Geography Archives: Asia

This post provides context to today’s news (July 31st 2025) of Donald Trump’s ‘25% tariff plus penalty’ announcement on India. For a background of Indian ruling class’ response to trade pressure from the Trump administration, see What Explain’s India’s Response to Trump.

Facing mounting pressure from Europe, Iran moved to reinforce its nuclear position with backing from Russia and China, just days before talks resumed in Istanbul.

Brazil’s collaboration with China has been flourishing. President Lula traveled to Beijing in May for his third bilateral meeting with China’s president, Xi Jinping, since returning to the presidency in 2023, declaring that “our relationship with China will be indestructible.”

In January 2024 Taiwan’s current President Lai Ching-te won the election against two other candidates. (Taiwan has no run off elections.)

India needs to shed the comfort of diplomacy and not concede the space it has fought so hard to occupy, in response to Trump’s message to U.S. tech giants “to stop hiring in India”.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who heads the LDP, has intensified his rhetoric on issues appealing to conservatives, the core LDP base.

The 2025 Belt and Road Journalists Forum in China was an opportunity for Black Agenda Report to join an international group of journalists working to promote meaningful dialogue on world issues.

THE World Bank has recently published a list of Gini coefficients for 61 countries relating in some cases to income distribution and in others to consumption expenditure distribution.

The information on increase in hunger is far more direct and based on readily verifiable statistics, than are the official calculations of poverty.

How internal divisions and geopolitical realities are shaping the bloc’s role in a rapidly transforming global order.

The Covid pandemic’s onset prompted speculation that the disease had been created in a lab in China, specifically as a weapon against the United States. This new and highly contagious virus did wreak profound socioeconomic trauma and widespread suffering, borne disproportionately by the disadvantaged. Initially it caused nearly 1.2 million deaths in the United States. […]

A new documentary that began airing on PBS this month (The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today) highlights one of the most surreal stories from World War II.

Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Pakistan’s General Asim Munir—have found common cause in nominating Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

China showcases a number of promising developments in the construction of socialism–though not without challenges and contradictions.

It is very important to distinguish between the Left criticism and the neoliberal criticism of the dirigiste strategy.

Diabetes is a silent epidemic, causing death and suffering on an unimaginable scale.

The Communist Party and socialist construction.

The little-reported opening of a major rail link between China and Iran may upend the strategic calculations behind U.S. imperial policy in the Middle East, argues Kevin Crane.

When Bertolt Brecht wrote: “Hungry man; reach for the book” he was articulating the Left attitude to education, as something that broadens perceptions and hence is essentially emancipatory. The fascist attitude to education is diametrically opposite to this.

The southern state spends nearly 60% of its revenue budget on education, health, pensions, food subsidies and rural development.