By Marcus Noland
HONOLULU (Nov. 19, 2019)—Rising diplomatic tensions between South Korea and Japan are putting American security interests at risk. Yet the United States government appears detached, unable to facilitate a rapprochement between its...
By Abby G. Frazier and Laura Brewington
HONOLULU (November 11, 2019)—Of all the earth’s environments, alpine regions are arguably the most vulnerable to climate change. This is especially true for alpine areas on islands. Island ecosystems are also...
By Anu Anwar
HONOLULU (November 1, 2019)—Originally announced by Chairman Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to bolster China’s connectivity with the world. While the name Belt and Road Initiative implies two routes—a...
By East-West Center
HONOLULU (October 4, 2019)—President Donald Trump first laid out a vision for a “free and open Indo-Pacific” at the November 2017 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Vietnam. From the start, statements describing...
By Charles E. Morrison and Mark Nuttall
HONOLULU (September 27, 2019)—In the summer of 2019, Greenland received considerable media attention for two developments: Its large ice sheet saw record rates of surface melt with potentially devastating...
By Tim Brown and Wiwat Peerapatanapokin
HONOLULU (September 17, 2019)—In 2018, roughly 6 million people were living with HIV in Asia and the Pacific, and 310,000 were newly infected, according to UNAIDS estimates. Despite these troubling numbers,...
By Sherry P. Broder
HONOLULU (August 28, 2019)—Since the 1950s when plastics were first produced, more than 150 million tons of plastic debris have accumulated in the world’s oceans. Marine plastic litter includes large items, such as nets, floats,...
By Marcus Noland
HONOLULU (August 23, 2019)—For three generations, the United States championed a rules-based multilateral trading system. That stance was overturned by the election of an avowed protectionist, Donald Trump, as president. It would be...
By Fan Lulu and Boy Luethje
HONOLULU (July 31, 2019)—With more than 800 million Internet users, China has become the global leader in e-commerce—the buying and selling of products and services online. Taobao (roughly “treasure hunt” in English) is...
By Wilmar Salim, Keith Bettinger, and Micah Fisher
HONOLULU (June 21, 2019)—With a population of more than 30 million, greater Jakarta is the largest metropolitan area in Southeast Asia and one of the most densely populated urban regions in the...
By Sumeet Saksena, Chinh Cong Tran, and Jefferson Fox
HONOLULU (May 24, 2019)—All over the world, more than three billion people—particularly in rural areas—cook on open fires or inefficient stoves that burn wood, coal, or crop residues. Burning...
By Jagannath Panda
HONOLULU (May 20, 2019)—In a 2014 speech, Xi Jinping described a multi-pronged strategy for increasing Chinese influence in Asia under the rubric “Asia for Asians.” Central to this concept is an expanding foreign relations,...
Many have mixed views on the bases and are more concerned with other issues
HONOLULU (April 18, 2019)—A new East-West Center report on the attitudes of younger Okinawans toward the islands’ US military bases has found that many have mixed feeling...
By Joshua Muldavin
HONOLULU (Apr. 5, 2019)—Environmental problems are a focus of both popular unrest within China and concern about the “China threat” in the rest of the world. Yet many assumptions and suggestions for how to “fix” China’s...
By Michael A. Tamor
HONOLULU (Mar. 11, 2019)—Evidence of rising global temperatures is overwhelming. Likewise, the evidence is clear that people are causing most of this rise through their use of fossil fuels. Yet people are not behaving as if they...
By Andrew Mason and Sang-Hyop Lee
HONOLULU (Mar. 1, 2019)—In all modern societies, children and the elderly consume more resources than they produce through their labor, while working-age adults produce more than they consume. What makes this “...
By Marcus Noland
HONOLULU (Feb. 5, 2019)—For more than 70 years, Japan has prospered in a US-led global order. Today, however, there is a perception that the tenets of US foreign policy are changing, implying that Japan will have to take greater...
By Kevin M. Woods
HONOLULU (Jan 29, 2019)—Myanmar’s natural resources are intertwined with a long history of armed conflict. The country’s teak forests first enticed the British during the colonial period. Then, leading up to and after independence...
By Eric Harwit
HONOLULU (Jan. 11, 2019)—China is moving rapidly away from relying on foreign communications technologies toward developing its own innovative formats, and new homegrown applications are flourishing. One of the most successful is the...
By Marcus Noland
HONOLULU (Jan. 8, 2019)—While there is little doubt that trade policy under the Trump administration is protectionist, there is uncertainty about the administration’s goals and how far it is willing to push confrontational tactics...
