East-West Views

By Barbara Bornet Stumph, M.S., East-West Center alumna and current chapter leader of the EWCA Northern California Chapter

Retired Teacher at Pittsburg and Mt. Diablo Unified School Districts of English Language Development (ESL) and Ancient World History

Center Heart Cultivate Spirit 07. Painting by Barbara Bornet Stumph.

The opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was dazzling. But what did it mean?

If we can decode the symbolism of that extravaganza, we may glean more understanding of the culture and thinking of this blooming, controlled state.

Two days after Beijing’s performers bedazzled the world in their 2008 Olympics Opening show, Bill Kristol said on Fox News, “Well, the Olympics is just a giant opportunity for People’s Republic of China to deliver their propaganda.”

This is an outdated viewpoint, I believe. Yes, the State uses art for its own purposes.

I am much more intrigued by what three famous artists in China, Zhang Yimou (Film Director), Jang Ligang (Director of Dance), and Tan Dun (Musical Director), tried to convey to us in the Opening Ceremony from inside an economically blooming, controlled state. While Democracies loathe Communist arrests of dissidents, for example, I wonder, what we also can learn from China’s contemporary artists? Continue Reading »

by Sumeet Saksena

The author carries pollution measurement instruments in a Mumbai auto rickshaw.

The driver of the auto rickshaw sure was puzzled when I instructed him to drive for half an hour along a busy road and then turn back to return to where we started. If he had any apprehensions about the strange devices that graduate student Chitra Murali of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, and I were carrying, he politely kept them to himself. (After all, in this day and age any small device kept closely to one’s body in public can raise a lot of fear). Perhaps he didn’t care as long as he got his fare. Or was his brain, after years of driving in a highly polluted environment, cloudy, as mine was beginning to get? Continue Reading »

Ayutthaya

It’s the stuff of high adventure: Warrior kings, mysterious ships from far-off Japan, thriving trade across oceans and generations.

All part of the real-life tale of Thailand’s King Naresuan, who sat on the Thai throne more than 400 years ago when adventurous Japanese traders and samurai first settled in Thailand. And, you can read all about it in English thanks to Kennon “Ken” Breazeale, a projects coordinator at the Center. Here’s the story: Continue Reading »

By Shayne Hasegawa

Theory was put to practice recently when 26 graduate students from the University of Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific University and Clark University in Massachusetts got their feet wet and hands dirty as they toured community-led sustainability efforts on Oahu.

Students load rocks to help rebuild an ancient Hawaiian fishpond

The group visited He’eia Fishpond in Windward Oahu and several sites along the southern Ka Iwi coastline, including world-famous Hanauma Bay. But they experienced far more than the usual tourist would encounter. Continue Reading »

IT’S EASY to get opinions about the security and stability of the Asia Pacific region — everyone has one.

But Center official Richard Baker has a view with more than a little heft to it. Each year, Continue Reading »

So much for closed door conversations among the “old guard” about the future of U.S. policy.

At least one slice of the next generation of leaders recently had a front-row seat at high-level discussions of potential Asia policy for the next presidential administration, thanks to the Pacific Forum CSIS’s Young Leaders program.

Top thinkers and policy makers met in Honolulu last week to draft a new U.S. Asia policy for submission to the incoming administration. They were joined by nine fresh faces, young people destined to be the policy-makers of tomorrow. Continue Reading »

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is off to Asia this week to attend the 7th annual meeting of the International Institute of Strategic Studies’ Asia Security Summit in Singapore, better known as the Shangri-la “dialogue” on Asia-Pacific security issues.

His trip is generating fresh speculation Continue Reading »

By Justin Liang

On May 2nd, Cyclone Nargis exacted a tragic toll upon Burma, spawning a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions.
Coming amid a controversial referendum vote on a new constitution drafted by the ruling junta, the havoc wrought by the storm—and the regime’s uninspired response to international assistance—has raised numerous questions about the challenges and opportunities of engagement with the isolationist regime.

I recently had the opportunity to ask some of these questions to Ambassador Priscilla Clapp, who served as Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy

Pricilla Clapp

in Burma from 1999-2002 and recently retired after a 30-year career with the U.S. government. Ambassador Clapp has written extensively on Burma and will be speaking at an upcoming program at the East-West Center in Washington (see details of that program, as well as on another Burma program in Honolulu May 21, below).

Clapp spoke candidly about diplomacy with the ruling junta, prospects for humanitarian assistance, and the road ahead in Burma. Continue Reading »

Allison Pan receives her certificate from Alumni Officer Gordon Ring

Even the best of times have to end some day.

So it was for a roomful participants who took part last week in the Center’s Ho’opuka Ceremony, a formal occasion to recognize the completion of various awards and programs sponsored by the Center.
Some 85 participants were on hand and another 28 — unable to attend — were undoubtedly there in spirit. Continue Reading »

Charles Morrison introduces the U.S. Asia Pacific Council meeting.

Take economic tremors in the United States that quite possibly could spread to Asia, add a billion Chinese who are feeling a little disrespected by the rest of the world, stir in a new conservative prime minister in South Korea and a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister of Australia and what do you get?

Just about the perfect time, in the thinking of Center President Charles Morrison, for the latest gathering of the U.S. Asia Pacific Council of the East West Center. Continue Reading »