Asia Society Magazine | Vol. 3 | 2021

2

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

IN LOVING MEMORY

HAROLD J. “HAL” NEWMAN 1931-2021

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y F R E YA B E T T S

ASIA SOCIETY TRUSTEE, ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE CO-FOUNDER

“Sometimes in life you are touched by the sheer humanity of a single individual.

Hal Newman was one such person. The legacy he leaves is a great one. And for many years to come, those of us at the Asia Society will continue to thank him for his vision, his deep generosity, and for always making it fun along the way.”

— Kevin Rudd, Asia Society President & CEO

ASIASO CIET Y.O RG/HALN E WMAN

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

The Fight to Be Seen

Letter From the President

BY K E V I N RU D D

PG. 5

2021: ‘Not So Fast, World’ What was supposed to be a year of recovery brought forth fresh challenges — in Asia and beyond.

BY TO M N AG O R S K I

PG. 6

BY H E LE N ZIA

P G . 42

Asians Represent Celebrating a year of historic achievements

The Year in Asia

and milestones in the U.S.

Stories that shaped 2021.

BY M AT T SCH I AV ENZ A

After another painful year for Asian Americans, a veteran activist reflects on what has — and hasn’t — changed since the movement began decades ago.

P G . 10

BY M I CH ELLE FLO RCRUZ , CH RIS TI N E H SI EH , A N D A M I LI

PG. 48

Asia Versus the Virus COVID-19 hit Asia much harder in 2021 than it did in 2020. But a close look at the numbers shows there's much more to the story.

DATA VISUALIZATION BY TING FANG CHENG PG. 18

The Absent Year Six renowned Indian artists try to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic — through art.

I N T RO D U C TI O N BY A B H AY SA R D E SA I

P G . 20

Chinatown Pretty A project dedicated to celebrating the resilience — and style — of the elderly in North America’s Chinatowns has recently taken on a whole new meaning.

BY A N D RIA LO A N D VA LE RI E LU U P G . 5 0

But why is it often ignored in U.S. classrooms?

Afghanistan: Before the Fall A Pulitzer Prize-winning Afghan photographer shares the last batch of images he took in his homeland — before he fled to save his life.

BY M A SSO U D H OSSA I N I

BY S T E WA RT K WO H

5 Asian Americans From History You Should Know Whether as an actress or astronaut, these f igures P G . 28

made a mark on U.S. history — even if many history books don’t show it.

4

VOL 3 · 2021

PG. 60

P G . 63

T KA S M CSRO ED U IDT HHO ES R SE A I N I , A N D R I A L O

‘Asian American History IS American History’

Five Curators on Five Artists

What the Diplomats Saw

Experts from museums across the U.S.

George Shultz and Henry Kissinger

recommend the A API artists who inspire them.

discuss working with China — and how

BY L AWREN CE- MIN H B Ù I DAVIS , VIVIEN N E LI U,

to f ix the U.S.-China relationship.

A D R I E L LU I S , M I C H E L L E Y U N M A P P L E T H O R P E , AN D H ERB TAM

PG. 64

Meet 2021’s Asia Game Changers P G .7 2

P G . 98

Can the U.S. and China Save the World?

In the first year under President Biden, the U.S.

On Hate, and Healing

and China began re-engaging on climate. But what

Asian Americans ref lect on their personal

really matters is whether this translates into action.

experiences with racism, and offer a path forward for the United States.

Who Stands to Benefit From the Supply Chain Shuffle?

BY WEN DY CUTLER AN D J EN NY A . K AI

Honoring seven Asian Americans whose achievements have inspired the world.

P G . 94

W IT H DA N I EL RU SS EL

P G . 78

BY T H O M WO O D RO O FE (S TO RY ), B E T T Y WA N G (RESE ARCH), AN D VALERI O PELLI G RI N I

Why the Quad Alarms China

‘Who’s Going to Be Next?’

The success of an Australia-IndiaJapan-United States strategic dialogue poses a major threat to Beijing’s ambitions.

BY K E V I N RU D D

P G . 102

(DATA VISUALIZ ATIO N)

Alice Su on the challenges foreign journalists face in today’s China.

P G . 10 6

W IT H D O R I N DA EL LI OT T

P G . 82

‘None of the Approved Candidates Were Worthy’ After an unusual 2021 presidential election, Iran public opinion expert Amir Farmanesh offers a peek into the mind of the Iranian voter.

P G . 110

W IT H M AT T SCH I AV ENZ A

The Silent Games As Tokyo finally hosted the Olympics, a journalist

TK R I CC HRAERDDI TG H OERRDEO N

found the city shrouded in an eerie calm.

How Bhutan Tamed COVID-19

Orville Schell reflects on a life spent trying to make sense of China.

W ITH M A RY K AY M AG ISTA D

P G . 112

BY M OTO KO R I CH

Witness to an ‘Amazing Experiment’ PG. 90

BY N A M G AY Z A M

P G . 114

Contributors

P G . 116

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

5

ASIA SOCIET Y MAGA ZINE

Publisher Asia Society Managing Editor Dan Washburn Senior Editor Matt Schiavenza Design Director Lisa Lok Editor-at-Large Tom Nagorski

Contributors Wendy Cutler Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis Dorinda Elliott Amir Farmanesh Michelle FlorCruz Vibha Galhotra Massoud Hossaini Christine Hsieh Jenny Kai Abir Karmakar Henry Kissinger Stewart Kwoh Ami Li Vivienne Liu Andria Lo Adriel Luis Valerie Luu

Mary Kay Magistad Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe Prabhakar Pachpute Benitha Perciyal Motoko Rich Kevin Rudd Daniel Russel Abhay Sardesai Orville Schell Gulammohammed Sheikh George Shultz Arpita Singh Alice Su Herb Tam Betty Wang Thom Woodroofe Namgay Zam Helen Zia

Illustrators Freya Betts Sally Deng Glenn Harvey Ari Liloan Mojo Wang Data Visualization Designers Ting Fang Cheng Valerio Pellegrini

VISIT US ONLINE AT

AsiaSociety.org/Magazine

ON THE COVER 1. A lotus flower infected with COVID

5. Asian representation takes

represents parts of Asia — India in

center stage at the Oscars. Pictured:

particular — hit hard by the virus

Youn Yuh-Jung, Riz Ahmed,

in 2021 before vaccines arrived.

Chloe Zhao, and Lee Isaac Chung.

2. After the U.S. withdraws, the

6. Israel and Iran hold significant

Taliban takes control of Afghanistan,

elections, the results of which

forcing many Afghans to attempt

will have implications across

to flee the country.

West Asia, and beyond.

3. Despite a fraught relationship,

7. Shang-Chi and the Legend of

U.S.-China cooperation on topics

the Ten Rings, featuring

such as climate change is necessary

Marvel’s first Asian superhero,

to achieve international goals.

sets box office records.

4. A violent coup d’etat takes place

8. Anti-Asian hate intensifies in

in Myanmar, overtaking Myanmar’s

the U.S., and beyond, sparking

fragile democracy.

a painful national reckoning.

COV E R I L LU S T R AT I O N BY A R I L I LOA N

With funding and support from Harold J. Newman and Mitchell R. Julis Asia Society takes no institutional position on policy issues and has no affiliation with any government. The views expressed in Asia Society Magazine are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Asia Society.

DECEMBER 2021

Dear Friends,

O

NE CAN ONLY imagine how historians, years from now, will look back on 2021. It was a year that started out with so much promise, hope, and optimism — spurred in large part by a vaccine that came faster than anyone expected. There was a global shared desire to get back to “normal,” or some semblance of it, and for a moment that actually felt like a possibility. That buoyancy quickly waned, however. Existing problems that carried over from the previous year — including the pandemic — actually got worse for many. New problems reared their heads, with devastating results. We titled 2020’s edition of Asia Society Magazine “The Year No One Saw Coming.” Maybe this year's tome could be called “The Year That Didn’t Go According to Plan.”

In the pages that follow you'll find a comprehensive account of what happened in Asia in 2021: including the shocking fall of Afghanistan; the coup in Myanmar; a most unusual Olympics in Japan; an election in Iran; and a tiny Himalayan country’s successful quest to control COVID-19. We consider the all-important U.S.-China relationship — past, present, and future — and examine the consequences of this year’s supply chain shifts. We devote considerable attention to the trials of Asians in the United States, featuring a veteran Asian American activist’s reflections as well as vignettes on hate — and healing — from a wide range of voices. We profile five AAPI artists deserving of wider recognition and discuss the importance of teaching Asian American history in schools.

It is, I am quite confident in saying, an issue that Asia Society Magazine founder and longtime Asia Society trustee Hal Newman would have loved.

Actively involved with the Asia Society since 1988, Hal, along with fellow trustee Mitch Julis, was instrumental in the creation of this publication — in fact, it was his brainchild. Sadly, Hal passed away in September at the age of 90. It was a life well lived. And he was a man well loved.

Sometimes in life you are touched by the sheer humanity of a single individual. Hal Newman was one such person. The legacy he leaves is a great one — Asia Society Magazine being no small part. And for many years to come, those of us at the Asia Society will continue to thank him for his vision, his deep generosity, and for always making it fun along the way.

Kind Regards,

Kevin Rudd President and CEO Asia Society

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

7

2 02 1: What was supposed to be a year of recovery brought forth fresh challenges — in Asia and beyond.

B Y 8

VOL 3 · 2021

T O M

N A G O R S K I

TK CREDIT HERE

’NOT SO FA S T, WORLD’

N AV E S H C H I T R A K A R / R E U T E R S /A L A M Y

F

OR MANY, THE turning of the calendar on December 31, 2020, was cause for more than the usual new year’s celebration. We saw glimmers of light at the end of the pandemic’s tunnel and imagined an economic rebound — begun already in China — that would soon ripple across the globe. We were bidding farewell to a year that had seen violent expressions of racism against Black and Asian Americans; and roughly half the American public, and many more around the world, were celebrating the departure of a U.S. administration they blamed for badly tarnishing America’s standing in the world.

One year ago, it wasn’t difficult to itemize our hopes and dreams for the new year, in Asia and beyond: Rush production of vaccines.

Jump-start the recovery. And begin a kind of global healing.

One year later, it’s hard to say that 2021 has been a great improvement. The year saw a maddening, one-step-forward-one-step-back see-saw in the pandemic recovery, and violence against Asian Americans failed to subside. It also brought profoundly unsettling developments that had nothing to do with the coronavirus.

First, though, the good news. Even the most optimistic public health experts had not imagined a COVID-19 vaccine arriving as quickly as it did. The first shots went into arms in the latter days of 2020, barely a year after the virus took hold. In the history of vaccine production, nothing like that pace had ever been achieved.

“Warp speed,” indeed. And while the relative efficacies of individual vaccines were judged and measured, this much seemed clear: We were turning a corner. As vaccine rates rose, infection rates fell. So did the number of fatalities. Travelers set out again; shuttered manufacturers got back to work; children planned returns to classrooms; public life resumed; GDP figures and global markets moved in the right directions.

Public health experts cheered the curve-f lattening prowess of several East Asian nations — South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam in particular. Leaders in China, India, and the U.S. declared their own versions of “mission accomplished.” Xi Jinping said “the pandemic once again proves the superiority of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics.” India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party passed a resolution cheering its standard-bearer, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “for introducing India to the world as a proud and victorious nation in the fight against COVID.” At a White House Independence Day gathering, President Joe Biden proclaimed “independence from this virus.”

A man wearing personal protective equipment helps cremate the bodies of COVID-19 victims in Kathmandu, Nepal, on May 5, 2021.

C O V I D ’ S C O U N T E R P U N C H ALAS, 2021 MAY INSTEAD be remembered

as the year of the COVID counterpunch. The much more infectious “delta” variant of the virus, first discovered in India, tore across the globe, bringing case levels in many countries to new heights. And while the development of the vaccines marked a real human triumph, getting shots in arms proved to be another story: The COVAX initiative fell far short of its promise for the world’s poorest nations, while large minorities in vaccine-abundant countries resisted inoculation. As of this writing, 47% of the world’s population has yet to receive a single shot; in more than 40 countries, fewer than one in 10 people have been fully vaccinated.

For a virus that knows no boundaries, it’s not nearly enough.

Almost every corner of the globe has taken a beating. Not long after that “victorious nation” boast, India was pummeled by a new surge of cases so severe that the country — a major vaccine exporter — shut down promised deliveries to other nations. Some of those early East Asian success stories were hit hard as well.

