Asia

Typhoons and Hurricanes

August 25, 2017 / Asia / ,
Shuttered door in the front lobby of the Metropark Hotel, Hong Kong, before the arrival of Category 10 Typhoon Hato on August 23rd, 2017. Photo by Shawn Smallman

Like everyone else, I’m watching the news as Hurricane Harvey reaches category four intensity tonight. It will reach the coast of Texas around midnight, August 25th. My thoughts are with everyone in the affected region. I also hope that people are paying much closer attention to the news than I was when Typhoon Hato reached Hong Kong this Wednesday. I was staying at a hotel in Hong Kong, and was not following events, because I had been busy traveling back from Shenzhen. When I awoke in the morning I was surprised to see the rain coming down in buckets, but just thought it was a summer storm. I then went down the stairs, only to find myself confused by the shutters that had been installed on the main lobby doors at the Metropark Hotel. I went out another door, and was puzzled to see the sidewalks without pedestrians, the streets without cars, and businesses closed. When I saw that the windows up and down the street were taped with X’s, I realized what was happening.

Typhoon Hato skirted Hong Kong but hit Macau hard. Still, even in Hong Kong it was an impressive sight from the hotel’s rooftop. A burst of intense wind would pass through, whipping the palm trees back and forth. Clouds of leaves would hurl through the air, as they were sucked hundreds of feet into the sky. The rain would pour sideways. Then, I don’t know why, suddenly it would be dead calm. At one point I found myself watching a flock of birds, desperately trying to fly into the wind to avoid being sucked up into the hills. They would gain a little space, they be blown helplessly back. By late afternoon the worst was over, although heavy rains continued for hours. …

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Afghanistan and despair

June 27, 2017 / Asia, civil-military relations, Middle East, security / ,

U.S. special forces troops ride horseback as they work with members of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom on Nov. 12, 2001. By Department of Defense employee [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I love the War College podcasts, which consist of outstanding interviews with key thinkers in the area of security. If you want to understand the current state of affairs in Afghanistan, I highly recommend their podcast, “The Case for Leaving Afghanistan,” which showcases the thoughts of journalist Douglas Wissing. Spoiler alert: the picture is not good. The author of two books on Afghanistan, Wissing argues that our longest military commitment has endured because companies make money from it, while officers make careers. Wissing says that we have spent over a trillion dollars on the war to date, but the Afghan government is losing ground.

In terms of development, the U.S. has spent over $100 billion in Afghanistan, which is more than the U.S. spent on the Marshall plan in Europe after adjusting for inflation. As Wissing notes this is a staggering amount of money for a nation of 30 million people. Worse, he suggests that a significant portion of those development funds were siphoned off to fund the Taliban itself. He argues that the projects that the U.S. has funded have been divorced from Afghan reality, and unsustainable for that reason. The entire history has been a textbook lesson in how not to do development, he suggests, in part because policy has been driven by the personal, career and institutional needs of those people dispersing the funds. …

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Cities, Size and China

March 14, 2017 / Asia, cities / ,

As my colleagues in Urban Studies point out, when we speak of global issues we often focus on nation states, but some cities can be nearly as influential as states regarding trade, political stability or cultural impact. Nowhere is urbanization of greater importance than in contemporary China. A new webpage titled “The City-nator” at Chinaskinny allows you to type in the name of your city and see how many cities in China have a greater population. For example, when I entered my city of Portland, Oregon (there was no option for Portland, Maine, which was under the one million minimum) the website showed a list of 219 cities in China of greater size. These cities combined spend more than three trillion dollars are year on goods and services. According to this website, there are 223 cities in China that are larger than Vancouver, Canada.

But how accurate are these figures? In the case of Portland , the website said that the city’s total population is 2.34 million. In fact, the city’s population is 609,000, but the website’s figure probably would be accurate for the greater Portland area. So the numbers appear reasonable, based on a quick survey of a few U.S. cities, but you can explore the page further. As the webpage points out, there are 112 cities in China “with more people than New Zealand.”

