Asia-Pacific Archive

Since beginning his current term in office eight years ago, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has repeatedly pledged that by 2020, 30 percent of leadership positions in the country would be held by women. But according to the World Economic Forum’s latest annual Global Gender Gap Report, women currently occupy only 15 percent of leadership posts in the country. To the surprise of no one, meeting Abe’s objective this year is “impossible, realistically speaking,” as one Japanese official acknowledged to the Mainichi newspaper in June. The government will instead push to hit its target “as early as possible by 2030.” […]

Over the past few months, the wildly popular video-sharing app TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, have found themselves mired in a serious public relations crisis. In June, India banned dozens of Chinese apps, including TikTok, over national security concerns, and officials in Australia are reportedly investigating the app due to concerns over its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. In the United States, President Donald Trump seemed ready to ban the app last week, but has now given his blessing to a potential deal in which Microsoft would buy TikTok’s operations in the U.S., as well as in […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. A vast fleet of Chinese fishing boats was spotted off Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands last month, triggering alarm in Quito and prompting concerns about the threat to numerous vulnerable species in the protected waters around what is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The presence of so many Chinese fishing vessels off South America’s Pacific coast also raised more questions about China’s distant-water fishing industry. Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, formally complained to China after the Ecuadorian navy announced it had spotted […]