Malaysia’s governing coalition won a tight national election on Sunday to extend its 56-year rule, fending off an opposition alliance that pledged to clean up politics and end race-based policies in Southeast Asia’s third-largest economy. Read here – Reuters
Most observers are gloomy about the prospects for serious economic reform in China. But they ignore a central lesson of recent Chinese history: reform is possible when the right mix of conditions comes together at the right time. And the very circumstances that facilitated the last major burst of economic reform in the 1990s are […]
It’s immediately apparent that he is in poor health. He is overweight, his face is puffy and, as he says, he has spent the last one-and-a-half years “almost entirely in the hospital.” He has had four operations in five years and suffers from severe diabetes. He was even erroneously reported dead on Twitter last May. […]
With his trip to Shenzhen and other places in southern China, Xi Jinping, the new leader of China’s Communist Party, has all but declared himself to be a reformer in the vein of Deng Xiaoping. Chinese politics is always full of signs, symbols, and suggestions. After a year characterized by a confusing mix of “signs […]
LESS than a week after the biggest shuffle of China’s leaders in a decade, the prime-minister-in-waiting, Li Keqiang, set tongues wagging with a speech about the country’s economic development. A government news-agency gushed that if his words could be summed up in four syllables, they would be “reform, reform”; if in six, then “reform, reform, […]
Sitting in the study of the prime ministerial bungalow in New Delhi, surrounded by manicured lawns and palm trees, Indian leader Manmohan Singh and his soon-to-be finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram pored over plans late into the evening to stem a growing sense of crisis. Singh, the 80-year-old soft-spoken architect of the country’s economic opening two […]
It had been a brutal August for India’s Congress party: economic growth was wilting, the monsoon rains were failing and the opposition had it cornered on yet another corruption scandal. In stepped Sonia Gandhi to revive the morale of the ruling party’s lawmakers, exhorting them at a meeting to “stand up and fight, fight with a […]
looking beyond borders 