Shawn Smallman

Nanjing: the Burning City

March 17, 2017 / Asia, book reviews / , ,

Nanking bodies 1937. Originally by Moriyasu Murase, 村瀬守保 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
China’s relationship with Japan has been strained ever since World War Two by what it has perceived to be Japan’s failure to acknowledge and atone for its wartime crimes. Iris Chang wrote a wonderfully researched academic book on this topic, “the Rape of Nanking.” This is still perhaps the best scholarly study of this event, although it was published in 1997. I love, however, graphic novels. Earlier on this blog I discussed Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa, a cycle of graphic novels examining war-era Japan, which is a richly researched and moving account of this time. Recently I also came across Ethan Young’s Nanjing: the Burning City, published by Dark Horse Books. This beautiful and well-written book tells the story of the Rape of Nanjing through the eyes of one individual soldier. This work describes the pathos and chaos of a world in which individuals had to choose whom they could help, and difficult moral choices awaited people at every step. Be warned that this book deals with graphic and disturbing material, including sexual violence, as one would expect. When one finishes the book, one understands why the memory of this event continues to haunt Chinese-Japanese relations. The book also speaks to issues that are relevant to more recent conflicts, such as events in Syria. Strongly recommended.

Shawn Smallman, 2016

Murder and Mystery in Malaysia

February 22, 2017 / Asia, mystery / , ,

I’ve always been interested in international mysteries, and I’ve covered many of them in this blog, such as the strange death of Natalio Alberto Nisman in Argentina; the authorship of the Stuxnet virus; the nature of Number Stations; the massacre in Coahuila; the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370; Cicada 3301; chronic kidney disease in Central America; lost nuclear weapons in Canada; the death of Walter Benjamin; the hijacking of the Arctic Sea; the Vela Incident; the lost island of Bermeja; the attack on a South African nuclear site; and the strange case of Witches Broom and bioterrorism in Brazil. This last blog post on Brazil received more attention than any other blog post on mystery, and certainly the most feedback from readers. …

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Cracking the North Korea Puzzle

February 17, 2017 / Asia, mystery, security, U.S. Foreign Policy / , , ,

I want to thank Dr. Mel Gurtov for the following guest post:

Donald Trump inherits an intractable problem in Asia: North Korea’s determination to modernize its weapons arsenal and, absent a better deal from the United States, continue working toward an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability. The North’s latest missile test—one with intermediate range of perhaps 2,000 miles—should be understood in the context of weapons modernization. According to the US Pentagon, the test represented progress for North Korea in several respects: it was a ground-based launch rather than a submarine launch; it used solid fuel technology; and it flew farther than other IRBM tests, the four most recent ones having all failed at launching.

Over the past year, North Korea has carried out over 25 ballistic missile tests and conducted its fifth nuclear-weapon test as well. All these tests are in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions that ban and condemn them. Each resolution has led to harsher sanctions, but sanctions have had little if any effect on Pyongyang’s behavior or rhetoric. Even China’s criticisms, which have grown more severe in recent years, have not moved North Korea to change course. …

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One life, Suffering and Pīnyīn

January 14, 2017 / Asia / ,

This letter written by Mi Fei. By 米芾（べい ふつ、1051年 - 1107年、中国の北宋末の文学者・書家・画家） [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
This letter written by Mi Fei. By 米芾（べい ふつ、1051年 – 1107年、中国の北宋末の文学者・書家・画家） [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The New York Times today has a magnificent article by Margalit Fox, “Zhou Youguang, Who Made Writing Chinese as Simple as ABC, dies at 111.” I’ve been studying Mandarin for a year now, and like all new learners I am using Pīnyīn. Zhou Youguang led the effort to create Pīnyīn, the romanization system that allows Chinese to be written without characters. There were other previous efforts to create an alphabet for Chinese, but after the Chinese government adopted Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, all the others quickly fell out of favor.

What struck me about the article, whoever, was less Zhou Youguang’s intellectual achievement in helping to create Pīnyīn, but rather the breadth of his life. Here is someone who lost a daughter to appendicitis during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and who was sent to the fields to harvest crops during the Cultural Revolution. Yet he published ten books after the age of 100.

While remarkable, Zhou Youguang was not unique. The Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer continued to design major buildings well after he turned a 100. And the Brazilian poet Cora Coralina was born in 1889 (the year the Brazilian empire ended, and one year after the abolition of slavery) but did not publish her first book until 1965. Of course she had been writing for most of her life, but she flourished after this book was published at the age of 76. Without question, she is one of Brazil’s canonical poets. Our culture celebrates youth, including in academia. Forbes has a “30 under 30 list” of young entrepreneurs; literary competitions seek to identify new talent; mathematicians who turn 30 begin to wonder if their best years are behind them. And yet, some of the world’s most insightful and creative poets, thinkers, and designers do their best work in their senior years. How much talent is lost because people assume that older people can no longer be creative?

