Recent Far East Articles

Xinjiang is burning. Will anyone care?

One of the world’s least-known and yet most obvious cases of the oppression of a minority group by a powerful state, China’s brutal hegemony over the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province, should be more widely known to western progressives.

It isn’t, partly because of the effectiveness of the Chinese state in blacking out mainstream media coverage of the region, but also because of residual left-wing quietism when it comes to criticising a stalinist state: one could safely assume that there would be far more banner headlines if the oppressor state involved was the USA.
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The logic and lunacy of Kim Jong-il

Article by ‘Left Outside‘

After weeks of duck houses, moats, fork handles and so on some people are actually rather excited that something has happened.

Some blogs have concentrated on the fact that this is actually a big deal and not a debate on PR vs. STV; others have focused on the militarisation of the Korean Peninsula; others have seen fit to question the moral authority of Gordon Brown to criticise Kim Jong-il.

I have decided to focus on just why such an impoverished nation is so interested in the Bomb, what it means for regional security and what is to be done.
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64 words for Aung San Suu Kyi

I didn’t know that Salman Rushdie and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a birthday:

On this day, my birthday and yours, I always remember your long ordeal and silently applaud your endurance. This year, silence is impossible. It is not any action of yours, but your house arrest, which symbolizes the suppression of Burmese democracy, that is criminal. It is your trial, not your struggle, that is unjust. On this day, on every day, I am with you.

Rushdie’s message launches the Sixty-Four Words for Aung San Suu Kyi project.
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Japanese take the big plunge

The New York Times reports:

Japan announced its biggest-ever economic stimulus plan Thursday, a $154 billion package of subsidies and tax breaks that aims to stem a deepening recession in the world’s second-largest economy. Prime Minister Taro Aso also outlined an ambitious long-term economic strategy that he said would make Japan a global leader in “green” technology like solar energy and electric cars.
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The plan announced Thursday is the largest single such effort ever proposed in Japan, dwarfing any of the stimulus measures the country enacted during the 1990s, during its so-called lost decade of economic stagnation.
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By 2020, Japan aims to increase its solar-generating capacities twentyfold, and raise the domestic sales of eco-friendly vehicles to one million vehicles a year. The plan would create four million new jobs in Japan, the prime minister said.