On the southern outskirts of the city Zaranj, where the last derelict shanties meet an endless, vacant country — beige desert and beige sky, whipped together into a single coalescing haze by the accurately named Wind of 120 Days — there is a place called Ganj: a kind of way station for Afghan migrants trying […]
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, […]
As China’s ruling Communist Party prepares for a once-in-a-decade leadership transition next month, it is planning a daunting step – breaking up the monopolies enjoyed by its gargantuan state-owned enterprises. The monopolists have other ideas. One of the most powerful of all Chinese state-owned giants is the power-grid operator, State Grid Corp, led by the politically […]
The recent crackdown by the Ghanaian government on illegal gold mining put the livelihood of hundreds of Chinese workers in the country at stake. On October 11, when Ghana’s police and immigration bureau raided mining fields in Ashanti province, a security officer shot and killed a 16-year old Chinese worker. More than one hundred Chinese […]
I thought Mitt Romney’s second debate was nearly as bad as Barack Obama’s first debate. Two weeks ago, Obama seemed to have no awareness of what he was doing wrong, and he spent the evening staring at the lectern and searching for something to say. Romney seemed to suffer from a similar malady Tuesday night, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Until just over a week ago, President Obama’s campaign was on the cusp of doing something unprecedented in modern presidential politics: turning the election into a referendum on the challenger, Mitt Romney. Why is that so special? Because every prior example of an incumbent running for reelection in recent times has wound up being a […]
Chen Shin-chi smiles through his dentures and drops down to the dusty floor of a jail cell to do a push up. He looks up at the crowd watching him, smiles again, and flips on his back to perform sit-ups, his body stretching almost the entire length of the three-by-two-meter cell. In 1968, he lived […]
The latest cover of the Economist, the weekly news magazine that likes to call itself a newspaper, featured inequality, which it believes is the new big problem facing the world at large. Belatedly, the world is finally beginning to acknowledge an endemic problem, which is so anecdotally visible in the new India defined by glitzy malls […]
