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South Korean Protests Growing
AsiaThese are the largest demonstrations in South Korea since the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s. But the street protests are also against the neoliberal reforms Park has pursued and the attacks on the KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions), and an emphatic statement that all politics is not forming in a populist hard right.
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China’s Pivot to World Markets, Washington’s Pivot to World Wars
AsiaWhile President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” has been largely a wasteful military strategy to encircle and intimidate China, Beijing’s “pivot to markets” has successfully enhanced its economic competitiveness. As a result, over the past decade, China’s growth rate is three times that of the US; and in the next decade China will double the US in ‘robotizing’ its productive economy.
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Corporate and military plunder in the Philippines
AsiaWill Justin Trudeau support the introduction of a new bill to mandate Canadian corporate respect for human rights standards and environmental responsibility? Will he stop supplying some of the world’s worst regimes with military equipment used to repress their own populations?
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China: Reformers and Compradors
AsiaChina’s reformers have started their new version of “The Long March” through many layers of corrupt, flawed and failing institutions. Bigger and more consequential changes await the awakening of the working class.
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China Helps Pave the Road to Paris with Ambitious Climate Pledge
AsiaShifts like these are more than a laundry list, according to China’s INDC. They are a fundamentally new policy, one of “transforming the economic development pattern, constructing ecological civilization and holding to a green, low-carbon and recycled development path.”
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A Critique of US “Grand Strategy toward China”
AsiaThe US should not attempt to block China’s growth and expansion; it should assist and share in its ascendancy, especially in the face of great global climate and energy challenges. Washington is much more likely to strengthen its Asian–Pacific partnership and succeed in its diplomacy if it replaced its military posturing with robust economic growth.
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A Fly’s Eye View of America’s War Against Vietnam, Part Two
AsiaManaging and conducting what are always called merely “operations”, it is impossible to draw any informed conclusions about the relationships between these people, the institutions they represent and the interests vested in those institutions—the progenitors of the war against Vietnam and the wars for the control of land and population that have continued since.
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A Fly’s Eye View of America’s War Against Vietnam, Part One
AsiaThe first war in Vietnam the one fought for credibility, to oppose communism, to defend the American way of life or “freedom”—this was a crusade in the most medieval sense of the word. It was a summons to white folks to punish heretics, to bring salvation to Vietnam by subjecting the entire country to an auto de fé.
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China’s Second ‘Cultural Revolution’
AsiaChina is in the midst of its second ‘cultural revolution’ in a half century. While the first (under Chairman Mao Tse Tung) was intended to ‘revitalize socialism’, the current is directed to ‘moralizing’ capitalism.
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A dangerous lurch to the extreme Right: India’s new Prime Minister
The landslide election earlier this month of Narendra Modi does not bode well for the 800 million or so Indians living in destitution, or the 120 million minority Muslims in the country, or the Adivasi (indigenous) people and Dalit groups sitting on resource-rich land in Orissa, Jharkhand and elsewhere.
