Asia

Kim Jong-un offered few surprises in his annual New Year’s address. As is the wont of North Korean leaders, he characterized the past year as “historic” and touted the successes and progress of the Party and state. In Pyongyang,...

China has long occupied a unique place in America’s relations with the world. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, China was a commercial magnet. Chinese products—tea, porcelains, silks—were in high demand and drew American merchants to Cathay. The...

Xinjiang, in northwest China, seems in many ways like the far edge of the modern world. Spanning a vast desert ringed by high mountains, the region was remote enough to have been chosen as the site of China’s nuclear...

Throughout 2018, Taiwan and its sovereignty faced a barrage of threats from the People’s Republic of China in the economic, military, and diplomatic realms. These threats ranged from the serious—poaching allies and opening new flight routes—to the absurd—pressuring hotels,...

Donald Trump wasn’t the first U.S. president to float the idea of a summit with North Korea. Historian James Person at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. has published declassified documents showing that President Jimmy Carter, in the...

Abstract Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1858-1936), a Dutch scholar of Islam, served as a “military anthropologist” in during the Aceh war in the Dutch East Indies. The Acehnese fighters viewed their anti-colonial struggle against the Dutch as a jihad, construing...

At first glance, one could imagine that China and Japan are getting ready to thaw the decade-long chill in their relationship. Diplomats from both countries have been busily preparing for a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese...

In late August 2018, China, Russia, and the six other countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) wrapped up the group’s seventh joint anti-terrorism exercise, called “Peace Mission 2018.” Participating for the first time were troops from India and...