East Asia Archive

President Joe Biden took office last year during one of the most turbulent times the United States had experienced in decades. Though his administration has tackled important foreign policy issues, it has also faced multiple domestic crises, so the primary focus of this first year has been on the urgent matters at home. In 2022, though, the world is likely to demand more of Biden’s attention, even as the domestic challenges remain far from resolved. Some of the foreign policy issues are expected and already evident. To start, Biden will have to work to help the entire planet, including poor […]

On Nov. 30, the center-left Constitutional Democratic Party, or CDP, Japan’s leading opposition party, elected 47-year-old Kenta Izumi to succeed CDP founder Yukio Edano as party leader. Izumi inherits a party reeling from an unexpectedly large defeat in Japan’s Oct. 31 general election, in which the CDP won fewer than 100 of the lower house’s 465 seats. Right up until the final days of the campaign, polls suggested that a united opposition bloc led by the CDP could flip dozens of seats held by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito coalition. But the coalition limited its losses to only a dozen […]

A record low 30 percent of the Hong Kong electorate voted in Sunday’s legislative elections, the first to be held since Beijing’s overhaul of the city’s electoral system to ensure that only “patriots” can run for public office there. The dramatic drop in voter turnout—as compared with 57 percent in the previous city-wide elections in 2016 and a record 71 percent in district council elections in 2019—reflects the “silent opposition” of the people of Hong Kong to the electoral changes, many activists in exile said. Described by the Hong Kong government as “improvements” over the previous system, the revamped rules curtailed […]

As the Biden administration prepares to release its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, observers are searching for clues on how those reviews will grapple with the framework of “great-power competition” that anchored the previous administration’s high-level policy documents. That framework has achieved substantial bipartisan traction in the intervening four years among government officials, lawmakers and scholars, in part because it is rooted in three judgments with which most analysts would agree, even if they disagree about how those core premises should guide U.S. foreign policy. First, interstate competition, which has been a core aspect of world affairs since the Treaty […]

China’s “coercive economic policies” took center stage at last weekend’s G-7 foreign ministers’ meeting, after an eventful week that saw Nicaragua break off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of Beijing and China upping the ante in its retaliation against Lithuania, after the Baltic country permitted a Taiwanese Representative Office to open in Vilnius last month. Nicaragua announced Friday that it would sever long-standing ties with Taiwan, further reducing the number of countries that still recognize the self-governing democracy as a sovereign nation to 14. (Honduras’ incoming president, Xiomara Castro, had made a similar pledge during her campaign, though she has […]

Russia’s ongoing military buildup along its border with Ukraine has cast into sharp relief the debate about how the United States, and its allies, can most effectively ensure security in the no man’s land lying beyond NATO’s eastern perimeter. Meanwhile, China’s mounting campaign of military pressure and intimidation against Taiwan is leading some observers to question the strength of U.S. commitments to the island. Though coordination between Russia and China on these efforts is likely limited at best, their attempts to bully Ukraine and Taiwan raise a common dilemma for Washington, one liable to become more pronounced and widespread in […]

There are any number of ways to measure one of the great secular transformations of our time: the decline of the United States’ power relative not only to a rising rival like China, but to the rest of the world generally. From 1960 to the present, the American share of global economic output has declined from 40 percent to less than a quarter in recent years. And compared even to the fairly recent past, say during the presidency of Barack Obama, the influence and prestige of the American political model has withered under the corrosive effects of Trumpism as well as […]

Nearly a year since Chinese authorities brought the Ant Group’s initial public offering, or IPO, to a halt, the domestic tech industry is still reeling from a relentless crackdown that has since broadened to include other sectors of the economy. In its latest reshuffling, the Alibaba Group replaced its chief financial officer and reorganized its sales team. The decision is part of the tech giant’s continuing restructuring efforts to make the company “more agile” by devolving power to the leaders of each business line. Elsewhere, ride-hailing giant Didi announced its plan to back out of the New York Stock Exchange and aim for a […]

The eighth edition of the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, or FOCAC, took place this week in Dakar, Senegal, marking the first time the meeting was held in West Africa. The conference, which took place days after the release of a Chinese government white paper detailing a new era of cooperation with African countries, saw major announcements on COVID-19 vaccines, Special Drawing Rights allocations and climate cooperation. While those areas of cooperation portend to be the cornerstone of engagement between China and Africa, growing debates are emerging on the continent and elsewhere about the imbalanced nature of the relationship. FOCAC […]

A flurry of visits by foreign officials and an invitation to the upcoming virtual democracy summit to be hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden have underscored Taiwan’s growing international profile. But the attention Taiwan is attracting is causing Beijing to increase diplomatic, economic and military pressure on its autonomous neighbor. Ten European lawmakers from Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia arrived on the island for an eight-day visit starting Sunday. “China is afraid that our mission in Taiwan will show the world that there are benefits to rejecting the so-called ‘economic partnership’ offered by the Chinese regime,” Maldas Maideikis, a Lithuanian parliamentarian who […]