Cora Coralina described a deep personal change when she turned 50, which she described as a “loss of fear.” Similarly, Zhou Youguang became a well known critic of the Chinese government, whose age made him almost untouchable. For these thinkers, there was a freedom that came with time, which enabled them to speak truth to power, and to create work without worrying what others thought. Zhou Youguang’s father served in the last Chinese dynasty, and he lived through the Second Sino-Japanese war. Out of a life that knew suffering he crafted a new writing system, which has helped hundreds of millions of people learn Mandarin. May we all remember what is possible if we have the good fortune to have a long life, and the wisdom not to see aging as only a loss.

Shawn Smallman, Portland State University

Intelligence failures and Vietnam

August 2, 2016 / Asia, espionage / , ,

Marine gets his wounds treated during operations in Huế City, 1968. By Undetermined U.S military photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons . By Undetermined U.S military photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Marine gets his wounds treated during operations in Huế City, 1968. By Undetermined U.S military photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons . By Undetermined U.S military photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Author Malcom Gladwell has a new podcast titled “Revisionist History,” which had a recent episode titled “Saigon: 1965.” The podcast tells the story of the Rand Corporation’s efforts to collect intelligence on North Vietnamese morale through interviews with captured soldiers and guerrillas. In particular, it examines the history of three people deeply involved in the program, who brought their own biases and beliefs to the data that they collected. Gladwell’s point in telling this story is that often the challenge is not to collect the information, but rather to interpret it accurately. Each of the three people had access to an overwhelming amount of information. Still, their vision of the war was shaped less by the the interviews themselves, than by their own biases. In an age of big data, NSA and cyber-espionage, the challenge of how to correctly interpret overwhelming amounts of data remains critical to global intelligence services.

Shawn Smallman, 2016

Thucydides, fear and China

October 8, 2016 / Asia, security / ,

Over the last 15 years a veritable cottage industry has arisen to describe similarities between 1) contemporary East Asia and Europe before World War One and 2) the potential for conflict between the United States and China, based on the work of Thucydides. Often scholars make both points, which is the case with Graham Allison’s recent article in the Atlantic. While the topic may not be new, it is no less significant for that reason. Allison makes this comparison based on a historical study done by his team for the Belfer Study at Harvard. I won’t summarize the results here, because I’d encourage you to view the presentation itself, but suffice it to say that there are reasons for serious concern. If Allison’s team is correct, the odds of war are higher than for peace, although conflict is not inevitable. For any nation in the region (see my book review of Malcom Fraser’s Dangerous Allies)  the current situation should be worrying. While the United States is currently preoccupied by Russia’s actions in Europe, Allison states that the greatest threat remains a conflict with China. The reason that so many authors write about the parallels with World War One is that conflict is likely to come about less from malice and planning than coincidence and misinterpretation. Scholars have often spoken about Europe “sleepwalking” into World War One. While it is easy to condemn that long-ago generation of statesman, diplomats and leaders, its more discomfiting to ask how current leaders would respond to a similar challenge. For all these reasons, I strongly recommend Allison’s piece in the Atlantic.

Shawn Smallman, Portland State University

Map of Japan’s demographic decline

August 10, 2015 / Asia / , , ,

When Kim and I wrote the first edition of the textbook, the external reviewers asked for a number of important changes, one of which was to include more demographic information. In the second edition, we continued to draw on demography, which particularly informed our discussion in the conclusion regarding future trends in global affairs. Demographic information can be dangerous if over-simplified, and it is often cited by cultural conservatives who fear the impact of migration. Still, demographics is perhaps the most reliable means to look into the future, whether it be to foresee the decline of francophone communities in Canada outside of Quebec and New Brunswick, or the enduring power of France, which has a brighter demographic future than many European states. The major global demographic trend in the world today is towards demographic decline amongst developed nations, even as Africa’s population climbs sharply. Some nations, such as Taiwan, have birth rates that are shockingly low. Of course, there are also advantages to population decline, particular regarding environmental issues. With a smaller population there is less demand for energy and other key resources. In the short term, however, most nation-states that have aging populations will face significant economic challenges, from how to fund the pension system, to the declining number of taxpayers to service the national debt. …

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