a Peking University professor, said […]
When most people think of Indonesia today, they think of beaches and temples or of its famously teeming cities, but this country of 240 million and counting is a much more modern, diversified, and dynamic economy than many international investors and companies assume. To make the most of Indonesia’s vast potential, they’re going to need […]
When the Japanese army invaded China in 1931, Mao Zedong, in those days still a guerrilla fighter, turned and ran. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s nominal president at the time, stayed behind to fight the Japanese in his wartime capital of Chongqing, but Mao’s Communist Party fled to the north to establish a base of anti-Japanese resistance in […]
India has taken two important decisions for stepping up its defense cooperation with the Maldives, a country situated in the Indian Ocean. This is significant when considering China’s recently-enlarged strategic footprint in the area. To begin with, the Indian government has decided to station a Defense Attaché at Male, the capital of Maldives. Additionally, India has […]
In his new book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, Robert Kaplan (Stratfor Global Intelligence) contends that current global conflicts, including wars, political instability, and clashes over religion, can be better understood and even forecasted through close examination of the maps that chart our world. Read […]
If the age of men has ended, nobody told Asia. True, across the continent women are obtaining degrees at higher rates — in some cases outpacing men — and bucking traditional gender roles. Yet the past few decades have brought significant setbacks as well as breakthroughs. Men’s wages are now growing faster than women’s wages […]
“Our generation is not wise enough to find a common language on this question,” Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1978 about his country’s territorial dispute with Japan. “Our next generation will certainly be wiser. They will certainly find a solution acceptable to all. In the meantime, Deng proposed, the two sides should jointly develop the […]
