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Results 1 to 30EU-China relations disintegrating on autopilot
In early December 2022, President of the European Council Charles Michel traveled to Beijing for his first face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The visit came after two events that epitomize the state of EU-China relations. The Chinese side refused to run a pre-recorded speech...
Myanmar junta can’t hide behind a sham election
Two years after a coup d’état orchestrated by Myanmar’s military leaders ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the country’s political and economic crisis continues to deepen. In the World Bank’s most recent forecast, released on January 30, economists...
Sneak peek at China’s next-gen missile-armed frigate
China is building its next-generation frigate with a design indicative of increased global deployments and features to match the latest US naval combatants. Last month, Naval News reported that China is now likely building its long-awaited Type 054B frigate, the successor to its Type 054A, of which...
Vietnam sees a shared future more with China than US
The resignation of Vietnamese president Nguyen Xuan Phuc last month had an inevitability about it. The media were rife with speculation for weeks implicating Phuc’s close family members in corruption scandals. Several dozen officials, including two deputy prime ministers, were earlier removed from...
Why ‘decoupling’ is a fatally flawed concept
A recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek said, “Despite the heated national-security rhetoric in Washington and talk of ‘decoupling’ in policy circles, the world’s top two economies remain firmly intertwined.” The article goes on to say that bilateral trade between the US and China for year ending...
Turkey’s winter of sadness
The third Monday in January, what psychologist Cliff Arnall dubbed Blue Monday, is said to be the most depressing day of the year, as the festive holiday season gives way to the monotony of the northern winter. For most of us, Blue Monday 2023 is now in the history books. For many Turks, however,...
Sanctions starting to bite Huawei 4G chips sourcing
Telecommunication equipment maker Huawei Technologies will have to source 4G chips elsewhere to make its smartphones as it cannot purchase more processors from the United States. The Biden administration has stopped approving licenses for US companies to ship items to Huawei over national security...
US spending record amounts servicing its sky-high debt
Consumers and businesses aren’t the only ones feeling the pain of higher borrowing costs because of Federal Reserve rate hikes. Uncle Sam is too. The US government spent a record US$213 billion on interest payments on its debt in the fourth quarter, up $63 billion from a year earlier. Indeed, a jump...
US debt default could trigger dollar’s collapse
It’s a case of déjà vu all over again on the debt ceiling debate. Republicans, who regained control of the House of Representatives in November 2022, are threatening to not allow an increase in the debt limit unless they get unspecified spending cuts in return. In so doing, they risk pushing the US...
Thai pot boom billows with political risk
BANGKOK – Cookies, a popular San Francisco-based cannabis and fashion company, opened its first Asian franchise on January 21 with billowing marijuana smoke, a Buddhist monk’s blessings, Muay Thai boxing and ceremonial drumming within sight of the American embassy. The razzmatazz included someone...
Myanmar’s anniversary of stalemate and shame
The inevitable slew of Myanmar coup d’etat two-year anniversary statements, opinion pieces and social media posturing will all promote defiance and eventual victory even as grim statistics of murders, arson and displacement are arrayed to condemn the criminal rule of the military’s State...
The moral conundrum in Pakistan’s academia
The state of education in Pakistan is a cause for concern. Some institutes inside this system are fostering a culture of immorality and rogue behavior among their students. The emphasis is placed on academic achievement, where students are taught how to excel in academics and attain high grades but...
Monopolies based on technology don’t last
Google is now undergoing the governmental grief reserved for companies deemed monopolies and potential threats to orderly and fair commerce. The US Department of Justice on January 24 sued Google “for monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of...
Forgotten history: China as Holocaust sanctuary
January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the date when Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. In the current historical moment it’s also important to remember another part of this story. In 1938, in early July, the representatives of 32 countries met at Évian-les-Bains,...
Two years on from Myanmar coup: What’s the plan?
Today is February 1, 2023. The military takeover in Myanmar exactly two years ago was the start of the most oppressive administration in recent memory. The situation in Myanmar has deteriorated drastically ever since, and a civil war between the military and the pro-democracy front is still raging....
