Joshua Kurlantzick is fellow for South-East Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Earlier this year, the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, went on a 12-day tour of Africa. In Zambia he announced that China would build an economic co-operation zone in the country that would attract $800 million of investment. Zambia’s former president, Kenneth Kaunda, received him personally, and the Chinese president delivered his usual speech: ‘China is happy to have Zambia as a...
For the first time in nearly twenty years, Burma has burst into open protest against the military junta, captivating the world with its ‘saffron revolution’. Across the country, monks have led massive demonstrations, joined by civil servants, prominent cultural figures and tens of thousands of ordinary people. Throngs of red-robed monks have marched through the streets of Rangoon,...
The riot started, last December, in the wake of a simple pay dispute at a small Chinese factory that manufactured cheap suitcases. Orders had been dropping, and the factory closed down without warning, leaving wages unpaid. The workers started to smash up the factory, and looked for managers to attack. The police arrived on the scene, and attempted to restrain the workers by locking them...
The protests spiralled quickly out of control, but the ethnic tensions in the west China region of Xinjiang are not new, and this unrest has been brewing for years. Unlike the Tibetans, the Uighurs – a Muslim, Turkic people – have no global spokesperson capable of bringing their cause to the attention of the West. But like Tibet, Xinjiang once laid claim to being its own nation, and Uighurs have harboured separatist ambitions since the founding of the People’s Republic. As I found during a number of visits to the region over the past decade, Uighurs and Chinese in Xinjiang have almost no interaction with each other.
Cambodia, now 15 years removed from civil war, remains a shattered country. Poverty is on a par with many failed African states, there is widespread malnourishment, and at night packs of beggars, many maimed from the war, gather outside restaurants and bars to plead for small change. These things don’t happen in neighbouring Vietnam or Thailand.
Not that you’d ever know about the...
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