Geography Archives: Asia

  • Third World: Is Another Debt Crisis in the Offing?

    While taking a significant toll on public revenues,1 repayment of the public debt has, since 2004, ceased to be a major concern for most middle-revenue countries and for raw material-exporting countries in general.  In fact the majority of governments of these countries are having no trouble finding loans at historically low interest rates.  However, the […]

  • The Making of the 2008 Koshi Disaster

      Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its September 2008 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. We know that the immediate future holds the certainty of severe climate change, and an ever increasing strain on not only the much publicised issue of reserves of […]

  • Dealing with Iran’s Not-So-Irrational Leadership

      Nothing expresses the widening gap between the mind frames of the Iranian ruling elite and their Western counterparts more than the headlines in their respective newspapers.  The American media, above all, have unilaterally resolved the intelligence questions over Iran’s nuclear program.  The New York Times leads the pack with articles and even editorials that […]

  • Pakistan Invades America — “Without Permission”

    The U.S. State Department lodged a sharp protest over ongoing Pakistani missile strikes and ground raids today, saying the Islamic Republic was violating American sovereignty. “We will try to convince Pakistan . . . to respect [the] sovereignty of the United States — and God willing, we will convince,” State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack told […]

  • A Guantanomized Age: The Long Interrogation

    Stark images of spectral men — their appearance in bright orange jumpsuits belied by legal invisibility — have been seared into the minds of many Muslims as an index of America’s anger. But, for American Muslims, abuse and disappearance of detainees are not the defining features of the “war on terror.”  Eyed by the national […]

  • The Current Situation of the United States Economy

    A Briefing to the Vietnamese Central Committee Delegation, September 11, 2008 The economic situation of the United States today is widely understood to be the most serious since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and not only for this country.  So far the actions by the government have been inadequate, late, and do not address […]

  • Billy Graham: Ministering to the Powerful

    Cecil Bothwell, The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire, Asheville, NC, 2007. Today we are used to the ministers and preachers playing an open role in class politics.  Usually they support the rule of our employers: railing against this or that Satan (the Kaiser, the Bolsheviks, Hitler, the USSR, Castro, […]

  • The Soft Surge: Opening the Gates of Hell in Pakistan

    When I was younger, my family would visit Pakistan during summer vacations.  In the teeming port city of Karachi, I often went with my uncle to the local bazaar, where merchants and browsers haggled fiercely over prices underneath tan tents. To conceal my American upbringing, I wore pants in the oppressive heat (shorts were derided […]

  • Traitor

    Anyone looking for a good movie about traitors can skip the new Don Cheadle vehicle Traitor.   Despite all the action movie hype, it won’t be around long, anyway. Traitor is not a movie about traitors, or a sensitive post-mortem on why people might become “traitors.”  That old chestnut “The Man without a Country” is […]

  • Revitalizing the Memory of Sacco and Vanzetti

    I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect.  I am convinced that the human history has not yet begun — that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.  I see with the eyes of my soul how the sky is diffused […]

  • Anti-Maoism, McCarthyism, and the Indian State

    Being the only “policeman” who “has ever risen to so much influence in India,” Indian National Security Adviser MK Narayanan seldom minces words in revealing the designs of the Indian State for “national security.”  He recently pronounced the focus of the state’s strategy against leftist militancy in the country.  In an interview with the Straits […]

  • Faculty Resist Raising Funds for Endowed Chair Named after “Good-time Charlie” Wilson

    When University of Texas faculty members opened the local Austin newspaper in mid-August, many were surprised to read that that their institution was raising funds for an endowed chair to honor Charlie Wilson, described charitably by the paper as “the fun-loving, hard-living former East Texas congressman portrayed by Tom Hanks in last year’s ‘Charlie Wilson’s […]

  • Of Jobs Lost and Wages Depressed: The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Employment and Wage Levels in the Philippines, 1980-20001

    Introduction Despite the vast literature examining the link between trade liberalization and economic growth, empirical studies still fail to provide conclusive and unequivocal evidence supporting the link.  What most of these studies emphasize is that openness, accompanied by a country-specific mix of appropriate complementary policies (macroeconomic and financial policies, education, infrastructure, institutional capacity and governance), […]

  • Chinese Nationalism

      Chinese Nationalism Paul Jay: To what extent is there development of big power nationalism, perhaps in the armed forces, in the Chinese Communist Party itself? Minqi Li: My own view is that, as far as China’s ruling elites are concerned, concerning China’s big capitalists, I’d say nationalism is not so much their own ideology.  […]

  • The New Left in China

      The New Left in China Minqi Li: There has been dramatic change in terms of China’s intellectual life.  Back in the 1980s, among most of the intellectuals who were politically conscious or politically active, among most of the university students, it was dominated by neoliberal ideas. Paul Jay: The ideas of open markets, independent […]

  • The Nepali Revolution Moves On

    In a historic vote on 15 August 2008 in Kathmandu,  Pushpa Kamal Dahal (aka Prachanda), chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), was elected first Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, where now a “Maoist leads from the top of the world.”  Prachanda garnered 80% of the votes cast in the […]

  • How Globalization Works: Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Texas (TMMTX) — A Case Study

    Modern economic class struggle, the unremitting, sometimes hidden, sometimes open, fight between capitalists and workers that erupted in the 19th century and dominated the 20th, is taking on new forms and dimensions in the 21st century. The stakes of this continuing conflict are higher than they have ever been.  Every aspect of human life on […]

  • Marxist Bestsellers Increase JCP Membership and Alarm Conservatives in Japan

      The Japanese Communist Party is suddenly attracting many new members.  According to the party’s press release, the membership peaked at 500,000 in 1990 when it began its decline, and it has been hovering around 400,000 over the last ten years, but 9,000 have joined the party since the JCP central committee’s fifth general meeting […]

  • Immigrant Rights Are Labor Rights

    Today’s critical labor struggles revolve around immigrants’ rights, while today’s struggles over immigrants’ rights are grounded in workplace and labor organizing.  Global, national, and local histories have woven these issues tightly together.  In the U.S. we are seeing the beginnings of a multifaceted movement which engages these dynamically linked histories. Twenty-five years ago, U.S. labor […]

  • Urgent Action Needed to Save Amin Maharana’s Life and to Free Anti-Displacement Activists in Orissa, India

    On August 15, Dave Pugh returned to the U.S. after spending three and a half weeks gathering information about the anti-displacement movement in India.  Pugh is a member of the Initiative Committee of the International Campaign Against Forced Displacement that was launched on June 19, 2008 at the Third International Assembly of the International League […]