A few days ago, the Global Times posted a brief opinion piece that questioned the West’s preoccupation with the Wukan village uprising last year and concluded: “China cannot be understood by focusing on the small details, something Western media would do well to appreciate.”

Despite this sage advice, I’ve always liked details and found myself captivated by a just-released survey of 1,791 Chinese farming households across 17 provinces. Read more »

For two decades spent mostly under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi was the icon of the Burmese democracy movement, and one of the most famous figures in the world. Jailed in her house, and with the regime totally in control, she had little chance to even engage in politics, and as an icon she remained almost completely above criticism. It was rare that any Burmese democracy advocates, inside or outside of the country, would voice even the mildest criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Read more »

Jared Mondschein looks at the key stories in Asia behind the headlines.

Another Unfortunate First for China – Already the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world, China has now reached another milestone with one of the dirtiest of energy sources: It now imports more coal than any other country. Japan had been the top importer of coal since 1976, but China’s rapid economic growth and consequent energy demand have forced Beijing to seek energy sources wherever they can find them. Even more concerning: China’s coal consumption is projected to increase every year for the next fifteen years. Read more »

This week the China-watching twitterverse was surprised to discover that Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, was now tweeting. That the editor of the Global Times, an “angry government mouthpiece”  that supports China’s policy of Internet censorship, was accessing a site blocked in China raised a few eyebrows and provoked several people to ask what VPN (a Virtual Private Network) he was using to evade the controls. Somewhat defensively, Hu responded to a characterization of him Read more »

Over the past year, Myanmar’s rapid pace of reform has surprised nearly everyone — activists in the country, foreign observers, and many in the U.S. government.  With change apparently coming so quickly, nearly everyone who watches the country has been trying to explain the reforms, often crediting years of Western sanctions, or Asian nations’ engagement policies. Neither seems, to me, to be correct. Instead, it is important to examine several critical domestic factors that lay behind this change. I examine these factors in a new CFR Expert Brief “How Myanmar Changed and What it Means.”

You can read the whole brief here.

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As the Guardian reports, the Thai government has become the first nation in the world to publicly endorse Twitter’s choice to censor certain types of messages in certain countries. In this case, that would mean censoring messages that fell afoul of the kingdom’s draconian lèse-majesté laws, which have been used increasingly harshly in recent years – most recently, against an underage college student and an elderly man with cancer. He allegedly sent four text messages insulting the king, and was given twenty years in jail, even though the government could not prove he had actually sent the messages. Read more »

Cutting off Iranian oil imports has put Tokyo in a difficult position. The United States and its European allies have already agreed to up the ante on sanctions against Iran, but the domestic costs that Japan has to bear in order to cooperate are higher.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s government has indicated its desire to cooperate, and last December the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced new restrictions on the operations of 106 entities as well as one individual with potential links to proliferation-sensitive activities in Iran. But the real effort now is to reduce Japan’s oil imports from Tehran, and to negotiate an exemption from more stringent restrictions on Japanese banks included in the new U.S. sanctions law. Read more »

Water is an issue that preoccupies Chinese officials throughout the country, but nowhere perhaps as much as in Beijing. The already water-scarce capital has been suffering a continuous and precipitous decline in water availability over the past decades, as both population size and income levels have grown dramatically. Caixin magazine has a terrific new piece that details not only the current crisis but also the historical challenges Beijing has faced. The piece also explores what the capital should be doing but isn’t. Experts, for example, have been pushing pricing reform, water conservation, and recycling. Some of this is being done, but not enough. Instead, Beijing’s plans center on desalination, exploiting karst resources, and the South-North Water Diversion, each of which, as the article discusses, brings with it additional economic and potentially serious environmental costs. Read more »

Today’s Washington Post has a useful article outlining the plans for a much greater U.S. military presence in the Philippines. The article discusses all of the potential options being put on the table between U.S. and Philippines officials: “Operating Navy ships from the Philippines, deploying troops on a rotational basis and staging more frequent joint exercises.” Read more »

Kong Qingdong has gone viral. The Peking University professor of literature and descendant of Confucius has become an overnight celebrity with his televised rant against Hong Kong. In a televised interview, Kong rails against non-Mandarin speaking Hong Kongers, denounces their rule of law system, and calls them “running dogs,” a Maoist-era epithet that typified the class warfare of the 1950s and 60s. What induced this attack was a momentary interchange on a Hong Kong subway between a Hong Kong resident and a mainland woman, in which the Hong Konger told the woman that her child should not be eating on the subway. Read more »