Category: Asia

Islamists corrosive to Pakistan’s fragile democracy

     

On Easter Sunday, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), killed over 72 people and wounded hundreds in an attack on a Lahore park, demonstrating that the… Read more »

Insurgency Trap? Labor unrest rattles China’s ruling party

     

An upsurge in industrial militancy is rattling China’s ruling Communist Party, CNN reports. A 2010 strike at the Nanhai Honda car plant in southern China was a turning point for… Read more »

Fighting North Korea’s dictatorship – with flash drives

     

If you have a flash drive or SD card that’s just gathering dust somewhere, New York-based Human Rights Foundation and Silicon Valley’s Forum280, are calling on you to donate them to their… Read more »

The Great Fall of China?

     

  Unless the Chinese Communist party’s general secretary, Xi Jinping, introduces major political reforms, the economy will tank and the party will crumble, David Shambaugh argues in “China’s Future.” The… Read more »

China’s ruling party ‘struggles for a new normal’

     

Two remarkable documents emerged from China last week, notes ChinaFile: the first is the essay “A Thousand Yes-Men Cannot Equal One Honest Advisor”—available here in Chinese and translated here into English—which appeared on the website… Read more »

Obama Doctrine – pendulum swung too far?

     

  For any believer in the trans-Atlantic alliance, liberal interventionism and the overall beneficence of American power, President Obama’s long exposition of his foreign policy to Jeffrey Goldberg in The… Read more »

Vietnam’s ‘Lady Gaga’ joins dissident gatecrashers running for parliament

     

  Vietnam’s constitution pays lip service to democratic principles, but the country of 93m people is a repressive one-party state. In it, ordinary folk have little say over who their… Read more »

Growing resistance to China’s political controls

     

The rise of ‘abusively racist clown’ Donald Trump proves democracy doesn’t work, according to China’s ruling Communist Party, citing his success as latest example of how allowing the masses a say in choosing… Read more »