East Asia & Pacific Archives

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

Implications for the United States, China, and the global order

May 21, 2025 • by William Milberg

I have spent decades giving boring lectures on tariffs to graduate students. Suddenly, every other newspaper article is on tariffs. We have to credit President Trump with tapping into the popular disgruntlement with globalization beginning in 2016, leading to a rethinking of the structure of global economic governance and a ...

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

East Asia & Pacific

“Village NBA” in China

When sports fandom meets rural governance

September 9, 2024 • by Gil Hizi

The driver of bus number 25 knew where I was heading the moment I stepped inside. Although he met few foreigners during his three years on this line (as he later told me), he assumed that I could only be heading to the “NBA village” of Taipan in the Guizhou ...

East Asia & Pacific

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, The Storm We Made

A graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing shines a light on a rarely discussed period of Malaysian history

June 5, 2024 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In the lonely period of the pandemic, Vanessa Chan could not get home to her family. In those years, she lost her mother. She sheltered in place. And she wrote her first book, The Storm We Made....

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, <em>The Storm We Made</em>

East Asia & Pacific

China’s Return to Global Dominance

What it means for America — and for the future of democracy around the world

April 1, 2021 • by John Keane

_____ When future historians look back on our discordant times, they will surely report an epochal shift of global importance: a transition from failed attempts to restore America’s greatness to China’s return, after two centuries of subjugation, to world pre-eminence. The writing is already on the wall, but strange prejudices, bitter ...

East Asia & Pacific

What America Teaches White Men About Asian American Women

The Atlanta killings have all the hallmarks of a hate crime

March 25, 2021 • by Nadia Y. Kim

_____ On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long – a twenty-one-year-old white male evangelical Christian – massacred six Asian American women while they were working at three Asian-owned Atlanta-area spas: Daoyou Feng (44), Hyunjung Grant (51), Suncha Kim (69), Soon Chung Park (74), Xiaojie Tan (49), and Yong Ae Yue (63). Police ...

What America Teaches White Men About Asian American Women

Democracy

Oppression, Resistance and High-Tech Totalitarianism

December 16, 2020 • by Teng Biao

But most censorship does not directly involve such happenings. It involves fear of such happenings. Perry Link had a classic metaphor - He described the CCP's censorship system as an “Anaconda in the Chandelier”. The silence of the anaconda crouching overhead means “the big brother is watching you!” So everyone will automatically ...

Oppression, Resistance and High-Tech Totalitarianism

Democracy

A Chinese Student’s Perspective on America’s Presidential Election

Young Americans and Chinese have more in common than meets the eye

November 24, 2020 • by Liuchang "Helen" Tan

On the night of November 3rd, I, like many of the 360,000 Chinese students in the U.S., was compulsively refreshing the electoral map and rooting for the Democrats to win by a landslide. In the previous four years, Chinese students had watched in shock and horror as the Trump administration relentlessly ...

A Chinese Student’s Perspective on America’s Presidential Election

Democracy

The Empire Strikes Back

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement faces an uncertain future

May 28, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

On May 22, 2020, the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing announced it would debate a new national policy for Hong Kong, a draft piece of legislation with an imposingly long and misleadingly soporific title: “Decision of the National People’s Congress on Establishing and Completing the Hong Kong Special Administrative ...

Activism

Hong Kong Under Lockdown

From the masks of protesters to the mask of public health

April 28, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

The mask ban, based on a century-old colonial emergency ordinance, was largely upheld earlier this month in a controversial ruling by Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. By then, the Covid-19 crisis had stopped the mass protests, accomplishing what Carrie Lam and her officers could not during much of 2019. ...

East Asia & Pacific

Hong Kong’s Protests Looked a Lot Like Shanghai Anti-colonial Protests a Century Ago

But this time, the protests were against a new imperial power: China

April 22, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

Protesters demanded electoral reforms, investigations of police conduct during the protests, and the preservation of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, under which Beijing had promised to maintain “one country, two systems” after Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty to China in 1997. The protests have continued online — including anti-government slogans in a popular video ...

Hong Kong’s Protests Looked a Lot Like Shanghai Anti-colonial Protests a Century Ago

Activism

Life and Protest in Hong Kong Amid COVID-19

An Interview with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Author of Vigil: Hong Kong On The Brink

March 17, 2020 • by Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Mark Frazier

Mark W. Frazier [MF]: Your book was released on February 11, in the midst of a public health crisis in mainland China that has meant massive disruptions to life and work in Hong Kong, the cancellation of a major international arts festival, and the cessation (for now at least) of ...

Life and Protest in Hong Kong Amid COVID-19

Democracy

Hong Kong on the Brink

March 3, 2020 • by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The irony of the UK, one of the world's great democracies, belatedly handing over a colonized people from one distant ruler to another, in Beijing, was not lost on the people living nearly 2,000km south of China's capital. It is hard to say how genuine Margaret Thatcher's claimed optimism at the ...