Geography Archives: Asia

If the U.S. wants to be a world leader, it has to match China in investing in knowledge generation for future technology. Why then is the U.S. taking the sanctions route? Sanctions are simpler to implement; building a society that values knowledge is much more difficult. This is the crisis of late capitalism.

One key factor in spreading suspicion that the coronavirus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is media’s early and ongoing politicization of the World Health Organization’s investigation into the pandemic’s origins. Much of this politicization weaponizes Orientalist tropes about China being especially, perhaps genetically, untrustworthy—the sort of people who would unleash COVID-19 on the world.

For China’s tech companies, user growth is increasingly all about having the pushiest push notifications.

From Ajmer to Indore, recent incidents show that the continuing hate-mongering by right-wing forces is having a direct impact.

While our government wants us to step back and forget what we know about the violence of Britain’s imperial state, Richard Gott says it’s time for a much deeper reckoning.

International media engaged in Sinophobic rhetoric during the recent Olympic games in Tokyo.

Cuba is a small country. But because it became in 1959 the first country in the Western hemisphere to thoroughly break with U.S. domination, and embark on a path of national independence, events concerning Cuba have a geopolitical significance many times greater than its size. Present events show that this continues to be the case.

Activist Chao Xiaomi is inspiring transgender Chinese to reject the gender binary. But the community continues to face deep-seated discrimination.

Bourgeois pundits are alarmed by the Chinese government’s latest regulatory changes. A Wall Street Journal headline is typical: “China’s corporate crackdown is just getting started. Signs point to more tumult ahead.”

The U.S. has degenerated to such an extent that is probably one of the least democratic countries in the world. It is ruled by an extremely powerful and undemocratic billionaire class, buttressed by an entrenched bureaucracy and intelligence apparatus, and legitimized by an obsequious media which does not even pretend to be neutral.

The perfect storm of COVID-19 and climate change, and the resulting economic damage, will most likely trigger much more social and political instability. Although substantially increased international cooperation can still avert this nightmarish scenario, the current state of global politics provides few grounds for optimism.

The dog-whistle calls of “Freedom for Cuba” that reverberated round the world on 11 July, emanating from a mix of forces in Cuba, which were carefully manipulated and crafted by the CIA and U.S. anti-Cuban forces abroad, shed a great deal of light not only on U.S. foreign policy hypocrisy but on left-wing hypocrisy and impotence, both here in Ireland and elsewhere.

ON July 19, 1969, 14 major banks were nationalised in the country. Today, after 52 years there is some talk again of privatising the nationalised banks, which naturally raises the question: why were banks nationalised at all?

Cuba only needs around 30 million syringes to vaccinate its entire population–that is a million dollars. This is a tiny sum for the countries, either together or even individually, which oppose the blockade of Cuba.

Marxist-inspired youths.

Many would remember that the Soviet Union and other Eastern European socialist countries used to be characterized by long queues of consumers for several commodities.

A blot on the nation.

Last month, China announced strict new regulations on academic tutoring and training classes for young children. How did the industry get so big, so fast?

Media reports from the U.S. this week–regurgitated by the European press–highlighted concerns that China is embarking on a massive scale-up of underground silos for launching nuclear weapons.

During this bleak period, in late February 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping announced that–counter to this general global downturn–China had eradicated extreme poverty. What does this announcement mean?