China & Taiwan

Since the mid-2010s, technology has been the topic du jour in Washington, DC policy circles. Trump’s crusade against Huawei and Biden’s war on China’s semiconductor industry reflect this new norm of the centrality of technology to US politics, as...

In spring 2024, Taiwan took over the global mainstage, not because of the election and upcoming inauguration of President-elect Lai Ching-te, whose electoral victory in January demonstrated Taiwan’s democratic successes to the world. No, Taiwan has another international superstar...

In October 2023, the White House requested emergency supplemental appropriations for Fiscal Year 2024 to provide additional aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific. After months of debate, the House of Representatives passed an emergency $8.1 billion supplemental appropriations bill to support Indo-Pacific...

The explosive growth of development along the Mekong river since 1995 has produced an estimated 167 hydropower plants, with eleven mainstream facilities on the way in Laos, Cambodia, and along the Laos-Thailand border. With its electricity generating capacity projected...

The mighty Mekong River, a life source for millions across Southeast Asia, now faces an existential threat. An ambitious regional plan developed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) incorporates the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) as...

Just as Halford Mackinder, in his seminal work The Geographical Pivot of History, argued that control over the Eurasian heartland held the key to global mastery, the world stands at the precipice of another pivotal shift—one driven not by...

  Introduction According to its Constitution, China is a unitary state; however, as part of economic reform in the 1980s and early 1990s, the central government delegated administrative authority to the provinces. Administrative delegation authorized local governments’ autonomy in...

On the first Monday in March 2024, delegates—nearly 3,000 to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and over 2,000 to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—gathered in Beijing. With the exception of a handful of members of ethnic minorities in...

 “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.” The most famous line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” might fairly be applied to the fate of Hong Kong since 1997. China’s slow strangulation...

    Executive Summary In the Middle East, reality can change in the blink of an eye. Misconceptions and misrepresentations that dominate the public discourse have it that the region has been embroiled in war since time immemorial. Still,...