Asia

In this first bulletin in the “Teaching about Japan” series, we feature three resources that we think you will find valuable. Two are books and the third is a web site. We would also like to include a news/feedback...

Abstract Defending Singapore has never been easy. At the southern end of the Malacca Strait, the island country is surrounded by ambitious and far larger neighbors. Yet, despite its lack of strategic depth and many natural vulnerabilities, Singapore has achieved a...

When Americans went to the polls on November 5, observers included a remarkable delegation of election scholars, elected officials, and election officials from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). These...

On July 1, 1997— the day of Hong Kong’s reversion to China— Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui pointedly declared to a group of foreign journalists and scholars (the latter in Taipei for a conference on Hong Kong’s handover), “Taiwan is...

China’s simmering discontent with its place in the world—and, more specifically, its relationship with the West and, more specifically still, with the United States — has bubbled to the surface in several recent incidents. Forced to land on Hainan...

The first several months of the George W. Bush administration have underscored a simple but vexing truth about the United States’ Taiwan policy: the basic goal is deceptively easy to state but crafting the means for achieving it is...

In May 2000, Philippines president Joseph Estrada visited Beijing and signed five accords to ease tensions over disputed islands in the South China Sea. It is surely encouraging to see two countries that have sparred in recent years take...

U.S. policymakers seem to have given up on Japan. Who can take a country seriously when its June 25 elections featured almost no debate on how to revitalize a stagnant economy? When the electorate returned to power one of...

How did the United States get into Vietnam? What was it doing there? What happened at home? How did we get out? What have we learned? For two days, these questions were explored in great depth by some of...

Note to Teachers: I taught a course on the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1980s. Each time I began the very first class with a “pop quiz.” It wasn’t a serious...