None of this was a total surprise. In an Asia Society program in December 2020, Saad Mohseni — a media executive, not a public health professional — had pushed back against bullish forecasts for 2021: “You’re assuming we have enough vaccines, and no new strains of the virus,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of wishful thinking there.”

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

9

Indeed there was. And that wasn’t the only prescient alarm Mohseni sounded last December as we looked collectively to the year ahead.

T H E

A F G H A N I S T A N D E B A C L E

AMONG MOHSENI’S MEDIA properties is

TOLO News, the first all-news television network in Afghanistan, which he founded soon af ter the Taliban fell in 2001. At that Asia Society event a year ago, Mohseni warned of “very difficult decisions” that loomed for the U.S. in Afghanistan. “The Biden administration’s hands are tied behind its back,” he said, referring to President Donald Trump’s February 2020 agreement with the Taliban. A peaceful exit, he warned, looked unlikely.

The risks inherent in a troop withdrawal were hardly a secret, and they ran well beyond concerns for the U.S. military and the Afghan interpreters and contractors who had worked at their side. There were also concentric circles of Afghans dependent on the U.S. and other forces for security, and thousands of people who held jobs that would have been unimaginable under Taliban rule: relief workers, small business owners, journalists, artists, educators, women’s rights advocates, and female members of the Afghan parliament.

Surely there would be plans for the safety and security of most, if not all, of these people, as the Americans withdrew?

What followed was as dispiriting as any global event in 2021 — a wrenching, hard-towatch debacle. Gone in one terrible August fortnight: virtually every gain made in Afghanistan civil society in the preceding 20 years; any security Afghans in those new, post-Taliban-era professions had enjoyed; and, with the Taliban back in charge, any guarantee that the country would be free of extremist militancy — the very thing the U.S. had come to ensure two decades before.

The consequences spilled beyond Afghanistan’s borders. Other nations were left with profound questions about the credibility and staying power of U.S. foreign policy. There

10

VOL 3 · 2021

was fear in India; something of a win for Pakistan, which had long supported the Taliban; and the specter of China stepping once more into a void left by a U.S. retreat. In late July, just one month before the collapse of the Afghan government, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar met in Tianjin, all smiles and handshakes and pledges of mutual respect.

As one former U.S. intelligence of ficial told me, “Give China an opportunity to poke a finger at the Americans, you can bet they will seize that opportunity.”

Which brings us, in a way, to what may be the most important issue of all, as the calendar turns once more: a dangerously frayed U.S.-China relationship, and fears that the two nations are on an inexorable path to conf lict.

A N

‘ A V O I D A B L E

W A R ’ ?

SOME YEARS AGO, the scholar Graham Allison provoked a global debate with his prediction that the U.S. and China were destined to fall into the so-called “Thucydides trap,” which argues, using ancient Sparta and Athens as examples, that rising powers rarely peacefully surpass established powers on the global stage. Asia Society President Kevin Rudd, himself a scholar of China, responded with a body of work under the heading “The Avoidable War,” arguing that suf ficient areas for bilateral compromise exist — and imploring both sides to explore each one, as potential off-ramps from war.

Could it really come to war between the U.S. and China? It’s tempting to say, Of course not. Not when both sides recognize just how calamitous the consequences would be, and not at a moment when the U.S. is retreating from a “forever war” and preaching a distant, “over the horizon” strategy to counter foes, minus the boots on the ground. Not to mention the fact that several long-standing areas of U.S.-China tension — Taiwan, the South China Sea, human rights, to name a significant few — have been managed peacefully over years, if not decades.

And yet the rumblings grew ominously in 2021. Old U.S.-China tensions re-emerged in dangerous ways, and new ones arose: furious disputes about China’s clampdown on Hong Kong and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic; American charges of genocide in Xinjiang; and the Biden administration’s declaration that China had backed cybercrime against the U.S. Nowhere is the risk of conf lict greater than in the case of Taiwan, which The Economist labeled recently in a much-debated cover story, “The most dangerous place on earth.” Taken literally, it was a preposterous statement.

By metrics of crime and COVID and most everything else, Taiwan is as safe a place as any. But the magazine was imagining future dangers, through the lens of China’s formidable buildup of naval capability, its unbreakable principle that there must be only one China, and, as the magazine put it, a concern that “military superiority will sooner or later tempt China into using force against Taiwan, not as a last resort but because it can.”

A United States Marine carries a child to be processed during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 25, 2021.

Add to this already combustible mix the fact that in the four decades since the normalization of U.S.-China relations, Beijing has never seemed so willing and determined to f lex its power, and that U.S. policymakers have never seemed so uniformly hostile toward China. Suddenly, war seems less easily avoidable. And those potential off-ramps to conf lict begin to look as important as any issue out there.

A

T O K Y O

T R I U M P H

ALAMY

ONE FINAL NOTE of optimism because, well,

we all could use one.

On the eve of the Summer Olympics in Japan, the International Olympic Committee and of ficials in Tokyo were roundly criticized for moving ahead with the Games.

Surely this would prove the mother of all “super-spreader” events; and given that virtually no fans would be in the stadiums and

arenas, going forward seemed unnecessary, a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one at that.

As it turns out, the organizers pulled off an Olympics that was not only safe, but also a tonic for athletes and fans the world over. The Games offered a large dose of something that had been in short supply in 2020 or 2021: reasons to cheer. You didn’t need to be a sports fan to celebrate Hmong American gymnast Sunisa Lee taking gold in a year that had been so difficult for Asian Americans; the medal stash achieved by the graceful swimmers Caeleb Dressel (U.S.) and Emma McKeon (Australia); or the sight of Karsten Warholm, the Norwegian sprinter who blazed past the field, looked up at the clock, and tore off his jersey when he saw how many seconds he had burned off his own world record. Each day brought multiple occasions to smile.

It’s probably too much to hope for — given that politics and the pandemic may both intrude — but perhaps we can find hope in the fact that the 2022 calendar promises both a Winter Olympics in Beijing and a World Cup soccer tournament in Qatar. Sports can do that sometimes — provide moments to look forward to, and celebrate, whatever a new year brings.

Tom Nagorski is the former executive vice president at Asia Society and Asia Society Magazine's editor-at-large.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

11

The Year in Asia From Afghanistan to Zhengzhou, these are the stories that defined 2021 across the continent.

BY MATT SCHIAVENZA

A Collapse in Afghanistan Restores the Taliban to Power WHEN PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN announced in April

that the U.S. would withdraw the remaining 3,500 troops from Afghanistan by late summer, experts largely agreed that, eventually, the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban. Even still, no one was prepared for it to happen so fast. On August 15, six weeks after the U.S. military left Bagram Air Base, Taliban fighters entered Kabul and assumed control of Afghanistan for the first time since 2001.

The U.S. then spent the next two weeks in a furious scramble to evacuate as many Americans — and Afghans who had helped the U.S. effort — as possible. Hundreds of thousands were brought out of the country, but in the midst of the evacuations a terrorist attack killed 13 U.S. service members and dozens more Afghans. On August 30, nearly 20 years after U.S. troops entered Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the last American soldier departed the country.

The chaotic withdrawal sparked fierce criticism both within the United States and among America’s allies across the world. But the consequences for Afghanistan are far graver. While the U.S. failed to build a self-sustaining Afghan government, the two decades of occupation had brought significant change in the country. A generation of Afghan girls attended school and entered the workforce. Telecommunications and media f lourished.

Kabul and other cities leapfrogged into modernity, their upwardly mobile residents better connected to the outside world than ever before. But for Af-

12

VOL 3 · 2021

ghans living in the vast hinterland, the two decades of U.S. occupation lef t behind a dif ferent legacy — one characterized by little progress amid constant internecine violence.

Upon taking power, the Taliban initially struck a conciliatory tone, promising that they’d evolved from the group whose draconian rule had elicited international condemnation in the 1990s. Their new leaders swore that they would not harbor terrorist groups, and that they would be more supportive of women’s rights and other freedoms.

But early indications have not been promising.

Thousands of Afghans who’d risked their lives for the United States and its allies over the previous two decades remain inside the country, fearful of reprisals from Taliban fighters. Women, once again, are barred from attending university.

Sorting out the geopolitical implications of the Taliban’s return may take years, as numerous players — the U.S., China, India, and Pakistan among them — adjust to the new status quo. But in the early months of “Taliban 2.0,” a more basic question emerges: Is anyone capable of uniting this fractious country of 38 million people — more than 65% of whom were born af ter 9/11?

There are few reasons for optimism.

“The current situation is simply unsustainable,” Tamim Asey, a former Afghan government official, said during an Asia Society Northern California town hall event in October. “It’s sowing the seeds for a full-blown war.”

ALAMY

Taliban fighters celebrate during a victory parade in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan on September 2, 2021.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

13

COVID Explodes Across Asia THROUGHOUT 2020, as COVID-19 devastated North Amer-

ica and Europe, much of Asia (China aside) remained largely unscathed, leading to claims that the world’s most populous region had, somehow, discovered a formula for avoiding the calamitous pandemic. Asian countries were generally slow to procure sufficient vaccines once they became available in late 2020, believing that inoculation was less urgent due to their successful suppression of the virus.

Asia’s good fortune did not hold in 2021. Across the continent, country after country experienced larger and more frequent viral outbreaks than they had the year before. In India, a terrifying spring surge, fueled by the hyper-infectious “delta” variant, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in a matter of months and exposed deficiencies in the Indian government’s response. “The state’s relationship with science has been tenuous at best throughout this pandemic,” Dr. Satchit Balsari, a professor at Harvard Medical School, said in an Asia Society India program in May. “They’ve tried to minimize COVID deaths, as if it’s some bizarre badge of honor in the middle of the pandemic.” The outbreak was so bad that India halted exports of vital vaccine doses to the rest of the world, a major setback in the global effort to stop the spread.

Countries elsewhere on the continent experienced similar travails. In Indonesia, hospitals ran out of oxygen as doctors, even those who were fully vaccinated, perished in alarming numbers. COVID breakouts in South Korea and Japan were worse than what either country experienced in 2020. Even countries that had claimed to have largely suppressed COVID-19, like Australia and New Zealand, abandoned a “zero tolerance” strategy in an acknowledgement that they would have to live with the virus.

By year’s end, the pace of vaccinations had quickened across Asia, even in poorer countries, sparking hope that 2022 might bring better news. And, all things considered, most Asian countries have still managed the pandemic more ably than the United States and Europe. But delta’s rampage across the continent in 2021 disrupted a triumphant narrative that had taken hold in 2020: that Asia had, by and large, dodged the pandemic’s bullet.

Outside the mortuary of a COVID-19 hospital in Ahmedabad, India, a woman mourns after her husband died from the disease on May 8, 2021.

14

VOL 3 · 2021

China Cracks Down on the Private Sector

A M I T D AV E / A L A M Y

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN the Chinese

government and the private sector, which began with the suspension of the financial behemoth Ant Group’s initial public offering in 2020, accelerated in 2021. In April, China’s market regulator imposed a $3 billion fine on Ant Group’s parent company, Alibaba, for “monopolistic behavior,” while in July cyber-regulators demanded that Didi, China's Uber-like ridesharing app, be removed from app stores pending an investigation into the company’s compliance with data laws. That month, Beijing also ef fectively kil led China’s multi-billion-dollar for-profit education sector by announcing that firms, overnight, reorganize into nonprofits.

China’s actions against some of its bestknown companies has had a profound economic ef fect: Between February and August, $1.1 trillion was knocked of f the combined market value of China’s top six technology stocks alone. But the real legacy of this crackdown may be political.

“The best way to summarize it is that [Chinese President] Xi Jinping has decided that, in the overall balance between the roles of the state and the market in China, it is in the interests of the Party to pivot toward the state,” said Asia Society President and CEO Kevin Rudd in a September 2021 speech. “In doing so, it ref lects Xi Jinping’s wider worldview on the role of the Party, the state, and the market in the transformation of modern China into a global great power — one in which the Chinese Communist Party nonetheless retains complete control.”

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

15

The Pandemic and an Unpopular Olympic Games Cause a Japanese Prime Minister To Resign

Rescuers help evacuate stranded people at the entry to an expressway in Zhengzhou, a city in central China's flood-ravaged Henan Province, on July 23, 2021.

