1983 Posts located
For Southeast Asia, the COVID-19 pandemic was not only a public health crisis. It also provided an occasion for China to deepen its engagement in the region by dint of…
COVID-19 has not gone away, and observers are now discussing possible long-term effects of the pandemic, including on geopolitics. A report by the European Parliament discussed five COVID-generated factors that…
The coronavirus pandemic that struck in late 2019 has affected the world profoundly, and Japan is no exception. But the direct impact on Japan has been relatively small considering the…
The national identity gap between China and the United States has become increasingly apparent. Under Xi Jinping, China has sought to reclaim its historical greatness and proclaimed itself to be…
June 25, 2020 marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. The conflict on the Korean Peninsula has been going on for so long that we sometimes…
2020 is starting off dramatically with the escalation of tensions in the Middle East – The world held its breath while the United States and Iran exchanged both blows and…
While it is frustrating to see North Korean projectiles flying out to sea and Pyongyang’s erratic, unpredictable reactions in negotiations, we cannot forget where things stood in 2017 – the…
30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people’s aspiration to establish a pluralistic liberal democracy appears to be under scrutiny around the world – anti-immigration policies dominate political…
What Happened New e-commerce start-ups are growing fast in areas such as fashion, online payments, ride-hailing, delivery, and biotechnology. In 2020, South Korea’s e-commerce market ranked 5th worldwide. Sales are expected to grow 9% to $120.56 billion in 2021. South Korea has 10 startup companies valued at over $1 billion making it the third-largest hub for such firms in the…
What Happened Last week, the Justice Ministry announced a revision to a law that would allow singles to adopt children. This plan was announced in light of new census data, which shows nearly a third of households in Korea are single-person households. The new adoption bill comes after the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family passed new regulations that allow children…
On August 31, 2021, South Korea’s National Assembly approved the amendments to the Telecommunications Business Act (전기통신사업법), which essentially imposes new restrictions and mechanisms of greater regulatory scrutiny over the operators of app markets (e.g., Apple’s ‘AppStore’ or Google’s ‘Play Store’). Hailed as the first successfully implemented measure against the giants operating global app markets,…
In the last two posts, we have provided data on the share of military personnel in the Politburo and analyzed in more detail the diversity of military backgrounds, some tied to the weapons program, but others linked more clearly to the military-industrial complex, technology and internal security. Here, we consider several intepretations of these developments,…