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East Asia
Rule of law in China
China’s new leader Xi Jinping gave a major address recently in which he pledged to curtail power and investigate violations of the law so as to protect the rights of Chinese citizens. “No organization or individual has the special rights to overstep the constitution and law, any violation of the…
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Dying alone
Last week, the skeleton of a man was found in the southeastern port city of Busan about six years after he apparently committed suicide. The man, identified only as Kim, was 49 when he hung himself at a rented house in 2006. Kim, an unmarried manual laborer, had lived alone…
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East Asia
Koreans shouldn’t romanticize ‘Les Miserables’
The movie “Les Miserables,” which was adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel by the same name, has become a hit this year in Korea. The late Hugo might find it puzzling that his fictional work is influencing the Korean society today. About five million Koreans watched the movie. Hugo’s novel, which…
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Oil spill compensation
Moon Seung-il earned his living by running fishing boats for weekend anglers in Taean County along the west coast. On Dec. 7, 2007, a Samsung Heavy Industries barge struck a crude oil tanker passing there, causing the country’s worst oil spill and driving him out of business. Moon filed a…
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East Asia
Japan’s quest for allies
MANILA ― Japan is probing the possibilities of a most improbable alliance in a corner of Southeast Asia that once lay at the heart of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” The term “co-prosperity” was a euphemism for Imperial Japan’s policy of prospering off impoverished people from Burma through the…
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Retooling government
What matters are not organizations but their operations Restructuring the government has become one of the traditional tasks of newly-elected leaders in Korea. Park Geun-hye is no exception. There may be little wrong with the organizational reboot ― why not put new wine into new bottles? ― except Korea is…
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East Asia
Korea’s Japanese problem
Just a few days before Park Geun-hye was elected as the new Korean president, Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party won a landslide victory in Japan. That event could have a major impact on Park’s administration over the next five years. The state of Korean-Japanese relations might even overshadow…
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East Asia
Holiday reading
Last month, I went on a beach vacation. I am a compulsively light packer. Before my daughter was born, I was known to take a single purse on a two-week getaway. When I went away to college, I arrived with a backpack and a suitcase, and was shocked to see…
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East Asia
Open door to N. Koreans
Last Dec. 12, I fired off an opinion piece of about 1,500 words to the Washington Post. It easily could have been 1,600 words, but I deleted all of the curse words. The day before, I had learned that the United States government had rejected visa applications by three of…
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The world in 2030
CAMBRIDGE ― What will the world look like two decades from now? Obviously, nobody knows, but some things are more likely than others. Companies and governments have to make informed guesses, because some of their investments today will last longer than 20 years. In December, the United States National Intelligence…
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