Terrifying Floods in China Punctuate a Year of Climate Disaster in Asia AS VIRAL VIDEOS GO, few were more terrifying than those filmed in

Zhengzhou, China, in July: As historic rains f looded the city’s subway system, terrified passengers trapped in a car hoisted themselves up to avoid being submerged by water that had reached shoulder height. The f looding in the subway system ultimately killed 14 and temporarily displaced more than a million others; in the end, more than 300 people in and around Zhengzhou lost their lives to a storm in which an astonishing eight inches of rain fell in the span of one hour.

Zhengzhou’s f lood disaster was only the most high-profile extreme weather event in a year, like recent years preceding it, when such events became almost common. A tropical cyclone that struck Indonesia in April killed 160 and displaced 22,000 others. In West Asia in June, summer temperatures soared over 120 degrees across a wide swathe of the region, setting records in multiple countries.

In September, President Xi Jinping announced that China would cease building coal-fired plants abroad, a move that triggered widespread praise. But at year’s end, China’s own coal production was still booming, and the f looding in Zhengzhou — where the submerged subway line opened only two years ago — illustrated the speed at which climate change is reshaping our world.

16

VOL 3 · 2021

popped out of a Super Mario Brothers’ costume at the closing ceremonies of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio De Janeiro, initiating the symbolic transition to the Tokyo 2020 games, Japan had every reason to be excited about hosting the quadrennial sporting competition: A successful Olympics would signal that the country had fully recovered from 2011’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

Neither Prime Minister Abe nor his constituents could have imagined what 2020 would bring.

The emergence of COVID-19 initially forced Japan to postpone the Games, originally scheduled for July and August 2020, by one year. By the spring of 2021, with COVID still raging and vaccinations slow to transpire, most Japanese people seemed to think that the Olympics should be scrapped entirely. An April poll found that nearly 80% of the population opposed the Games going forward that summer. Instead, the Japanese government and the International Olympic Committee forged a compromise, allowing the world’s best athletes to compete but barring spectators from watching.

From an athletic point of view, the resulting games were a success. But the spectacle was less joyful for Tokyo’s population, who were forced to endure strict COVID-19 lockdowns and were unable to capitalize on the expected tourist bonanza. For Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who insisted that the Games proceed, his tenure in office barely outlasted them. He announced on September 2 that he would not seek re-election.

TK X I NCHRUEAD /I TAHL EARMEY

WHEN THEN-PRIME MINISTER Shinzo Abe

A protester shouts slogans during demonstrations against the Myanmar military coup in Mandalay on February 28, 2021.

A Coup Overtakes Myanmar’s Fragile Democracy

T KL ACMRYE D I T H E R E A

ON FEBRUARY 1, Myanmar’s military announced

that it had dissolved the country’s civilian leadership, detained de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other figures in her National League for Democracy (NLD) party, and assumed power in a military coup, halting the fragile, decade-long democratic transition.

The ostensible reason for the coup was the result of nationwide elections held in November 2020, in which the military fared poorly and Aung San Suu Kyi’s party captured the vast majority of seats in parliament. “The military felt quite threatened because the NLD had won a huge mandate,” Scot Marciel, former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, said in an Asia Society program held

soon after the coup. “It was a pure power grab.”

In the ensuing months, the military violently suppressed pro-democracy protests across the country, and reneged on a promise to hold new elections by February 2022. This political turmoil exacerbated long-simmering ethnic conf licts and stymied ef forts to manage the spread of COVID-19. Economic conditions in an already-poor nation have deteriorated: The World Bank projects that Myanmar’s economy will contract by 18% in the 2021 fiscal year. As of this writing, the future of Aung San Suu Kyi’s leadership, as she is now 76 and once again in custody, remains in doubt; the fate of her country currently seems little brighter.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

17

Israeli demonstrators celebrate the passing of a vote confirming a new coalition government during a rally in front of the Knesset on June 13, 2021, in Jerusalem, Israel.

IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE , two of West Asia’s most powerful countries — Israel and Iran — held consequential elections a mere six days apart. On June 12, an unwieldy eight-party coalition prevailed in Israel’s national elections, elevating Naftali Bennett to prime minister and unseating the powerful Benjamin Netanyahu af ter 11 years in of fice. On the 18th, Iranian voters chose Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, as their new president in an election marred by numerous disqualified candidates and a distinct lack of voter enthusiasm.

“Iranian elections have always had a unique combination of being unfree, unfair, and unpredictable,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said during an Asia Society New York program in July. “This election was unfree, unfair — but predictable.”

18

VOL 3 · 2021

Neither of the new leaders appear to augur a significant policy shift for their countries. Bennett, the head of Israel’s New Right coalition, seems poised to continue his predecessor’s uncompromising stance toward the country’s Palestinian population. As for Raisi — thought to be an eventual replacement for Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei — early evidence suggests that he will not easily yield to U.S. demands in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

Policy stakes aside, the elections nonetheless each had symbolic significance. For Israel, Bennett’s victory punctured the aura of invincibility that Netanyahu had enjoyed for years — even if the long-serving prime minister’s ideology largely remains in place. Raisi’s victory in Iran, meanwhile, removed any lingering doubt that the country’s theocratic leadership would remain unchallenged.

EDDIE GERALD / ALAMY

Elections Upend Politics in Israel and Iran

A think — and do — tank tackling the major policy challenges confronting the Asia-Pacific.

Ranked in the top 1% of think tanks globally, according to the University of Pennsylvania.

Learn More Website: AsiaSociety.org/ASPI Twitter: @asiapolicy Facebook: facebook.com/asiapolicy

ASIA SOCIETY POLICY INSTITUTE

Clockwise from top left: Then IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde at ASPI; Then Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and ASPI President Kevin Rudd; Kevin Rudd meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi; ASPI Vice President Daniel Russel and Ambassador Wendy Sherman; ASPI Vice President Wendy Cutler; Then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad at ASPI.

w

KEEP UP WITH CHINA.

TK CREDIT HERE

Read ChinaFile.

ChinaFile is an online magazine from Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.

ChinaFile.com

PHOTO: WANG HE FOR CHINAFILE

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

19

Asia Versus the Virus DATA VISUALIZATION DESIGNED

BY TING FANG CHENG

HOW TO READ IT?

A�ter largely suppressing the coronavirus in 2020, Asia experienced a much more challenging year in 2021. A slow vaccine rollout, combined with the devastating spread of the delta variant, led to higher case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths across the region. As this data visualization shows, however, by year’s end, vaccination campaigns in many parts of Asia had gained ground on those in Europe and North America, and satisfaction with government handling of the crisis across the continent remained relatively high. But as the “stringency index” — a composite measure of COVID mitigation policies — shows, life in Asia by 2021’s end remained far from normal.

0

50

100

Stringency Index* (100 = strictest) Daily new confirmed cases by country (per million people) Daily COVID-19 vaccine doses administrated (per 100 people)

41%

% of people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (as of Nov. 9, 2021) % who think there should have been more restrictions on public activity

Bad

Daily new confirmed cases by region (per million people)

Good

% who say their government has done a good or bad job dealing with COVID-19

400

Europe North America South America

Asia 2020

2021

U N I T ED

S TA T E

S

J A PAN SO U TH K OR EA

S I N G A P O RE Taiwan’s early ban of foreign visitors enabled the government to remove virtually all restrictions during the pandemic’s first year.

T A I WA N I N DI A

I R AN C HIN A

2020 MAR

*The Stringency Index is a composite measure based on nine response indicators including school closures, workplace closures, and travel bans, rescaled to a value from 0 to 100 (100 = strictest)

APR

MAY

JUN

JUL

AUG

SEP

OCT

518

The delta variant, plus vaccine hesitancy, led to a U.S. case surge after Joe Biden declared “independence” from the virus.

oses ine d le vacc 00 peop per 1

per es le cas peop 0 74 llion mi

58%

of total population vaccinated

Japan’s case peak coincided with the Olympics, which went on (minus spectators) despite public opposition.

58%

Bad

56% tions ric

st e re mor d e t Wan

183

42% d o Go

74%

1.5 8

South Korea was slow to make vaccines widely available after inoculating high-risk groups quickly.

35%

1.6

64%

76% 62%

70%

30%

1.1 4

625

Seeking “COVID resilience,” Singapore dropped most restrictions.

98% of following cases were reportedly asymptomatic or mild.

82%

39% 97%

3%

1.28

25

21%

38% 92%

8% 15%

280

India’s sluggish vaccine rollout — due to government missteps — led to a spring surge of the delta variant, which then spread globally.

0.7 2

25% 462

1. 43

Despite minuscule case numbers and high vaccination rates, China — seeking COVID eradication — continued to institute localized lockdowns throughout the country.

NOV

DEC

2021 JAN

FEB

MAR

Sources: Pew Research Center, Johns Hopkins University CSSE, Our World in Data, Financial Times, The New York Times, WHO Note: China and India COVID-19 case figures are likely undercounted.

APR

MAY

1.5 5

JUN

JUL

Iran’s vaccination campaign 46% ramped up after increasing imports of two foreign vaccines: AstraZeneca and Sinopharm.

AUG

77%

SEP

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

21

The

Absent Year Six renowned Indian artists try to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic — through art.

22

VOL 3 · 2021

Benitha Perciyal THERE IS NO PLACE TO GO, 2021 Original Medium: Catechu on recycled paper

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

23

BY ABHAY SARDESAI

How does one imagine the future after an absent year?

How fraught is the act of anticipating continuities and ruptures as one bears witness to transitions that are uneasy, uneven, and unpredictable?

Stationed between disease and disorder, and denying every uncontested resolution, the future seems caught in limbo, the kind that brings to mind the 19th century British poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who talks of swerving between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

As we stumble back to a kind of normalcy, we witness firestorms all around the world — sputtering economies, imploding institutions, threatened freedoms.

How does an artist collect oneself to negotiate with a changing world? In the middle of the raging pandemic, which pictures of the present did they hope to preserve and which did they hope to bury deep?

Asia Society India posed these questions, and more, to six renowned artists, all recipients of the Asia Arts Game Changer Award: Vibha Galhotra, Abir Karmakar, Prabhakar Pachpute, Benitha Perciyal, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Arpita Singh. In response, each artist either created a new work inspired by the questions or submitted an existing piece they felt resonated with the theme.

The result is a moving collection of works that gets to the heart of the difficult questions that an artist chooses to ask in testing times such as these — questions that may address the heart’s unease but also illuminate a path ahead, offering a contract with hope.

Abhay Sardesai is editor of ARTIndia magazine.

To commemorate the fifth Asia Arts Game Changer Awards

The Absent Year and poignantly presents a marker and

India, Asia Society India produced a series of limited-edi-

memory of the past year through a collection of artworks

tion portfolios featuring signed reproductions by the artists.

that negotiate a changing world.

Conceptualized by Abhay Sardesai, editor of ARTIndia

A portion of the proceeds supports Creative Dignity,

magazine, and designed by Reeya Mehta, founder of

an organization dedicated to providing COVID-19 relief

The Experimental Box, the portfolio is themed around

and rehabilitation to Indian artisans.

Learn more at AsiaSociety.org/AbsentYear

24

VOL 3 · 2021

Gulammohammed Sheikh Speechless City, 1975 Original Medium: Oil on canvas Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Speechless City was made during The Emergency period of Indian history (1975-77), and portrays the desolation of the urban landscape with a conspicuous absence of human imagery. The “absent year” Abhay Sardesai wrote about recalled that memory strangely replicated in the lockdown year under the impact of COVID-19. I offered this piece because it seemed to express the inexpressible muteness that humanity experienced that year.

— Gulammohammed

Sheikh

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

25

In… Times is a series of staged/performative photographic works conceived in response to the unimaginable period brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The coerced social distancing norms in fear of contracting the virus have massively changed the world order, questioning the very meaning of what was previously considered normal.

— Vibha

Galhotra

Vibha Galhotra In... Times, 2020 Original Medium: Performative staged photo-work

26

VOL 3 · 2021

Prabhakar Pachpute A plight of hardship, 2020 Original Medium: Watercolor and pencil on paper

I chose this work as my response to the most uncertain time of the past year. Fear and chaotic surroundings have made us more vulnerable towards our present and future. Our day-to-day activity has slowed down and limited our actions. We are stuck, and at the same time protected by the walls of our houses. But what about those who don’t have these walls? A Plight of Hardship tries to talk about these concerns, the injustice that resides in society, a society that we still inhabit.

