Asia

In the Cold War years, the literature on China’s development focused on two themes. One was that trade and more generally participation in the international marketplace is unlikely to be helpful for poor countries in search of economic development....

The U.S. elections in November 2008 will bring new leadership and reconsideration of policies toward Asia. In China, the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership, which began its second and final five-year term in 2007–08, faces new leaders in its key...

I. A Horse of a Different Color? Democracy and Distrust in Taiwan Following a seventeen-point victory in Taiwan’s presidential election on March 22, 2008, Ma Ying-jeou took office on May 20 with an inaugural address that reiterated his priorities:...

I want to talk about rising China and the United States. To start with a couple obvious points about the rise of Chinese power in the twenty-first century, the most obvious is that we are talking about a resurrection...

The Kuomintang won a sweeping victory in Taiwan’s parliamentary elections on January 12, 2008. This, and the enhanced prospect for a KMT victory in the March 2008 presidential vote, brought relief in Washington, Beijing and elsewhere that Taiwan’s lively...

The Chinese Communist Party holds its Seventeenth National Congress this month. That congress and the session of China’s national legislature next March mark the midway point and the reconfirmation in power of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership and provide...

About a month and a half ago, a college student in Taiwan ran away from home because, as he told a reporter later, “There’s only negative news on TV, and I do not believe Taiwan is such a bad...

Classical Chinese Thought and Culture and Early Chinese History Victor Mair, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that China’s great social variety has always made it hard to keep the country together, necessitating...

Perhaps the phrase that best characterizes the Maoist era is “never forget class struggle.” By contrast, the mantra that the Communist Party has endorsed most recently, “harmonious society,” is distinctly unMaoist, even somewhat Confucian: It is a long way...

Although scientist Jared Diamond famously called China an “empire of uniformity,” in fact nothing could be further from the truth. China is one of the most diverse nations on earth. Linguistically, ethnically, religiously—on virtually any basis, China has always...