Asia-Pacific Archive

The 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan a decade ago was a literally world-changing event. One of the most powerful tremors ever recorded, it rearranged the planet’s mass, shortening Earth’s day by 1.8 microseconds and causing it to wobble on its axis by an additional 6.7 inches. It also triggered a record-setting tsunami and knocked the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in northeastern Japan, offline, resulting in the worst nuclear meltdown the world had seen since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. More than 18,000 people were left dead or unaccounted for. For those residents who were left behind to grieve […]

Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, stands between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Faced with the fact that the United States has lost patience with the Afghan government’s dithering negotiations with the Taliban, Ghani now has little choice but to orchestrate a deal that will likely end his presidency—and almost certainly result in a destructive civil war. Whether Washington decides to honor a bargain struck with the Taliban under the Trump administration, which calls for the exit of 2,500 American troops by May 1, or whether the Biden administration extends their mission by another 90 or 180 days, is almost […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Rachel Cheung and Assistant Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. HONG KONG—By the time the marathon bail hearing of 47 pro-democracy advocates wrapped up at 3 a.m. last Tuesday in Hong Kong, one of the defendants, Clarisse Yeung, had collapsed in the dock, and four had been hospitalized for exhaustion. Several more were wheeled out of the courthouse in stretchers over the next few days as the proceedings dragged on until Thursday evening. […]

Along the waters of Pangong Lake, high up in the Himalayas, there was a slackening of shoulders and a collective sigh of relief on Feb. 11. After nine months of tense military confrontation, which included the first deadly clash in decades between Indian and Chinese troops along their disputed border, the two sides began withdrawing from their positions on the southern and northern banks of the lake as part of a phased, synchronized military disengagement. By mitigating the risk of another skirmish or accident, the move has brought Beijing and New Delhi back from the brink in their border standoff. […]

In retrospect, the early 2000s can be considered, if not the high-water mark, then the golden age of contemporary globalization. Liberalized trade had achieved a quasi-theological status, with the catalogue of its benefits—both real and anticipated—extending far beyond its strictly economic impact. Trade, it was argued, would allow countries in the developing world to lift their populations out of poverty and into the “global middle class.” With this new affluence would come greater expectations for effective governance, generating protean demands for accountability that would eventually lead to political liberalization in countries where authoritarianism was the rule. Meanwhile, the lowered barriers […]

Earlier this month, hundreds of Hong Kongers thronged outside a courthouse in West Kowloon to protest the arrest of 47 activists and opposition lawmakers, who were attending an arraignment hearing inside. When the police took them into custody in early January, along with eight other activists, it was one of the most brazen acts of repression in the city since Beijing imposed a new national security law on Hong Kong last summer. With this latest action, Hong Kong authorities have jailed or driven into exile every notable opposition voice in the territory. The national security law was designed to crack […]

A raging pandemic, an absent America and an emboldened China have exacerbated an ongoing global democratic recession. That is the message of “Freedom in the World 2021,” Freedom House’s latest status report on the fortunes of democracy. During 2020, democracy retreated for the 15th consecutive year, deteriorating in 73 countries and improving in only 28—a record margin according to Freedom House, which has been tracking these trends for more than 40 years. Reversing this decline will require established democracies to play both defense and offense, bolstering democracy where it is under siege and challenging the anti-democratic message of the world’s […]

Over the course of three days in Laos in mid-January, more than 750 senior members of the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party convened in the capital, Vientiane, to elect its political leaders for the next five years. The delegates to the 11th National Congress chose incumbent Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith to replace the retiring Bounnhang Vorachit as the party’s secretary general—the most powerful position in Laos’ communist system. If recent precedent is upheld, this paves the way for Sisoulith to also be confirmed as president when a nominally new National Assembly meets later this month. Elections for the assembly were […]

Depending on who you ask, there are either good reasons to panic about China one day weaponizing its dominance of the market for rare earth elements, or to think that the risk is overblown. Judging from President Joe Biden’s executive order last week calling for a major 100-day review of U.S. strategic supply chains, including rare earths, in order to spur domestic production, Washington is starting to take that risk more seriously than ever. That could be a very good thing, not only for the United States but for the world. There is no debating that the coming shift to […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Rachel Cheung and Assistant Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. Pineapples are the latest product to land in China’s crosshairs, as its deteriorating relationship with Taiwan spills over into trade. For years, Taiwanese farmers have made handsome profits selling their pineapples to Chinese consumers, expanding their fields each year. Even as cross-strait relations soured, they ignored warnings about their overreliance on the Chinese market. That all came to an end this week, as […]

On a snowy afternoon in January, 24-year-old Thanujan Sellathurai delivered a speech in front of a small crowd of protesters from the Tamil community in Geneva. He called for the United Nations, which has several of its agencies headquartered there, to condemn the “brutal atrocity” that had just taken place in Sri Lanka. Authorities at the University of Jaffna, on the northern tip of Sri Lanka, had ordered the bulldozing of a memorial paying tribute to the victims of the Mullivaikkal massacre, a mass killing of Tamil civilians that took place in May 2009, during the last few days of […]

“Keep the politics out of the network”—that was the mantra of the tech community back in the day. There was wisdom in that sentiment, and it worked fairly well for the first 20 years of the internet’s build-out. But today, controversies over next generation 5G networks and how many of them will be built by China’s telecom giant, Huawei, have demonstrated how far geopolitics have infected digital infrastructure. The latest tensions are now over undersea cables. The argument over digital networks goes like this. It’s to be expected that politics, culture, language and all sorts of complex, contested issues will […]

2020 was the year that Vietnam gained widespread recognition as a substantial player in the global economy and as a model “developmental state.” The world noticed because Vietnam effectively contained COVID-19 even while the disease wreaked havoc on the populations and economies of much wealthier nations. International media outlets normally pay Vietnam scant attention; the war that ravaged it ended nearly half a century ago, and the one-party regime in Hanoi discourages investigative reporting. However, its strikingly successful mobilization against the pandemic has prompted a spate of essays hailing Vietnam’s “breakout moment.” As Richard Heydarian wrote recently in Nikkei Asia, […]