US-Pakistan reset won’t lessen China dependence
Pakistan and the United States have recently been pursuing a reset of relations. High-level visitors from both countries have expressed intentions to find a basis for a partnership not centered on Pakistan’s neighbors Afghanistan or India. While the United States has been circumspect in its vision...
Two-year-old coup an unmitigated disaster in Myanmar
Two years on from the latest military coup that deposed Myanmar’s democratically elected government, what began as a wave of national protest against the army’s power grab has descended into outright civil war. Myanmar’s military has gone beyond repression or terrorizing ethnic minority groups – it...
China bans export of core solar panel technologies
In a mirror image of what the United States has been doing with semiconductor lithography technology, China has recently amended its rules to ban the export of several core solar panel technologies in order to maintain its leading status and global market share in the sector. A solar panel on a...
Little lost radioactive capsule rings big alarm in Australia
On January 12 a truck pulled out of Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri iron ore mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and drove 1,400 kilometers south to Perth, arriving on January 16. Nine days later, on January 25, it was discovered the truck had lost a rather special piece of cargo somewhere along...
Japan, Korea risk blowing rare economic tailwinds
TOKYO – With China set to boom and the US economy holding up better than feared, 2023 is an ideal moment for Japan and South Korea to get their respective reform programs back on track. What are the odds this might actually happen? Low and falling, sadly. This period of synchronized China-US growth...
Bridging the energy transition
A defining image of our contemporary era might be a middle-class family at an airport in Asia or Africa, their smartphones tucked into their bags, boarding a flight to Dubai or Singapore or London. Such an image won’t capture headlines or go viral, but its commonplace nature reflects a dramatic...
US debt default could have serious global implications
This Wednesday, the newly elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, is set to sit down with President Joe Biden to resolve what could become a global problem. It involves the much-hyped deadlock between the White House proposing that Congress raise America’s debt celling...
AI, technomarkers and a smarter search for alien life
Some 540 million years ago, diverse life forms suddenly began to emerge from the muddy ocean floors of planet Earth. This period is known as the Cambrian Explosion, and these aquatic critters are our ancient ancestors. All complex life on Earth evolved from these underwater creatures. Scientists...
Stress tests ahead for Vietnam’s post-Covid boom
In 2022, the geopolitical tensions caused by the war in Ukraine, slowing growth in the Chinese economy and sharp rises in energy and food prices led to a significantly higher inflationary outlook globally. These factors all added to the risks confronting Vietnam as its economy recovered from its...
Sensing US shortfall, Tokyo and Seoul self-strengthen
An old question among international relations scholars is how states will react to the emergence of a relatively strong and threatening great power. The worried states might accommodate the threatening power, which would involve giving up some of their autonomy in the hope of buying safety....
West giving billions to Ukraine and nearly nothing to Myanmar
Two years after Myanmar’s coup on February 1, 2021, the country’s large and growing resistance forces receive almost no attention outside the country. The democratic opposition, fronted by the National Unity Government (NUG), but comprising many different groups, armies, militias and individuals,...
China gets burned as Mongolia breaks coal link
China will have to pay more to buy coal from Mongolia, which says it will stop shipping its solid fuel to China directly from February and instead sell it through auctions. Mongolia will also use border price, instead of pithead price, to sell its coal starting Wednesday, meaning that the new price...
How to plug the Chinese trust drain?
A 40-year bond of trust between entrepreneurs and the government, the backbone of China’s meteoric rise, is in jeopardy because of short-term mistakes and long-term neglect. Some Chinese are apparently voting with their feet or lack of activity against what they don’t like. This fuels and is also...
The Straits Times caught in a readership lie
SINGAPORE – SPH Media Trust, the publicly-financed publisher of The Straits Times, Singapore’s newspaper of record, and other daily broadsheets, is under parliamentary scrutiny after an internal review found the circulation numbers of its titles to be arbitrarily inflated by up to 95,000 copies, or...
India is ready for Mandal 2.0 politics
“Caste, for 5,000 years, has been the basis of unbridled torture and ostracization; now it has become the basis of justice.” – V P Singh These were the words attributed to then-prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh after making a historic announcement in the Indian Parliament in August 1990 of a...
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