Southeast Asia Archive

Governments in emerging markets should be forgiven if they are dealing with a case of crisis fatigue. For 10 years now, they have lurched from one financial mess to another, triggered largely by external events and decisions outside of their control. Things are once again getting messy as global investors have soured on Argentina, Turkey and Indonesia, among other emerging market economies, causing their currencies to crash. As troubles have developed in one country after another late this summer, some observers have been careful to point out that the causes of the individual economic crises are very different. Don’t jump […]

Will Nguyen doesn’t remember much of what happened immediately after he was beaten by police officers at a mass demonstration in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest metropolis. A fellow protester tipped him off that he was about to be arrested, but before he could escape into the crowd, half a dozen plainclothes officers descended on him, beating him with fists and clubs. What happened next is fuzzy. Video subsequently posted online shows him being dragged to a police truck, where he had a bag placed over his head before being taken to jail, but Nguyen doesn’t remember that. “When […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative, a major infrastructure and development program across Eurasia. Speaking to reporters on the final day of a five-day visit to China last month, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad announced that his government would cancel three major Chinese-financed infrastructure projects due to concerns over the projects’ costs and debt burdens. The announcement came as other Chinese-financed projects in Pakistan and Sri Lanka—part of the country’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative—ran into trouble. In an email interview, Yun Sun, director of the China Program at […]