Reminiscent of the carefully-choreographed 2008 Beijing Olympics, China’s unveiling on Thursday of the lineup of the new Politburo Standing Committee, its highest leadership body, took every precaution to ensure an orderly transfer of power. Security in Beijing was tightened, shops were ordered to remove fruit knives from their shelves, hotels opened and inspected all stored […]
U.S. President Obama is no stranger to Southeast Asia having spent parts of his childhood in Indonesia and returning several times to the region as Commander-in-Chief. And now, fresh off his reelection to the highest office in the land, President Obama will travel to the region next week on a three-country tour culminating in the […]
As history tells it, the father of modern day Myanmar, Gen. Aung San, was assassinated in 1947 not long after the country gained its independence from Britain as he sought to forge a democracy among leaders from Myanmar’s 100-plus ethnic groups. But even 50 years of authoritarian military rule (itself installed following ethnic rivalries in […]
The once-in-a-decade leadership transition in China that starts November 8 will see a new slate of top leaders installed by next spring, all eager to influence a new vision of a changing China. But the most prominent leaders to be replaced, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, are no lame ducks. Both are still […]
I grew up in a town called Lindenhurst, a relatively quiet suburb on Long Island’s southern shore located just inside Suffolk County’s border with Nassau. It’s an upper-middle class, family oriented neighborhood whose residents, for the most part, have all of their needs and wants met. When I was a boy, my mother would take […]
I don’t like saying that the majority of Americans are ignorant when it comes to foreign policy, but when you read some of the statistics that were listed in a recent article in the magazine named after this very subject, it’s disconsolately hard to deny. Take my mother for example. She is the type of […]
Chinese construction companies are behind many of the new buildings going up in Yangon While in Yangon, Myanmar last month, I had a chance to talk with several Myanmarese who naturally asked me where I lived. When I told them I lived in China, what struck me most with their response was their anxiety over […]
The Foreign Policy Association has just released preliminarily results of its 2012 National Opinion Survey and there are some interesting tidbits in there regarding the Asia-Pacific. However, for all the dynamics that are unfolding in the region there is not a lot of debate in this survey on the importance of Asia to U.S. interests, […]
In the spring of 1966, a small group of students attending the Tsinghua University Middle School named themselves “Chairman Mao’s Red Guards” after signing two big-character posters criticizing the controversial play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The students interpreted the play as an allegory for Peng Dehuai’s criticism of Mao’s Great Leap Forward during the […]
“In life, men are either kings or pawns.” -Napoleon Bonaparte Not to underestimate the cult of personality which Cambodia’s late King Father Norodom Sihanouk engendered, approximately one million people reminded us of his revered presence in the country by lining the streets from Pochentong International Airport all the way to the Royal Palace on […]
It was 1940 and the City of Lights had gone dark. Men of importance of Vichy France were meeting in order to decide how to manage their overseas colonies and protectorates in light of the new global reality — Hitler strolling along the Champs-Élysées as the Nazis occupied Paris. In Indochina, specifically Cambodia, many members […]
The late theologian and political analyst Reinhold Niebuhr in his essay entitled “Optimism, Pessimism, and Religious Faith” wrote the following about Soviet Marxism: “But after many five-year plans have come and gone and it is discovered that strong men still tend to exploit the weak, and that shrewd men still take advantage of the simple, […]
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