— Prabhakar

Pachpute

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

27

For research, while going through the visual materials on COVID published in various local newspapers — and at the same time being COVID positive — a thought occurs: the possibility that I myself would turn into the very images I was looking at.

— Abir

Karmakar

Abir Karmakar Self-portrait (as COVID positive), 2021 Original Medium: Graphite, erasure, and f ixative on paper

28

VOL 3 · 2021

Arpita Singh Home, 2020 Original Medium: Watercolor on paper

I don’t think there should be a special reason [to select a work].

All my works are usual, and all my works are important, as well.

Like one walks — every step is usual, and every step is special, too. But perhaps, given the theme of The Absent Year and the fact that it was linked to the idea of “home,” I felt this particular work resonated, or perhaps I felt this was a somewhat different work from my others.

— Arpita

Singh ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

29

AFGHANISTAN:

BEFORE THE FALL

the last batch of photos he took in his homeland — before he fled to save his life.

30

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

Pulitzer Prize winner MASSOUD HOSSAINI shares

TK CREDIT HERE

Charkint Governor Salima Mazari, one of Afghanistan’s highest ranking female politicians ever, points a gun as she visits forces in Charkint district, Balkh province on June 29, 2021. She devoted much of her last years in office to repelling Taliban encroachments.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

31

across Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, I didn’t want to admit it — but the country’s fate felt inevitable. In Bamyan, the Taliban were entering villages and demanding lists of virgins and unmarried girls, so they could be married to Taliban soldiers. And in Balkh Province, in the north, government of ficials admitted that the Afghan military was running out of bullets.

It became achingly clear they were also running out of time. We all were.

The last place I visited was Herat, a major, strategic city — the second largest in Afghanistan after Kabul. By the time we arrived, the Taliban had surrounded the city and controlled the road leading from the airport.

Upon landing, I stayed in the airport for seven hours, unsure what to do. I eventually paid a large sum for a driver who promised to drive fast and not stop, even if he saw Taliban fighters present. I hid in the backseat, and we made it to the hotel safely. Once there, it became clear that the Taliban were in control — the Afghan government was no longer defending the city. Throughout Afghanistan’s history, once Herat falls, it’s only a matter of time before Kabul falls next.

My f light back to the capital was canceled, so I booked two more, hoping I could board one of them. I also booked a f light from Kabul to the Netherlands, where I had a short-term visa. The CIA estimated that once Herat had fallen, Kabul might collapse in 90 days. Some journalists I knew thought it would be a month. Having traveled across the country, I figured it’d be two weeks. We were all wrong — Kabul fell in less than a week.

When I arrived in Kabul, the city was in chaos. Shops across town were closed. The police and security forces were absent; no one was obeying traf fic rules at all. My f light to Amsterdam was departing the next day. I didn’t tell anyone this — it’s best to keep details like this private — but still, my friends and I held a farewell party of sorts at an apartment that evening. We knew we’d all be trying to leave at some point, we just didn’t know when. That night, I wore my shalwar kameez — a traditional costume I’d purchased

32

VOL 3 · 2021

in Herat — and had a friend take a photo of me with Kabul’s mountains in the background. I knew it would be the last proper photo taken of me in my homeland.

Friends of mine who worked in Afghanistan’s presidential palace came to the party.

They told me the palace was empty — that Ashraf Ghani, the president, had f led. As the gathering was ending, one of my friends came over to give me a hug. She held on really tight.

“What should I do?” she asked me.

“Leave,” I said. “As soon as possible.”

I went to bed, thinking I could pack in the morning before my f light. But at 1:30 a.m. I started getting messages on social media from friends asking me if I was still in Kabul. They’d heard that the Taliban had entered the city.

Was it true? No, I said. Surely not. But when I went outside, I heard gunfire nearby — the closest it’d been to my house in 20 years. There was no time to sleep. I began to pack, going through my life’s belongings, moving so hastily that I didn’t even pack a matching pair of socks. I took my camera, laptop, hard drives, and important documents. I did not have time, or space, to take everything I wanted.

I instructed a friend to take what was left — my Pulitzer Prize, my World Press Photo Awards — and bury them in the backyard. To protect my loved ones, I wanted all signs of my life as a journalist erased.

I finished packing just before dawn. As we drove to the airport, the streets were eerily quiet — a sure sign that something was wrong. Kabul is typically full of life in the early hours of the day.

The scene at the airport was madness. We entered without passing through security, and found large groups of foreigners and Afghans desperate to leave the country. I secured my boarding pass and headed to the gate to board my f light, Turkish Airlines Flight 7070 to Istanbul. There, I saw a friend, a prominent women’s rights activist. We hugged and immediately we both began to cry.

“Do you think we’ve lost Afghanistan?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said through tears. “I do.”

My f light, it turned out, would be the last commercial f light to depart Kabul before the

TK CREDIT HERE

WHILE I WAS ON ASSIGNMENT in war zones

Militia members take their positions in Charkint district, Balkh province on June 29, 2021.

evacuations. I am convinced that if I had not been on it, I would be dead. Because of my status as a journalist, my name appeared on a Taliban list of targets. After arriving in the Netherlands, Taliban fighters texted me on WhatsApp and threatened to find and kill me. They didn’t realize that I was already out of the country.

Sitting on the airplane, waiting for takeoff, I felt immense sadness. As the engines roared, I finally began to cry, the sounds of the engine obscuring my sobs. My life in Afghanistan — decades of friendship, of family, of love — was now over. They were years of happiness, excitement, and tragedy. Years in which I risked my

life for the sake of universal values, of a free press, of a new and better Afghanistan. And now it’s all gone. I am a man without a home. A photographer without his subject.

I am now in Amsterdam. I have a short-term visa and $200. I have no job, no bank account, and soon, probably, no valid passport. I do not know what will happen to me af ter my time here is up. But I am more worried about the people I’ve left behind.

Massoud Hossaini has been documenting the War on Terror since 2002. He won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography in 2012.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

33

TK CREDIT HERE

Afghan government forces spent their last months in power resisting incursions from the Taliban. In this photo, military police officers in Bamyan province pose for a picture in Du Ab village, located in the mountainous Shibar district some 65 miles northwest of Kabul on July 18, 2021, the day of a Taliban retreat.

34

VOL 3 · 2021

Afghan military police officers stand on a hilltop in Ghandak village, Shibar district, in Bamyan on Jul 18, 2021. Bamyan, in central Afghanistan, is most famous as the home of ancient Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

35

TK CREDIT HERE

Men eat ice cream in a shop in Bamyan province’s Saighan district, located in Afghanistan’s central highlands, three days after the Taliban's retreat on July 21, 2021.

36

VOL 3 · 2021

A farmer carries wheat in Saighan district on July 21, 2021.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

37

A militia member from Afghanistan's Hazara ethnicity, a group that faced extreme persecution under the previous era of Taliban rule, smokes a cigarette while on patrol in Wardak province, central Afghanistan, on July 19, 2021.

38

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

An Afghan military policeman walks past a local shop in Saighan district on July 21, 2021.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

39

TK CREDIT HERE 40

VOL 3 · 2021

Militia leader Ismail Khan prays at his fortified command headquarters during a clash with Taliban insurgents in Herat, Afghanistan, on August 2, 2021. Khan, 75, commanded a 2,000-member civilian militia who fought the Taliban in the absence of regular Afghan security forces.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

41

TK CREDIT HERE

A member of the Afghan military tries to intervene as a militia member detains and beats a suspected Taliban insurgent in Herat on August 2, 2021. Militias emerged to fight the Taliban in places where Afghan security forces were insufficient.

Security forces who were there reported being powerless to prevent the militia members from violently attacking the Taliban.

42

VOL 3 · 2021

A militia member covers the dead body of the alleged Taliban insurgent, who was killed by a mob with their fists, their feet, and the butts of their rifles. Human rights activists fear that heavily armed civilian militias could hasten civil conflict in the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

43

TH E

After another painful year for Asian Americans, a veteran activist reflects on what has — and hasn’t — changed since the movement began decades ago.

BY HE LE N ZIA

F IG H T

V I C T O R YA N G / C H I N A T I M E S

TO B E

SEEN

Helen Zia participates in a Vincent Chin rally in Detroit in 1983.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

45

WH EN TH E MO VIE Contagion came out in 2011, featuring a global pandemic arising in Hong Kong from a virus that jumped from bat, to pig, to Gwyneth Paltrow, I was in China conducting research for my book Last Boat Out of Shanghai. I watched the movie on the f light home to California from Hong Kong, hyperconscious of every cough and sneeze by fellow travelers. The film’s depiction of America’s descent into chaos and violence, as the social order disintegrated due to the pathogen, was so convincing that it drew praise from health experts and epidemiologists.

In March 2020, as the U.S. shut down due to COVID-19, I watched Contagion again. This time, I noticed that a big chunk of reality was missing: There were no scenes of people blaming or scapegoating Asians for the deadly virus. The film included no background shots of harassment or assaults against Chinese Americans, ethnic Chinese, or other Asians who might be guilty of “looking Chinese.”

When news of the novel coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan, China, I knew in my gut that Chinese Americans and Asian Americans would be blamed and targeted. It didn’t take long for my fears to be realized. Weeks before COVID-19 interrupted daily life for the rest of America, Chinatowns across the country reported business closures, harassment, and violence. On April 2, 2020, I wrote an essay for The Washington Post that warned: “This violence could become much worse as more people lose jobs — and lives.”

I was frequently asked how I knew that this would happen.

But it was no mystery. Decades ago, I was living in Detroit when the collapse of America’s auto industry introduced another tsunami of anti-Asian hate in the country. It has been disheartening, to say the least, to watch this cycle repeat it-

46

VOL 3 · 2021

Helen Zia speaks at an event commemorating the 10th anniversary of Vincent Chin’s murder at New York City's Chinatown in 1992.

self. But advancements forged by today’s generation of activists have left me hopeful that Asians, long an invisible part of the American fabric, can no longer be ignored.

‘Those Little Yellow Men’

CORKY LEE

THEN, AS NOW, America was facing multiple crises. The

post-World War II economic boom eventually stalled and, by the 1970s, the country was in a prolonged recession, with high unemployment and high inf lation. Job prospects were grim in those years for recent college graduates like me. In 1979, an oil crisis caused by events in the Middle East led gas supplies across the U.S. to dry up. As a result, cost-conscious Americans stopped buying gas-guzzling domestic cars and the auto industry collapsed — a shock felt throughout the country’s manufacturing industry. The energy crisis, like the pandemic, threw millions of Americans out of work.

Politicians, CEOs, and union leaders pointed fingers at each other for the economic collapse until they landed on a common enemy: Japan. Fuel-ef ficient Japanese cars had recently become popular, eliciting a spasm of xenophobia and hatred

from prominent Americans: John Dingell, the longtime congressman from Michigan, caustically referred to “those little yellow men” while Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca joked about dropping nuclear bombs on Japan. As it happened, fuel-efficient German cars were also selling well — and yet there was no similar outrage targeting Americans of German descent.

These events were not abstract for me: I myself was a laidoff autoworker in Detroit. As a Chinese American, I had to always be vigilant, because I knew that to non-Asians, we all looked alike. People who drove Japanese cars were shot at on the freeway. But our worst fears were realized in 1982, the third year of the economic crisis, when a young Chinese American named Vincent Chin was beaten to death on the night of his bachelor party. His 400 wedding guests went to his funeral instead.

In those days, Asians were essentially invisible in America. News stories about our communities did not exist. But Vincent’s story broke through when a judge sentenced his two white killers to probation and imposed a small fine, saying “these aren’t the kind of men you send

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

47

interviewed us often assumed that we were all “fresh of f the boat” and could barely understand English. Many were completely ignorant of our long history with exclusion and ethnic cleansing.

To take on such challenges, Asian Americans came together in a new civil rights movement, joining Blacks, Jews, Arab Americans, Latinx groups, and people of many faiths and backgrounds.

Our ef forts inspired the creation of many new Asian American Pacific Islander advocacy groups and contributed to the movement for hate crimes protections, as well as the right of victims to speak at the sentencing of their assailants. In Michigan, this latter change was initially called the “Vincent Chin rule.”

THE RESURGENCE OF XENOPHOBIC HATE TRIGGERED BY THE COVID -19 PANDEMIC HAS SERVED AS A POTENT REMINDER OF HOW FAR WE STILL HAVE TO GO.

to jail.” I joined many others in Detroit rising up in outrage at a sentence that ef fectively sanctioned the killing of Asian Americans.

