Asia & the Pacific

399 Items

Vietnamese sky raider pulls out of its bomb run after a phosphorous bomb explodes

AP/Nick Ut

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Affairs

Judging Henry Kissinger

| Nov. 30, 2023

Joseph S. Nye writes that evaluating ethics in international relations is difficult, and Kissinger's legacy is particularly complex. Over his long tenure in government, he had many great successes, including with China and the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Kissinger also had major failures, including in how the Vietnam War ended. But on net, his legacy is positive. In a world haunted by the specter of nuclear war, his decisions made the international order more stable and safer.

Analysis & Opinions - Financial Times

China’s dominance of solar poses difficult choices for the west

| June 22, 2023

The geopolitical implications of solar displacing oil as the world’s major source of energy are enormous. Why has the Middle East been a central arena in the “great game” for the past century? Because countries there have been the major suppliers of the oil and gas that powered 20th-century economies. If, over the next decade, photovoltaic cells that capture energy from the sun were to replace a substantial part of the demand for oil and gas, who will the biggest losers be? And even more consequentially: who will be the biggest winner?

Video - Harvard University Center for the Environment

Video: Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China

Daniel Schrag and Henry Lee discuss the policies China could enact in the near-term to ease its transition to a low-carbon economy, the subject of their book Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

Smoke and steam rise from a coal processing plant in Hejin

AP Photo/Olivia Zhang, File

News - Harvard Crimson

Environmental Policy Experts Discuss China’s Coal Transition at Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Event

    Authors:
  • Abigail Romero
  • Nathanael Tjandra
| Apr. 11, 2023

Environmental policy experts discussed China’s energy policies during an event at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs on April 10, 2023. The event featured Weila Gong, a Belfer Center postdoctoral research fellow, and Georgetown University professor Joanna I. Lewis, who discussed their joint research exploring China’s coal consumption, its pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, and the political and economic factors hindering the country’s transition away from coal.

The ghost town of Kayaköy (Livisi) in southwestern Anatolia

Wikimedia CC/William Neuheisel

Analysis & Opinions - Political Violence @ a Glance

Why Do Mass Expulsions Still Happen?

| Jan. 30, 2023

Meghan Garrity details the history of mass expulsions since the centennial of the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.

A field of manganese nodules off the coast of Hawaii

NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2015 Hohonu Moana

Analysis & Opinions - The Wire China

The Ocean Edge

| Nov. 06, 2022

The energy transition has made deep-sea mining for critical minerals cost-competitive for the first time, and Chinese companies are champing at the bit to start mining at a commercial scale. The United States and its partners, by contrast, have been caught on the back foot when it comes to China’s stranglehold on the critical mineral supply chain. With the geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States intensifying, many Western observers say the United States can’t afford to lose the scramble for the seabed.