Over the past year, since Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was elected in July 2011, the balance of power has shifted precariously, back and forth, between the Thaksin/Red Shirt/ Puea Thai forces and the establishment pro-royalist forces, allied with the army. As Asia Times has written in several comprehensive pieces, the army, which cast serious dishonor upon itself with the killings in the streets of Bangkok in the spring of 2010, restored some of its positive image through effective relief work during the floods of 2010, at a time when the Yingluck government seemed to be flailing in handling the crisis. Read more »

Politicians and pundits in Washington have it all wrong. Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng is not going to be a political football in U.S. election-year politics or a poster boy for one side of a domestic debate or another. Rather, Chen has the potential to emerge as the most potent weapon in China’s otherwise fairly dismal arsenal of soft power. Read more »

Eric Heginbotham and George Gilboy have a new book, Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior, looking at the rise of China and India. One of their main points is a warning directed at U.S. policymakers who think that India is going to be a counterweight to China. Delhi has many of its own interests and in many instances—Iran, trade, and proliferation—those interests are closer to Beijing’s than Washington’s. China and India “both pursue a common agenda at the U.N. and other security bodies: a strict interpretation of state sovereignty and a protection of the principle of non-interference in the affairs of other states.” Read more »

One of the cardinal rules of Chinese diplomacy is that China doesn’t mix business with politics. The precept fits in nicely with the primacy that China places on sovereignty, respecting the right of a country—or at least the leaders of the moment—to determine how things ought to work. And, of course, it also provides Beijing with the opportunity to rationalize its lack of enthusiasm for tough foreign policy action in places such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, or Zimbabwe as a matter of principle. Read more »

With the ousting of the military regime in 1992, Thailand emerged as a regional beacon of democracy. The international monitoring organization Freedom House even ranked Thailand a “free” country in its 1999 report—one of only a few Asian countries to receive this designation. Over the past six years, however, democracy has retreated rapidly in Thailand. Today, the imminent return of Thaksin, the current government’s oppressive wielding of the draconian lèse-majesté law, and the deteriorating health of the beloved King, all suggest that this fragile “democracy” may be on the precipice of yet another crisis. Read more »

The ongoing uprisings in the Arab world, as well as transformations in Myanmar and several other closed countries, have led to predictions that we are in the beginnings of a global Fourth Wave of democratization, following the three previous waves over the past century. I disagree —and I think the data supports my argument that in reality democracy in many developing nations remains in serious crisis. In the new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, I review William Dobson’s book The Dictator’s Learning Curve, which deals with many of these questions of whether a Fourth Wave is upon us. Read more »

The dramatic political reforms underway in Myanmar have lead to readmission of the one-time pariah into the international community, and the suspension of sanctions by Western governments such as the European Union and Canada. The result is an inundation of foreign investment, which brings with it both opportunity and cause for concern.

There is a wealth of new material being published on Myanmar’s once opaque economy. Here are some of the best pieces: Read more »

South Korea’s National Assembly elections were supposed to shape the landscape for December’s presidential contest; instead, the parliamentary outcome seems to have muddied the waters.  The unanticipated victory of the ruling Saenuri Party has put Park Geun-hye back in the driver’s seat as the front runner candidate in the latest opinion polls, but the presidential election is still seven months away, an eternity in South Korean politics. Read more »

The conventional wisdom is that there could be nothing more dangerous to North Korea’s current leadership than the penetration of information into North Korea from the outside world.  A new empirical study released last week by Nat Ketchum and Jane Kim entitled “A Quiet Opening:  North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment”draws on surveys and interviews from North Korean refugees to show that information penetration is changing North Korea, but the result has been an evolutionary change of circumstances in North Korea rather than uprising or revolution. Read more »

Recent international media attention related to Thailand has been (quite reasonably) focused on the tragic story of Ampon Tangnoppakul, also known as “Ar Kong,” an elderly grandfather who had been sentenced to twenty years in prison for allegedly sending four text messages defaming the monarchy. This despite the fact that he had no previous political experience, and the state could not even prove he had actually sent the messages, but instead simply applied the standard that he could not disprove he sent them — obviously not a reasonable standard of proof in a democracy. Sick with cancer and other ailments, and separated from his entire family, Ampon died in jail earlier this week. Read more »