Until that point, different Asian ethnicities kept apart, not having coalesced as a united voice that could command attention. But Vincent’s killing and the outrageous sentence spurred the separate Asian communities in Detroit into action. Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and Vietnamese descent, as well as other Asian ethnicities, came together, overcoming old grievances to fight for justice for Vincent Chin.

I was one of the organizers in that effort — and there was nothing easy about it. Wherever we went, we encountered deeply embedded misconceptions and stereotypes: that all Asians were foreigners, and never Americans; that Asians were submissive, hard-working “model minorities” who never experienced racism or societal difficulties. The Michigan chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and National Lawyers Guild falsely asserted that Vincent and other Asian Americans were not protected by federal civil rights law because, they said, Asians weren’t in the U.S. when those laws were established in the 1860s.

Others questioned whether immigrants should be protected under civil rights law at all — or scof fed that Asian Americans were naive to expect justice. The civil rights director of the United Auto Workers said that if Vincent had been Japanese American, they wouldn’t have considered supporting our cause because his murder would have been understandable. Many Asian Americans were hesitant to speak out, fearful of reprisal. Members of the media who

48

VOL 3 · 2021

A Resurgence of Hate

THESE CHANGES REPRESENTED real progress, even if

violent incidents against Asians in the U.S. continued. But over the past two years, the resurgence of xenophobic hate triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a potent reminder of how far we still have to go. The Stop AAPI Hate website documented more than 9,000 hate incidents from March 2020 through June 2021, including high-profile mass killings in Indianapolis and Atlanta. Two-thirds of the reported victims have been women, children, and elderly Asian Americans. Just as Vincent was killed in the third year of his era’s economic crisis, today’s attacks on Asian Americans persist even though the first COVID-19 case was diagnosed two years ago.

Twenty-four million people now identify as Asian American, comprising 7% of the U.S. population. For perspective, in the 1980s, the decade of Vincent’s murder, U.S. census data indicated that our numbers had surpassed 1% for the first time.

But the invisibility of Asians still pervades the American psyche. After my 2020 Washington Post op-ed, many people asked me if it was true that Asian Americans really experienced prejudice and racial violence. Even then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, when asked on MSNBC for his thoughts about anti-Asian hate, talked instead about China and Xi Jinping.

This ignorance creates barriers for Asian Americans who experience and call out discrimination. For example, back in 1982 a witness heard Vincent’s killers say, “It’s because of you motherfuckers that we’re out of work.” Yet to many observers

at the time, such statements showed no racial motivation because no racial slurs were used. In fact, as vulnerable people know too well, discrimination can occur without the articulation of identifiable slurs — or any vocalization at all.

Similarly, after the March 2021 mass shooting in Atlanta, local police initially asserted that no racism was involved because the killer told them so — overlooking his hunt through the metro area to find Asian-run spas. The police accepted the shooter’s explanation that he killed in order to cure his “sex addiction” — a justification rooted in racist and sexist stereotypes of Asian women.

Today’s antipathy toward Asian Americans is the byproduct of years of China-bashing — just as anti-Japan rhetoric contributed to Chin’s murder. In the 1990s, Asian Americans who donated to President Bill Clinton’s campaign were investigated by the FBI and publicly touted as likely conduits to China — regardless of their particular ethnicity. The aggressive and highly public quest for Chinese spies has led to false criminal charges against numerous innocent Chinese Americans, such as Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was locked up in solitary confinement for nine months until he was released with an apology. And as the U.S-China relationship worsened in the past decade, the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump launched the still-ongoing “China Initiative” that has only accelerated the pace of investigations, arrests, and prosecutions of Chinese Americans accused of dual loyalties.

Dynamic, Forward Motion

COURTESY OF HELEN ZIA

IN SPITE OF these challenges, Asian American communities

are in dynamic, forward motion. The AAPI population has grown considerably in recent decades — and AAPI voices are buttressed by a growing infrastructure of activists, leadership, and organizations more empowered to speak up to counter the invisibility and take on thorny issues.

Technological change, too, has shaped the new generation of activists. In the 1980s, there were no mobile phones or internet to inform and connect our diverse and separate communities. Today, AAPIs armed with smartphone cameras and social media are building solidarity to resist anti-COVID hate. AAPI community activists created StopAAPIHate.org and made the site accessible in several Asian languages, capturing data from thousands of incident reports in order to document and validate the existence of anti-Asian hate. In the early months of the pandemic, with restrictions on gatherings, AAPIs used Zoom to strategize how to respond

Helen Zia leads a demonstration calling for the release of imprisoned scientist Wen Ho Lee outside the Federal Building in San Francisco in 2000.

to the following hypothetical scenarios: heightened anti-China rhetoric; intensified surveillance justified on national security grounds; and a mass shooting targeting Asian Americans. All three ultimately came to pass.

Social media and the internet have also highlighted how AAPIs are standing with Black, Latinx, and indigenous communities to fight systemic racism, especially in the face of police killings. AAPI activists are debating the role of the police in society and are questioning the need for hate crime laws in protecting Asian American communities, especially Chinatowns, from harassment and violence. When videos of fatal assaults by Black assailants against elderly Asian Americans went viral, AAPI scholars posted data showing that the overwhelming majority of anti-Asian hate assailants are actually white males, contradicting an often-stated belief.

Back in March 2020, I warned that anti-Asian hate is not going away. Nearly two years later, I believe it has the potential to get worse, depending on what happens with the virus, the global economy, and the status of U.S.-China relations.

Building a society in which violent hatred does not exist remains an elusive dream. But a crucial difference between then and now is clear: Asian Americans are rising up, insisting on an end to invisibility. And in the future, when Contagion-like films consider the totality of the American experience during these difficult COVID years, I am hopeful there will be an Asian American storyline this time around, one that focuses on the struggle of a diverse group of people standing together for human dignity — and refusing to be ignored.

Helen Zia is author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. Her most recent book is Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution. She is the executor of the Vincent and Lily Chin estate.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

49

Asians Represent

MADAME VP

Kamala Harris makes history as the first woman, first Black woman, and first Asian American elected U.S. vice president.

Celebrating a year of historic achievements and milestones in the U.S.

POLL-STARS

Asian Americans emerge as a U.S. political force.

Election data found that voter turnout for Asian Americans jumped a whopping 47 percent between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections — more than any other group.

BY M I C H E L L E F LO R C R U Z , CHRISTINE HSIEH, AND AMI LI

NOVEMBER 2020

OPEN SEASON

SUPPORT LINE

Collin Morikawa becomes the first Asian American golfer to win The British Open.

HISTORY UNCENSORED

Illinois passes the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act, becoming the first state in the country to require Asian American history be taught in public schools.

DESERVING DOC

Asian Americans, PBS’ five-part documentary series that chronicles the history of Asian Americans, wins a 2021 Peabody Award, one of the most prestigious honors in broadcast journalism.

PRIMETIME PLAYER

Bowen Yang, the first Chinese American Saturday Night Live cast member, receives a historic Emmy nomination — the first SNL featured player (cast members in their first two seasons on air) to be nominated for an acting award.

JUNE 2021

“I really want to be an inspiration to others and help others reach their dreams.”

VOL 3 · 2021

Learn more about Lee on page 76.

–SUNISA LEE

JULY 2021

50

OLYMPIC METTLE

Sunisa Lee takes gold in the gymnastics all-around at the Tokyo Olympics, becoming the first Hmong American Olympian to stand atop the podium.

AUGUST 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

JULY 2021

The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) launches, pledging $125 million in support of Asian American and Pacific Islander causes and organizations — the largest philanthropic commitment in history

by Asian Americans fully focused on supporting the AAPI community.

HELPING HANDS

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in awareness of violence against people of Asian descent, aid groups such as Heart of Dinner answer the call and take care of the most vulnerable members of their community.

A TRADE MARK

Katherine Tai is unanimously confirmed as U.S. Trade Representative, becoming the first Asian American and first woman of color in the role.

“This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves, and to hold on to the goodness in each other.”

–CHLOE ZHAO

MARCH 2021

OSCAR-WORTHY

Asian representation takes center stage at the 93rd Academy Awards.

Chloe Zhao, Nomadland.

First woman of Chinese descent to be nominated for Best Director.

First woman of color to win Best Director.

Steven Yeun, Minari. First Asian American nominated for Best Actor.

Youn Yuh-Jung, Minari. First Korean actress to win Best Supporting Actress.

Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal.

First man of Pakistani descent to be nominated for Best Actor.

Lee Isaac Chung, Minari. First Korean-American double nominee (Best Director and Best Original Screenplay).

APRIL 2021

SMOOTH LIKE BUTTER

Asians dominate the charts. Korean music group BTS’ single “Butter” shattered records, sitting at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 with a record-breaking 289.2 million streams in its first week. And, in one week, Filipino American pop star Olivia Rodrigo saw eight songs from her debut album Sour dominate the Billboard Streaming Songs chart, breaking the record for simultaneous top-10s by a female artist, previously held by Taylor Swift.

ANTI-HATE LAW

HOME RUN HIRE

Co-sponsored by Sen. Mazie Hirono and Rep. Grace Meng, President Joe Biden signs the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act into law. With overwhelming bipartisan support, the law was designed to address race-based hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.

Kim Ng begins her first season as general manager of professional baseball’s Miami Marlins, becoming the first woman to run a team in any of America’s four major sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL).

Learn more about Ng on page 73.

TK CREDIT HERE

MAY 2021

HEROIC EFFORT

SQUID FAME

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Marvel Studios’ first Asian superhero movie, with Canadian actor Simu Liu in the title role, debuts with a superpowered $94 million opening weekend, breaking the domestic box office record for Labor Day weekend.

Netflix calls South Korea’s Squid Game its ”biggest ever series at launch” after 111 million tune in during its first 17 days on the service.

SEPTEMBER 2021

“I’m looking forward to the moment where we no longer celebrate firsts.”

–SIMU LIU

OCTOBER 2021

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

51

T E T

A project dedicated to celebrating the resilience — and style — of the elderly in North America’s Chinatowns has recently taken on a whole new meaning.

P H OTO G R A P H S BY Andria Lo | WO R D S BY Valerie Luu

52

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

P

R

Y

CHINATOWN

THE JUNGS

2016, Los Angeles

TK CREDIT HERE

The Jungs pose in matching Luk Tung Kuen sweatsuits in front of Alpine Recreation Center in Los Angeles Chinatown. Mrs. Jung leads Luk Tung Kuen classes every morning at the park. It’s an exercise routine originating in Hong Kong consisting of 36 repetitive movements that involve the entire body and are said to improve circulation, coordination, and memory.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

53

C

CHINATOWN PRETTY IS A STORYTELLING project that

captures the street style of senior citizens in Chinatowns across North America. Since 2014, our blog-turned-Instagram-account has celebrated the unexpected and joyful outfits Chinatown seniors wear to dim sum, grocery stores, or while hanging out in the park.

Here’s a snapshot of Chinatown Pretty fashion: A Supreme hat worn with a f loral silk shirt from Hong Kong and a hand-me-down Dora the Explorer backpack from a grandchild. Or knockoff Balenciaga slip-ons paired with elastic waist pants; a handknit sweater layered with a puffy jacket.

This style crosses geographical and cultural borders, teeters between high and low fashion, and combines handmade and gifted clothes. It’s an unmistakable élan, owned by resourceful senior citizens whose life histories, immigration stories, and personalities are woven into these outfits.

We released our first book, Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors in September 2020. It’s a collection of more than 100 stories and outfits of the feisty and sweet seniors we met on Chinatown streets.

This was the pre-pandemic world, back when po pos (grandmas) would sometimes say goodbye by holding our hands, and we’d all feel the joy of our serendipitous encounter.

Once the book was published, we anticipated going on a book tour to meet generations of people for whom Chinatown is a home base of sorts. We were excited by the prospect of events in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Vancouver — the cities featured in the book — as well as going to Chinatowns we’ve always wanted to explore.

That’s the special thing about Chinatowns; you can find one in almost every major city, from Seattle to Saigon.

But, of course, COVID-19 changed our plans, as it did for everyone else. We did our book talks via Zoom, to virtual audiences who shared stories of their own grandparents’ style and wisdom. A common question posed to us was, “How can we support our Chinatowns?” Our answer was to double-down on what the Chinatown Pretty project was about: Celebrate the people who live there.

