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Economics

Politics: American Luminaries and U.S. Diplomacy towards Pariah States

August 22, 2009

Guest Post from Dragoman

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.) had successfully negotiated the release of John Yettaw, the American much maligned for his unwitting involvement in the recent intrigue against Aung San Suu Kyi. Earlier this month, Bill Clinton returned from Pyongyang with the two American journalists whom North [...]

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Politics: Obama and Crew Using Mandarin

August 21, 2009

One thing I have always appreciated about Obama is the fact that he is open-minded, culturally sensitive, and willing to listen and adapt. If you look at the way he has dealt with people and foreign leaders, you’ll quickly notice a very strong contrast from the way the President Bush dealt with them.

A brilliant example [...]

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Link: The Economist’s Banyan on Burma and Indonesia

August 20, 2009

This week’s opinion column on Asia in the Economist highlighted the ways Burma and Indonesia became fellow travelers in matters of military control of their society and how the two countries have parted ways in terms of development.
I was highly interested in this excellent piece because it echoes certain things that I argued in another [...]

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Politics: Indonesia’s Parliamentary Elections: What’s Next?

May 23, 2009

Guest Post from Dragoman
The official results of Indonesia’s legislative elections were recently announced in Jakarta, indicating that President Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party (PD), with 150 seats out of the total 560, will hold the largest number of seats in the upcoming parliamentary session. Golkar will hold 107 seats, while Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party—Struggle (PDI-P), with 95 [...]

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Economics: Singapore’s Port, Economic Downturn, and Google Earth

May 15, 2009

Foreign Policy’s blog has a short post about observing Singapore’s port traffic through Google Earth. By looking at the images on this program, you can get a real sense of how bad the economic situation is. For Singapore, the visible sign is the decline in vessel movements. Using a special product called AIS Vessel Data, [...]

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Politics: Indonesia’s Embrace of Democracy and the Future “Asian Values” Debate

May 11, 2009

Guest Post from Dragoman
More than ten years ago, popular agitation in Indonesia, particularly in Jakarta, led to the downfall of post-colonial Southeast Asia’s longest-ruling strongman Soeharto. Since May 1998, Indonesia has moved from soft authoritarianism to being a thriving regional democracy with the experience of three relatively orderly and popularly legitimate general elections. With the [...]

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Politics: The Democratic Party in Singapore

March 29, 2009

I have been reading some articles on the Singapore Democratic Party website, and I have found them quite interesting. In a country that has been run by one part for so long, I rarely read/hear about other opinions (this may or may not have something to do with the way media works in Singapore…). Anyway, [...]

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Link: Kishore on Failure in Singapore

March 29, 2009

To avert failure, Singapore must conceive it – Kishore Mahbubani

MARCH 25 – I have just finished writing an article for the Wilson Quarterly, an American journal, on the topic, “Can America Fail?”
The opening paragraph reads as follows: “In 1981, Singapore’s long-ruling People’s Action Party was shocked when it suffered its first defeat at the polls [...]

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Current Events: More Shoe Throwing

February 3, 2009

I guess political leaders need to start watching out for shoe throwers…

A 27-year-old man has been charged after a shoe was thrown at Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during a visit to Cambridge University.
Police said the man, who has not been named, would appear before magistrates in Cambridge on 10 February accused of committing a [...]

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Politics: Fred Hiatt on Singapore

December 12, 2008

Fred Hiatt wrote an article on Singapore for the Washtington Post. I first came across the article when I was reading Mr. Brown, a famous Singaporean blogger’s feed. He quoted a short section from the article, and posed a question about Singapore’s democracy.  Here is what he had to say (post taken from here):

Excerpt from [...]

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