Dirty officials aren’t the only ones getting slammed as Xi Jinping continues his crackdown on corruption and waste. China’s restaurant industry grew 9 percent, to 2.56 trillion yuan ($411 billion), last year, its slowest growth in more than two decades, according to a report released by the China Cuisine Association on April 19.
This is the President’s fifth trip to the Asia Pacific region, which has been a focus of our foreign policy. It makes up in part for the trip he was not able to take last fall because of the government shutdown, with the stops in Malaysia and the Philippines, and also allows us to go visit two of our closest allies in the world, the Republic of Korea and Japan.
From their website:
The Department's mission is to shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world and foster conditions for stability and progress for the benefit of the American people and people everywhere. This mission is shared with the USAID, ensuring we have a common path forward in partnership as we invest in the shared security and prosperity that will ultimately better prepare us for the challenges of tomorrow.
--From the FY 2015 Agency Financial Report,
released November 2015
On Wednesday, Barack Obama will land in Tokyo beginning a week-long trip to four of China's neighbors—but not to China itself.
In Obama’s stops in Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, and Kuala Lampur, the specter of China will loom large. This will be especially pronounced in Tokyo, where the big unanswered question is how involved the United States would be if China seized the Diaoyu, the disputed islands administered by Japan, which calls them the Senkakus. We asked contributors what President Obama should say about China in Tokyo. —The Editors
Dan Blumenthal is the Director of Asian Studies at AEI, where he focuses on East Asian security issues and Sino-American relations. He is also the John A. van Beuren Chair Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Naval War College. He has both served in and advised the U.S. government on China issues for over a decade. From 2001 to 2004, he served as Senior Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the Department of Defense. Additionally, he served as a commissioner on the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission from 2006 to 2012 and held the position of Vice Chairman in 2007. He has also served on the Academic Advisory Board of the congressional U.S.-China Working Group. Blumenthal is the co-author of An Awkward Embrace: The United States and China in the 21st Century (AEI Press, 2012) and regularly writes op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The Weekly Standard, among others.
Shogo Suzuki is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester. He has published on Chinese and Japanese foreign policy, as well as Sino-Japanese relations and International Relations theory with reference to East Asia. His most recent book is International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West (Routledge, 2014) (edited with Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk).
Yuki Tatsumi was appointed Senior Associate of the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center in September 2008 after serving as a research fellow since 2004. Before joining Stimson, Tatsumi worked as a research associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and as the Special Assistant for Political Affairs at the Embassy of Japan in Washington.
Tatsumi has authored and edited numerous books and reports on Japanese foreign and security policy, including the most recently published "Japan's Challenges in East Asia: View from Next Generation" (Stimson Center, 2014), "Opportunity out of Necessity: The Impact of US Defense Budget Cut on the US-Japan Alliance" (Stimson Center, 2013) and "Japan's National Security Policy Infrastructure: Can Tokyo Meets Washington's Expectation?" (Stimson Center, 2008). She is a recipient of the 2009 Yasuhiro Nakasone Incentive Award.
In 2012, she was awarded the Letter of Appreciation from the Ministry of National Policy of Japan for her contribution in advancing mutual understanding between the United States and Japan. A native of Tokyo, Tatsumi holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan and an M.A. in International Economics and Asian Studies from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.
This week we’re delighted to be joined by Christopher Beam, author of the passage quoted above, which we unceremoniously filched from his fantastic New Republic essay about his year with the Chongqing Dockers, one of the many new amateur football teams that has sprung up in China as of late. And if you haven’t read the piece, you should stop what you’re doing and check it out now. If you like this show, be sure to check out Christopher’s other excellent essay on tackling twelve-year-old ping pong players in Shichahai.
If yesterday was typical, about 1,400 children in Africa died of malaria. It is a preventable, treatable disease, and the young victims lost their lives through no faults of their own. Why it is that human beings accept a fact like this as an unremarkable daily event, whereas one murder can grab a headline, is an awkward question.
Zhou Yongkang, a member of China’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee from 2007 to 2012, is the subject of one of the highest-level corruption investigations in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Several members of his family, over the years Mr. Zhou was in power, made investments in companies with ties to the China National Petroleum Corp., the state oil company formerly run by Mr. Zhou, although there is no evidence to show that Mr. Zhou was personally involved in the dealings.