54

VOL 3 · 2021

During the pandemic, we visited Chinatown without our camera and interview questions — it was about showing up and showing love during a time when the rise of anti-Asian sentiment was making headlines. For us, it was about having Chinatown become part of our weekly ritual: Getting food from our favorite dim sum spots, buying deadstock T-shirts from gift shops, shopping at mom-andpop grocery stores, and of course, telling grandmas and grandpas they look good.

We were lucky to have captured these stories when we did, in the seven years before the coronavirus. And although releasing the book during the pandemic was not what we imagined, it did debut in a slowed down world where people were craving human connection. People told us our book was a positive portal to the Chinatown community they missed seeing.

They didn’t have to miss Chinatown, though. While we did our weekly visits, life there carried on. Gong gongs (grandpas) were still rushing to Stockton Street to get their groceries, po pos continued taking their evening walks.

People were out a little less — COVID-19 and violence loomed as real threats — but the energy generated by these senior citizens reverberated throughout Chinatown. The heartbeat was still there.

Af ter getting our vaccines we held our first in-person book talk with senior citizens at a retirement community in Oakland’s Chinatown. The chairs were spaced six feet apart.

The po pos and gong gongs filed in, and an 88-year-old resident and self-proclaimed Chinatown Pretty fan volunteered to translate our presentation for those who needed it.

For the first time, we got to present our book to the folks represented in the book. The shift in semantics was small but important. Instead of saying, “Senior citizens live active and beautiful lives,” we got to say, “You live active and beautiful lives. You represent so much resilience and so much joy. You show us how to live rich and fulfilling lives, well into your 80s. Thank you.”

BUCK CHEW

2015, San Francisco Buck Chew, pictured at Portsmouth Square in San Francisco Chinatown, has a collection of more than 40 colorful ties. He says the key to his longevity is to “cook at home and eat lots of fresh veggies, ginger, and fish.”

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

55

SUI CHEN SHEN

2018, Vancouver

Sui Chen Shen stands outside a senior home near Vancouver Chinatown where she was visiting her husband. Her colorful shirt was made by a friend utilizing leftover fabric from the clothing factory where they both worked.

DOROTHY G.C. QUOCK

2019, San Francisco

History is often woven into Chinatown outfits.

Dorothy G.C. Quock turned an heirloom rice bag into a dress for the premiere of Forever Chinatown, a documentary film she consulted on.

Her father delivered rice for work, dropping off 50- and 100-pound sacks to San Francisco Chinatown businesses and residences.

56

VOL 3 · 2021

MS. CHEN

2017, Oakland Ms. Chen’s signature piece is an embroidered elephant hat. Chen lives in Oakland Chinatown, but bought the hat more than 20 years ago in Thailand — and had recently rediscovered it in her closet.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

57

FENG LINH FENG

2015, San Francisco

A detail of a bold outfit that showcases two hallmarks of Chinatown Pretty style: layering and pattern mixing.

58

VOL 3 · 2021

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

59

SIDNEY YU EN

2017, Oakland

Meet Sidney Yuen, the bearded butcher. He's retired now — for 36 years he worked as a butcher at Berkeley Bowl. He’s always worked in markets, first in Hong Kong, then Hawaii.

60

VOL 3 · 2021

G UI ZHI LI

2018, Manhattan Gui Zhi Li, seen outside of the Chinese Community Center in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was a park gardener in Hong Kong before she retired.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

61

Asian American History IS American History But why is it often ignored in U.S. classrooms?

TK CREDIT HERE

BY STE WAR T K WOH IL L U S T R AT IONS BY MOJ O WA NG

62

VOL 3 · 2021

ON JUNE 19, 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American draftsman, was involved in a brawl outside of a strip club in Highland Park, Michigan.

Chin was there for his bachelor’s party, and the fight followed a dispute with two white men, a Chrysler plant supervisor named Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz, a laid of f auto worker. Soon af ter, Ebens and Nitz found Chin at a local McDonald’s, where they bludgeoned him with a baseball bat while shouting racial epithets. Chin died from his injuries four days later. He was 27 — and just days away from getting married.

Previous page: A young student looks up at a portrait of Vincent Chin.

The incident occurred amid an atmosphere of anti-Asian hate in Michigan, where an economic downturn had been blamed on the emergence of the Japanese auto industry. Despite the clear racial motivation — and the severity of the crime — a state court gave Ebens and Nitz a remarkably light sentence: three years’ probation, no jail time, and a $3,000 fine. I was a young attorney at the time, and beginning in 1983 I served as co-counsel to Chin’s mother, Lily.

That year, Lily stayed with my family when she came to Los Angeles to advocate for federal charges against the men who killed her son. During a community meeting in a crowded Chinatown restaurant, Lily demanded justice for her son — and then fainted. Seated next to her, I helped her to her feet. Later that day, I asked her if she

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

63

64

VOL 3 · 2021

business, sports, technology, entertainment, and the arts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, amid heightened risk of verbal abuse and physical attacks, Asian Americans — who comprise more than 20% of the national health care work force — saved lives through treating patients stricken with disease.

In recent years, Asian Americans have increasingly come together to raise awareness of our role in American history. Organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Stop AAPI Hate, the Asian Pacific

Better educating Americans of the contributions of Asians is more than just correcting the record. It will also make Asians more visible in the United States today.

Policy and Planning Council, and hundreds of others have launched immediate measures to reduce and eliminate hate crimes and incidents. But more can be done to improve understanding of our past. While overt racism is certainly a factor, complacency is a bigger problem. Many parents, students, and teachers feel that if Asian kids are doing well in school, they don’t need to know their history. That, we’ve learned, is a mistake — because history repeats itself.

It isn’t hard to see the connection between Japanese internment during World War II, harassment of Sikh Americans after 9/11, and the attacks on Asian Americans today. We need to work with parents, students, teachers, administrators, and political leaders to require ethnic studies and to train more teachers. My wife Pat and I have promoted the education of a million youth to understand the history, struggles, and accomplishments of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through the Asian American Education Project. We have started by training 500 teachers in how to tell our stories — but that number is far from enough.

After the federal trial against Vincent Chin’s killers resulted in acquittal, Lily Chin decided to leave the U.S. She returned to Guangzhou, China, where I visited her in 1995. Her cheerful spirit could not hide the deep sadness she felt — that she had lost everything dear to her.

Nothing could have brought her son back. But a concerted nationwide push to improve education of Asian American history among all Americans may ensure that his death will not have been in vain.

Stewart Kwoh is co-founder and co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project.

TK CREDIT HERE

was OK. “There’s nothing I can do to bring back Vincent,” she said. “But I don’t want any other mother to go through what I have gone through.”

The murder of Vincent Chin galvanized the Asian American community to fight against racial hatred and inspired thousands to pledge their lives to community service and advocacy. Four decades later, however, the event remains unknown to the vast majority of Americans. Given this ignorance, it is tragic — if unsurprising — that many more mothers in the years since have indeed had to endure the pain and trauma that Lily Chin experienced. In the past year, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been victims of more than 6,000 hate incidents, a sharp increase caused, in part, by xenophobic anger over COVID-19. Too of ten, Asian Americans are seen as perpetual foreigners out to steal jobs from “real Americans,” or model minorities undeserving of special consideration. A large reason for these misperceptions is a sheer lack of Asian American history being taught in America’s schools. This needs to change — because Asian American history is American history.

Beginning with the arrival of Chinese immigrants to build America’s railroads in the 19th century, Asian Americans have played an outsized role in our nation’s past. The internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II — while German Americans and Italian Americans were lef t alone — remains a blight on our national conscience. Asian Americans were banned from immigrating to the U.S. for 60 years, and their presence was cited as justification for denying citizenship to minorities of other races in the early 20th century. It is because of Asian Americans that English as a Second Language (ESL) education was legalized in the United States, and that bilingual instruction is available for immigrant children. Asian Americans have also found solidarity with other minority groups to forge lasting change, such as when Filipino workers joined Mexican colleagues in organizing the Delano Grape strike in 1965, and have been instrumental in forcing changes to immigration law and standing up for labor rights. Today, Asian Americans are often seen in solidarity with Black Americans protesting racial discrimination and violence.

Better educating Americans of the contributions of Asians is more than just correcting the record. It will also make Asians more visible in the United States today. Asian Americans, the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. over the last 20 years, have established themselves in leadership roles in politics,

5 Asian Americans From History You Should Know Whether as an actress or astronaut, these figures made a mark on U.S. history — even if many history books don’t show it.

WONG KIM ARK On March 28, 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark, a San Francisco-born Chinese American, was a U.S. citizen — despite the fact that his parents had been excluded from citizenship by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Wong had sued the federal government after being denied re-entry to the U.S. following a visit to China. The ruling established the principle of birthright citizenship for all those born in the United States under the 14th amendment.

ANNA MAY WONG Born Liu Song in Los Angeles’ Chinatown on January 3, 1905, Anna May Wong is considered the first Chinese American movie star, acting in many films in the 1920s and 1930s and becoming an iconic exemplar of the era’s “flapper” fashion.

Frustrated by Hollywood’s endemic racism — Wong was famously passed over for the role of a Chinese character in The Good Earth in favor of a white actress — she continued her career in Europe before dying in relative obscurity in 1961.

DALIP SAUND When Dalip Saund was elected to represent California’s 29th district on January 3, 1957, he became the first Indian American, Asian American, and Sikh to join Congress. Saund, a trained mathematician, became interested in politics after purchasing a ranch during the Great Depression, when he witnessed the struggles of his neighbors; the experience turned him into an advocate of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Saund ultimately served three terms in Congress where he championed civil rights legislation as well as the rights of small farmers.

LARRY ITLIONG In 1965, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee — a California union led by the Filipino American Larry Itliong — began the Delano Grape Strike, prompting a global boycott of grapes. Itliong’s largely Filipino workforce collaborated with Cesar Chavez’s Latino farm hands to form United Farm Workers, and five years later, they won better pay, benefits, and protections — a breakthrough that eventually led to farmers obtaining collective bargaining rights.

TK CREDIT HERE

KALPANA CHAWLA Born in Karnal, India, in 1961, Kalpana Chawla nurtured a lifelong dream to fly.

After obtaining a degree in aerospace engineering, Chawla immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s and was selected as an astronaut in 1994. Three years later, she became the first Asian American woman to visit space when she served aboard the space shuttle Columbia. In 2003, while onboard the Columbia for her second mission in space, Chawla was among seven astronauts killed when the spaceship tragically disintegrated upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere due to a technical failure. She has since received many posthumous honors in the United States and is considered a national hero in her native India.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

65

FIVE CU R ATO RS ON FIVE ARTISTS

Experts from Asia Society Museum, the Museum of Chinese in America, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center recommend the AAPI artists who inspire them.

66

VOL 3 · 2021

PHOTO BY LU ZHANG

H E R B TAM ON DONG KINGMAN Herb is Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)

THE PAINTING BEGS MANY QUESTIONS: WHAT WAS THE ARTIST THINKING WHEN HE CHOSE THIS VIEW? WHY DID HE STOP IN THE MIDDLE? WHO ELSE WAS ON THE STREET THAT DAY?

Previous Page "Mott Street 2" Dong Kingman, 1953 From the collection of the Museum of Chinese in America

DONG KINGMAN WAS a pioneering Asian American artist back when the term “Asian American” had not been coined yet.

In fact, in the pre- and post-war periods in which Kingman was active, there were just a scant few visual artists of Asian descent who were pursuing a life in the arts.

However, Kingman’s ethnicity — he was born in 1911 to Chinese immigrants in Oakland, California — is not the only reason we should take a closer look at his work.

His “Mott Street 2” watercolor from 1953, likely painted on the spot in plein air, shows an assured colorist with an imaginative eye for dramatic light and shadow that recalls the seaside watercolors of Edward Hopper, Kingman’s contemporary.

It is an early painted depiction of New York City’s Chinatown and though it has been left unfinished, Kingman’s

painting of fers up important details.

The tall spire of the historic Transfiguration Church in the background situates it immediately as Manhattan Chinatown’s Mott Street.

In the foreground, he carefully renders a red store sign for an herbal medicine shop on the ground f loor of a quintessential New York tenement building, complete with rickety fire escapes and wiry TV antennas jutting from the roof.

The painting begs many questions: What was the artist thinking when he chose this view? Why did he stop in the middle? Who else was on the street that day?

