After his election as the new President of South Korea in May, Yoon Suk-yeol hastily implemented one of his key promises: to relocate South Korea’s presidential office from Chung Wa Dae (Blue House) to a Defense Ministry Complex in Yongsan, an underdeveloped neighborhood in Seoul best known for its stationing of the United States military forces.
Imran Khan’s constitutional coup and subsequent dissolution of the National Assembly has polarized Pakistan; a flurry of allegations has magnified the power of the military in the country’s domestic politics. Pakistan’s current constitutional crisis was sparked by a vote of no-confidence against Imran Khan in April 2022, but has escalated further now that Khan has been disqualified from the next set of elections in August 2023. In the wake of the vote of no confidence, Khan rallied unprecedented support against the military establishment while he simultaneously claimed an American conspiracy removed him from office, which may have been fabricated.
For three years, the CCP’s zero-COVID policy in the aftermath of the Wuhan outbreak has included mass lockdowns, excessive testings, heightened surveillance, isolation, quarantines, and border closures. For three years, the CCP has managed to justify the policy by broadcasting how they were able to hold the virus at bay during 2020 and 2021 and how they kept excess deaths to low levels while marginally revitalizing China’s economy after an almost 7 percent sharp decline in GDP.
Recently, there has been much debate surrounding whether China can prevent a recession for the upcoming year. In reality, not only is China incapable of preventing a recession—it appears that China’s recession is already underway, and there are several leading indicators suggesting that the worst is yet to come. Despite talks of GDP growth and state sponsored infrastructure projects to boost its economy, China is currently exhibiting telltale signs of an ongoing recession.
The show of force and shift in new leadership firmly established Xi’s undisputed control over party and country, making the entire week-long affair seem less about confirming political appointments, and more of a coronation ceremony for Xi.
As the recent 20th Party Congress came to a conclusion, Sino-watchers across the globe were less interested in China’s immediate policy direction. Rather, there was a profound sense that the world’s second-largest economic and military power seemed to have gone adrift; or for some, more depressingly, it highlighted the end of an epoch.
What does it mean to be Chinese? Am I Chinese? With my recent move to New York City, I am surprised at how often I am asked this question: Are you Chinese? I struggle to respond every time because the word “Chinese” can mean a lot of things – a nationality, an ethnicity, a language, and even a culture. And it requires much more than a simple yes or no to answer.
On September 16, I watched as Hong Kongers lined up for hours outside the British Consulate in Admiralty, the city’s eastern central business district, to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II. A colossal bed of flowers and pictures of the queen were gradually built up against the consulate walls—it may have been one of the greatest displays of affection for the late monarch witnessed outside the UK.
On Sept. 29, the US-Asia Law Institute at NYU Law invited attorneys Jennifer Wu (NYU Law, 2004) and Lawrence Wee (Harvard Law, 1994) from the Paul Weiss Law firm to discuss anti-Asian hate crime. Wu and Wee spoke on the difficulty of prosecuting hate crimes through the nature of collecting evidence, and why the community response, both digital and protest advocacy, should be made first and foremost with the voice of the victims in mind. In a city-campus where students are already cautious of daily safety, the rise in hate crimes and the deaths of young professionals alarmed safety concerns and brought forward attention and support for the Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) community.
Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has animated the use of economic sanctions in an unprecedented way. Strenuous US-China relations, exacerbated by Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, raise the question of whether Washington would impose similar measures on Beijing in the face of a military invasion of Taiwan.
On August 4, 2022, the day following the official state visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) responded by conducting the largest military exercises ever staged by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Taiwan Strait.
As the United States draws down its presence in the Middle East, many in the international community are wondering what actor might step in to fill the supposed power vacuum that will be left in place of the region’s main security broker.
The prospect of China’s superstar real estate giant, Evergrande Group, defaulting on an offshore coupon payment of $84 million sent panic waves across the global investing community.
On August 13, Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced normalization of their relations. This deal, known as the Abraham Accord, was brokered by United…
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court acquitted Asia Bibi, a woman falsely accused of blasphemy, in a landmark verdict. This long-delayed, historic decision freed Bibi after…
On June 7, Papua New Guinea’s police opened fire on university students who were peacefully protesting against government corruption. Initial reports stated that four students…
On March 2nd, the UN Security Council unanimously voted to impose the harshest sanctions on North Korea in nearly two decades in a multilateral effort…
In August 2001, a Norwegian freight ship carrying 438 refugees attempted to cross Australian waters. The ship’s captain, who rescued the refugees after their boat…
More than 9,000 people were killed in a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated Nepal on April 25, 2015. Four days later, nearly 200 Nepali villagers…
Since the military junta stepped down in 2011, Myanmar began a sustained process of political transformation. President Thein Sein’s administration has paved the way for…
When France’s ecology minister Ségolène Royal implored the world to stop eating Nutella this week, she became the most prominent Western politician to join the…
Even in his death, Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean Prime Minister, has given Taiwan one last gift: the reaffirmation of Taiwan-Singapore relations in an…
The Maldives archipelago inspires images of pristine blue water, white sandy beaches and palm trees. Yet on February 23, a very different image populated…
[Originally posted here] Dawood Ibrahim is perhaps the most notorious “underworld don” in South Asia, involved in everything from supporting terrorist organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba and…
[Originally posted here] Since the video statement by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri on September 3 announcing al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, South Asia has…