I can easily imagine him walking towards Transfiguration, making a right on Pell Street, then another right down a windy Doyers Street to stop for a bite at Nom Wah Tea Parlor, the oldest dim sum restaurant in Chinatown.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

67

"A Lady and a Road Map" Bernice Bing, 1962 From the collection of the Asian Art Museum

68

VOL 3 · 2021

VIVI E N N E LI U ON BERNICE BING

Vivienne Liu is Curatorial Assistant, Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art BERNICE BING WAS a painter associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Beat Generation. Despite studying under the likes of Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell and exhibiting alongside contemporaries such as Manuel Neri and Jay DeFeo, Bing remains overlooked and understudied — undoubtedly because she was queer, Chinese American, and a woman.

Bing rejected readings of social dif ference into her work, seeing them as simplistic and reductive. However, I contend that her intersecting identities created a complexity of being — a sense of multiplicity that allowed Bing to hold so many parts of the world together in generous tandem.

In her ever-evolving explorations of the unconscious mind, New Age spirituality, Eastern calligraphy, and natural Californian landscapes, as well as her roles as an artist, community organizer, and arts administrator, Bing demonstrates the ways that queer women of color contain infinite possibility.

BING DEMONSTRATES THE WAYS THAT QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR CONTAIN INFINITE POSSIBILITY.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

69

HUYNH IS RETHINKING STORYTELLING AS EMBODIED ENCOUNTER, VERTIGINOUS AND MULTISENSORY, UNFAMILIAR AND WONDROUS.

PHOTO BY MIMI KHÚC

I FIRST LEARNED of artist Matt Huynh

L AWR E N CE- M IN H B Ù I DAVIS ON MAT T HUYNH Lawrence is the Curator of Asian Pacific American Studies, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

Still from The Ark Matt Huynh, 2017 From the collection of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

70

VOL 3 · 2021

in 2015, when The Boat debuted — six years and counting later, arguably still the most cutting edge, ambitious “interactive graphic novel” any of us has seen.

Since that time, this Vietnamese Australian (now based in New York City) artist-illustrator-animator extraordinaire has authored a wide array of work, including, I’m happy to say, a number of projects in collaboration with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center: Kung Fu Zombies vs Shaman Warrior, a 2016 animated adaptation of a play-inprogress by Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay; The Ark, a 2017 animated adaptation of the preface to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s then novel-in-progress The Committed; and On True War Stories, a

graphic narrative adaptation of an essay by the same name by Nguyen, published in the Massachusetts Review in 2018, and collected in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019.

In mid-March 2021, when The New Yorker launched the groundbreaking Reeducated, a virtual reality documentary about the detention and political reeducation of ethnic and religious minorities in China, I wasn’t surprised to see Matt as its central artist.

Across his body of work, attuned especially to the lives and humanity of refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrant communities, Huynh is rethinking storytelling as embodied encounter, vertiginous and multisensory, unfamiliar and wondrous.

I LOVE MONICA RAMOS’ WORK BECAUSE OF HOW IT MAKES ME RETHINK THE HUMAN FORM.

Kama Monica Ramos, 2016 From the collection of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

AD RI E L LU IS ON MONICA R AMOS

PHOTO BY JESS X. SNOW

Adriel is the Curator of Digital and Emerging Media, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center I LOVE MONICA R AMOS’ WORK because of how it makes me rethink the human form.

Ramos’ illustrations sometimes include mythical creatures and celestial beings, but they ultimately speak to deeply personal issues such as migration, sexuality, and mental health.

In 2016, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center collaborated with Monica to create Kama, a “jungle” of iconographies that represent identity as an interconnected universe that includes Filipino indigeneity, colonization, and diaspora.

It exemplifies all of the traits that I love about Monica as an artist: beauty, whimsy, and depth.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

71

P H O T O B Y E D WA R D M A P P L E T H O R P E

“NE W YORK , NE W YORK 1979

M ICH E LLE Y U N MAPPLETH O R PE ON TSENG K WONG CHI Michelle is Vice President for Global Artistic Programs, Asia Society; Director, Asia Society Museum

(Statue of Liberty)” from the East Meets West Self-Portrait Series 1979–1989, by Tseng Kwong Chi is one of my earliest associations with Asia Society Museum.

This artwork graces the catalogue cover of the museum’s first contemporary art exhibition: Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian Art. Encountering the photograph upon my arrival to New York as a young art historian, one of the few Asian Americans in the field at that time, it ignited a new awareness of powerful voices outside the Eurocentric perspective I had been schooled in.

The artist writes: “My photographs are social studies and social comments on Western society and its relationship with the East. [I pose] as a Chinese tourist in front of monuments of Europe, America,

and elsewhere. ... I am an inquisitive traveler, a witness of my time, and an ambiguous ambassador.”

Twenty years later, serendipitously, I had the pleasure of acquiring the photograph for Asia Society as a tribute to the museum’s trailblazing roots in the field and a reminder of the power of images to impassion and inspire.

Tseng’s photograph remains a touchstone for me. It exudes strength and solidarity with the ideas of liberty and freedom, yet also serves as a poignant reminder of the Asian American community’s ongoing status as the “other” in American society. And amidst the alarming rise of violence and discrimination against Asian Americans, it is a comforting symbol of the enduring strength of the contributions of Asian American artists.

AMIDST THE ALARMING RISE OF VIOLENCE AND DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ASIAN AMERICANS, IT IS A COMFORTING SYMBOL OF THE ENDURING STRENGTH OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ASIAN AMERICAN ARTISTS.

"New York, New York 1979 (Statue of Liberty)" from the East Meets West Self-Portrait Series 1979–1989 Tseng Kwong Chi, 1979 From the collection of Asia Society Museum

72

VOL 3 · 2021

A version of this story was originally published by Google Arts & Culture.

REBEL, JESTER, MYSTIC, POET CONTEMPORARY PERSIANS The Mohammed Afkhami Collection

TK CREDIT HERE

On View Through May 8, 2022

ASIA SOCIET Y MUSEUM 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street) New York City AsiaSociety.org/ContemporaryPersians @AsiaSocietyNY

@AsiaSocietyNY

@AsiaSociety

L EARN MORE

ASIA SOCIETY ASIA MAGAZINE SOCIETY

73

M E E T

2 0 2 1 'S

ASIA GAME CHANGERS H O N O R I N G

SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 2014, the Asia Game Changer Awards has recognized individuals and groups whose actions have profoundly strengthened the bonds between Asia and the world. In 2021, a time of trauma for many Asian Americans, we honor and celebrate that community — those who have inspired the world with their achievements, and those who have seized this moment and brought positive change.

“In this challenging time for Asian Americans, we thought it only natural that our signature global initiative specifically honor the achievement and impact of the Asian American community,” said Asia Society President and CEO Kevin Rudd. “These people have inspired us, and they have inspired their country and inspired the world.”

74

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

ASIAN AMERICANS

KIM NG

F O R S H AT T E R I N G T H E G L A S S C E I L I N G I N A M E R I C A’ S N AT I O N A L PA S T I M E born for a life in sports.

“I was the kid that was perpetually dirty, with scabs on my knees,” she says. Ng grew up in Long Island and New Jersey, the oldest of five girls.

Af ter a stellar sof tball career at the University of Chicago, Ng got her first job in Major League Baseball in 1991, when she secured an internship with the Chicago White Sox. In the next two decades, she rose through the ranks. Running a team of

TK CREDIT HERE

KIM NG WAS

her own, though, proved elusive. Ng interviewed at least five times for open general manager positions, only for a man to be hired instead.

Late last year, when the Miami Marlins approached her about their general manager opening, Ng braced herself for disappointment — but she was determined to give it a shot: “The only thing I knew is that I wouldn’t get the job if I didn’t try.”

At long last, it happened. At 53, Ng isn’t just the second person of Asian descent to serve as a baseball general manager. She’s the first woman — ever. It’s an achievement that earned her accolades from Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and her childhood hero, Billie Jean King. But for Ng, being a trailblazer is nothing new. “I was always a little bit of a rule breaker,” she says.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

75

FOR PIONEERING WORK O N D E A D LY V I R U S E S — AC R O S S T W O G E N E R AT I O N S

RAISED IN TACOMA, Wash- she has appeared widely in the ington, by a white Jewish father national media, and was named and a Korean Buddhist mother, one of the country’s 50 most Angela Buchdahl took to Juda- prominent rabbis. ism at a young age, studying Buchdahl has used her rereligion at Yale and becoming markable story — as an Asian ordained as a rabbi before her American woman leading one of 30th birthday — the first Asian America’s largest Jewish congreAmerican to become a rabbi in gations — to promote a more inNorth America. clusive definition of Jewishness.

In 2014, Buchdahl became the “Even though I had a Jewish father, first woman to lead New York’s with my Asian American face, I Central Synagogue in its 180- would never really be Jewish,” year history. Her sermons have she says. In a widely shared Yom at t rac ted a w id e fol low ing, Kippur sermon delivered last drawing large audiences both in September, Buchdahl rejected the synagogue’s sanctuary and via online streaming, reaching viewers in more than 100 countries. The popularity of Buchdahl’s message has resonated —

76

VOL 3 · 2021

such notions — instead defining faith as a family: “Race is something we view as inherited and unchanging, but there are many ways to become family.”

RABBI ANGELA WARNICK BUCHDAHL FOR CONNECTING COMMUNITIES B E YO N D RELIG IO N , R ACE , O R N AT I O N A L I T Y

TK CREDIT HERE

DR. DAVID HO

FOR MOST VIROLOGISTS working today, the ef fort to stop COVID-19 will define their careers. Not David Ho. In the mid1990s, Ho was instrumental in developing protease inhibitor drug cocktails that turned AIDS into a manageable disease — something that has saved countless lives in the quarter century since. The achievement led Time magazine to select Ho as its 1996 “Man of the Year.” Magic Johnson, the basketball star whose HIV diagnosis marked a watershed moment in the fight against the disease, credits Ho for saving his life.

But Ho has not rested on his laurels — reflecting a discipline he developed as a Taiwanese immigrant who came to the United States, speaking no English, at the age of 12. “People get to this new world, and they want to carve out a place in it,” he says.

“The result is dedication and a higher work ethic.”

Since the coronavirus began spreading in early 2020, the 69-year-old Ho and his colleagues at Columbia University have conducted tireless research into monoclonal antibodies, drugs that may lessen the lethality of the virus. The task is far from complete. But without question, Dr. Ho’s dedication to protecting Americans from two generation-defining viruses has cemented his scientific legacy. Just take it from his mother. “He’s kind of a genius, you know,” she said after he was named Man of the Year. “I’m not supposed to say that, but it’s true.”

DR. MORRIS CHANG FOR CONNECTING BILLIONS ACROSS THE WORLD — ONE M I C R O C H I P AT A T I M E

TK CREDIT HERE

SAL KHAN F O R P R OV I N G T H AT A G O O D E D U C AT I O N CAN BE PROVIDED TO ANYO N E , ANY WH ERE

YOU MIGHT NOT know the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). But there’s a good chance one of its products is sitting in your pocket. One of the world’s most successful semiconductor companies, TSMC chips are found in everything from fighter jets to iPhones. The secret to its success? Founder Morris Chang.

Born in mainland China in 1931, Chang founded TSMC in 1987 following a long, successful career in the United States with Texas Instruments. His basic insight was that companies with innovative semiconductor design lacked the capacity to manufacture them. TSMC, he reasoned, had the factory space to do it for them. The idea worked. Today, TSMC produces more than 12 million semiconductor wafers a year for more than 500 customers, and employs more than 51,000 workers. As the company grew, Chang instilled it with the values he had personally embodied his whole life: integrity, commitment, innovation, and trust.

“The world is full of successful people, but heroes are rare,” Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder of Nvidia, says of Chang. “There is a dif ference between success and impact. I think Morris — his career, his philosophies, TSMC, its strategy, its core values — is absolutely a study in industrial revolution.”

IN 2004, a Boston-based hedge f u nd a n a l y s t n a me d Sa l K h a n learned that his cousin Nadia, a 7th grader in New Orleans, was struggling with math. Sal tutored her through some challenging problems and then posted his lesson online.

To his amazement, the tutorial received thousands of visits. Khan didn’t know it then — but his life’s work had begun.

In 2008, Khan established Khan Academy, a non-profit institution with a simple mission: providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. More than a decade later, the academy features more than 70,000 practice problems, as well as quizzes, videos, and articles across a range of subjects — many

produced by Khan himself — and now boasts nearly 18 million learners per month across 51 languages in 190 countries. The academy has even been called “the future of education.”

The future arrived much sooner than anyone thought. When the coronavirus began to spread around the world in early 2020, more than one billion children around the world suddenly lost access to school. Khan found himself an indispensable resource for teachers, students, and parents everywhere. “Only by pulling out all the stops can we have a chance to ensure that what is already a health care and economic crisis doesn’t also leave an entire generation of learners with insurmountable gaps in their education,” he says.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

77

SUNISA LEE

WHEN THE TOKYO Olympic Games began

in July, Sunisa “Suni” Lee had already made history as the first Hmong American to compete in the quadrennial sporting event. It turned out that Lee’s journey had just begun. On July 29, the 18-yearold gymnast from St. Paul, Minnesota, became the first Asian American to win all around gold in women’s gymnastics.

Lee’s vault to fame ref lected not only her own talent and hard work but also the support of her family: Her father John built a wooden balance beam in the backyard so that young Suni could practice. In 2019, John fell from a ladder

78

VOL 3 · 2021

and became paralyzed. Suni considered withdrawing from an important tournament — but John wouldn’t have it. “You’ve worked so hard for it,” he told her. “Just go.”

The Games’ prohibition of spectators prevented Lee’s family from seeing her perform in person in Tokyo — but their raucous cheers from home inspired television viewers around the world. In spite of pressure from competing in her sport’s greatest stage, Lee exuded preternatural grace and calm.

“I just told myself to take a deep breath,” she says, “and do what I always do.”

TK CREDIT HERE

FOR COMPETING WITH GR ACE UNDER P R E S S U R E A N D M A K I N G O LY M P I C H I S T O R Y

Google and its parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai runs one of the most impactful hightech organizations in the world. But the first piece of technology that changed his life was a rotary telephone.

Growing up in Chennai, India, Pichai remembers the day the phone arrived — five years after his parents had applied for it — and how neighbors would come over to use it to connect with family far away: “It showed me the power of what’s possible with technology,” he says.

It’s an insight he’s put to good use.

Pichai arrived in the U.S. in 1993 to attend graduate school, and started at Google in 2004. He soon began making an impact, helping launch Chrome, Google’s web browser, in 2007.

In 2015, Pichai was named Google’s CEO, before taking over its parent company, Alphabet, in 2019. Under his leadership, Google and Alphabet have continued to grow, creating products that are helpful to users in moments that matter while pursuing technologies of the future, from machine learning and AI to quantum computing.

But the 49-year-old Pichai does not forget where he comes from. “India is deeply within me, a big part of who I am,” he says.

AS THE CEO OF

SUNDAR PICHAI

TK CREDIT HERE

FOR HARNESSING THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY TO CHANGE PEOPLE’S LIVES

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

79

Asian Americans ref lect on their personal experiences with racism, and of fer a path forward for the United States ILLUSTRATIONS BY SALLY DENG In May, following a year marked by an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia across the United States, Asia Society started a global task force with staff from across the organization. The group launched Asian Americans Building America, a new video series featuring interviews with Asian Americans from a wide range of backgrounds, professions, and perspectives. The interviews, conducted by Asia Society President Kevin Rudd, explore how each participant deals with racism in their personal lives and include their suggestions to build a more tolerant, inclusive future in the United States.

The following are excerpts from these conversations.

“It started when my mom was deliberately coughed at in public. It was very eye-opening to me. It really hit home. I actually spoke about it in my school assembly, about the rise of xenophobia against the AAPI community. I was really nervous to do so, because no one was covering the issue [then]. But I felt like I needed to do it for my community — that I personally needed to say something.”

MINA FEDOR, 8TH GRADE STUDENT ACTIVIST

“At the beginning of the pandemic, when hate was targeted toward Asians, we’d get into the elevator at my apartment complex and people would leave. There was no other reason than that we were Asian.”

GRACE HWANG, CADET, ROTC

80

VOL 3 · 2021

“Growing up as an Indian in Texas, there was always that feeling that you were different. You’d be called ‘Gandhi’ or ‘dot head.’”

SHVETA PILLAI, EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP COACH

“In the early 1970s, I was pretty much the only kid who looked different at my school. And I was always the smallest in stature, as well. At age 12 or 13, that wasn’t a great combo. I endured bullying and racist taunts and the occasional fistfight. But I decided I wasn’t going to be a victim and I used the negative energy to motivate myself to work even harder at school and do even better. And I promised myself that I was going to be better than every one of those kids that had been giving me a hard time.”

LEROY CHIAO, RETIRED NASA ASTRONAUT

“After 9/11, we would receive calls to our office from people telling us we were terrorists, we were Osama bin Laden, we’d killed many people, we needed to go back to our country. These threats made us afraid to leave our homes. And there’s still fear. My son has a black beard and looks like a Middle Easterner. And sometimes I’m still afraid for him.”

RONA POPAL , HEAD OF THE AFGHAN COALITION

“I find a lot of comfort in wearing a uniform, because no one questions whether I’m American.”

DIANA KIM, CADET, ROTC

“My daughter used to go by herself on the subway when she was in middle school, but I told her to stop doing that. Now she’s in high school. As for my son, when my daughter was his age, I let her take the subway by herself — but I won’t let him. I have to go with him.”

VERA SUNG, DIRECTOR, ABACUS BANK

“I came within a couple of feet of a butcher knife that went into a young man’s back at the end of February. Ironically, it happened right in front of a place called Paradise Square. One night a man just came up and plunged a knife into the back of a young Asian man on his way home. I literally shouldn’t be here. If I were two feet away, that knife would have been in my chest, and I wouldn’t be talking to you now. It reminded me of the struggle, why Chinatown was initially created, as an ethnic enclave after the 1882 Exclusion Act. Ever since, we’ve been here, in this little enclave, doing our own thing. And little did I know that over 100 years later, I would be here facing the knife.”

WELLINGTON CHEN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CHINATOWN PARTNERSHIP LOCAL DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

81

“A state representative from the east coast recently said that Asian Americans don’t have any issues — which is very false. Asian Americans do have barriers. We do have issues that need to be alleviated. That kind of thinking among our elected officials really dismisses our community.”

KAREN KWAN, REPRESENTATIVE, UTAH’S 34TH DISTRICT

“There’s a lot of history that’s not taught in schools in our country — not only about Asian Americans, but also African Americans and Latinos. If this education were to be improved, if there were forums for these issues on the community level, and if people in position to seize the bully pulpit could take leadership and start a public dialogue, I think it would go further in stopping these attacks than trying to call for legislation, hate crime penalties, and other carceral solutions.”

CECILLIA WANG, DEPUTY LEGAL DIRECTOR, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION

“I realized after the Atlanta shooting that we can’t fight anti-Asian hate just as an Asian community, just as we can’t fight anti-Semitism just as a Jewish community, just as we can’t expect the Black community to fight anti-Black racism alone. And I think what you’re starting to see is the sense that we’re all in this together. In a painful way, I think there are a lot of groups who feel like they’re the ‘other’ at the moment. Even white men feel under attack in certain ways. Instead of feeling like this pushes us all away, I believe there’s this potential to create a much greater radical empathy for the otherness and pain that different groups are feeling. We should remember that 99.9 percent of our DNA is exactly the same, that our differences are superficial, and that we should stand together against bigotry.”

RABBI ANGELA WARNICK BUCHDAHL, NEW YORK CENTRAL SYNAGOGUE

For 82 more VOLon 3 ·the 2021 Asian Americans Building America video series visit AsiaSociety.org/AsianAmerica.

“In the Asian American community, there can be a lot of stigma against seeking mental health care. Asian Americans, among minority communities, seek mental health services at the lowest rate and also have among the highest rates of suicide. So I think out of all this struggle and difficulty over the past year, which is absolutely affecting the community, I’m glad there’s a conversation about seeking help.”

CONNIE CHEN, PSYCHIATRIST

“If there’s something that’s good as a result of all this, it’s that Asian Americans, for the first time, actually have a national stage to have a conversation. Even after the Japanese internment, when tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were released, there was never a national conversation about the harm and trauma that was created. Now, for the first time in our nation’s history, we’re able to — as a community, as a nation — address topics of Asian America, our diaspora, and the history of stereotyping and discrimination.”

LEE ANN KIM, FOUNDER, PACIFIC ARTS MOVEMENT

“As a woman in particular, I think the stereotypes that Asian Americans often face is that we’re meek, we’re unambitious, we’re not leadership material, we’re quiet and unassuming, and that we’re not creative thinkers. I’m actually a research biologist and I spend a lot of time in labs. In science, when you’re doing research, creative thinking is what drives scientific discovery. And so the stereotype that we aren’t creative thinkers, that we’re not leaders, and we’re not inspirational can actually have a detrimental effect on us as scientists. This is compounded by the particularly hostile racial climate right now, where Asian American and Chinese and Chinese American scientists in particular are being profiled in the U.S. as, potentially, actors of foreign governments.”

JENN FANG, BLOGGER AND ACTIVIST, REAPPROPRIATE.CO

“I believe you can enjoy so much delicious texture when you’re more inclusive than when you’re trying to be exclusive. You know, I sometimes feel sorry for people who are ignorant and very afraid of things they don’t know or know how to handle.

Love is a beautiful ingredient. It does take a lot of patience and education, and in the process you can get hurt. But you can’t shake a hand with a clenched fist.”

RANJAN DEY, CHEF

“I’ve sung opera in German, in Italian, in English, in Russian, in Czech — in all these different languages. Why not, I thought, also sing in Mandarin, too? I could introduce contemporary Chinese opera to Western audiences, using music to help heal and bridge differences.”

HAO JIAN TANG, OPERA SINGER

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

83

TK CREDIT HERE 84

VOL 3 · 2021

WHY THE QUAD AL ARMS

CHINA T he succ e s s of an Aus tralia- India-Japan - Uni ted S t a te s s tra tegic dialogue pose s a major threa t to Beijing ’s ambi tions .

TK CREDIT HERE

BY KEVIN RUDD

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

85

W

HEN

FORMER

Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe invited of ficia ls f rom Au stra lia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry.

This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scof fed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.

A version of this story was originally published by Foreign Affairs.

86

VOL 3 · 2021

Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of 2021, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese of ficials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.

As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin re-writing the rules of the international order — and entrench its global leadership position, without ever having to fire a shot.

The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stif fen spines across

the whole of the Indo-Pacific — and possibly beyond.

For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an ef fective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese of ficials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-China competition in what has already become this “decade of living dangerously” — and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally.

COME TOGETHER SHINZO ABE’S FIRST attempt to launch the Quad came

in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, when Australia, India, Japan, and the United States worked together on disaster response. Abe saw the Quad as a way to build the four countries’ capacity to work together to meet shared regional security challenges. But the response in other capitals was tentative at best.

In Washington, President George W. Bush worried that such cooperation would unhelpfully alienate China when it needed Beijing in the “war against terrorism”; within a few years, as cables subsequently released by WikiLeaks showed, the administration was privately assuring regional governments that the Quad would never meet. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repeatedly ruled out any real security cooperation with the Quad while categorizing ties with Beijing

as his “imperative necessity.” And in Canberra, the conservative government of John Howard both worried about undermining economically beneficial ties with China and opposed expanding existing trilateral cooperation with the United States and Japan by adding India; in June 2007, Australia formally withdrew and announced the decision in Beijing soon after. After Abe, the driving force behind the Quad, unexpectedly resigned in September 2007 (before becoming prime minister again in 2012), his successor Yasuo Fukuda formally consigned the Quad to the dustbin of history.

When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically.

Af ter years of growing U.S.-China tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had changed in all of the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry af ter the Quad re-gathered in November 2017 for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indif ferent even af ter the first meeting of the Quad foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

87

Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead — and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again in October 2020, in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered South Korea, New Zealand, and Vietnam for what became known as “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)

Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual “Malabar” naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in New Delhi was gone.

From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.

88

VOL 3 · 2021

FROM DIVIDE TO AT TACK AT FIRST, CHINESE strategists seemed to think there

was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.

Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial and subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi changed his tone dramatically, slamming the ef fort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).

Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal — and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the

BEIJING HAS CONCLUDED THAT THE QUAD REPRESENTS ONE OF THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL CHALLENGES TO CHINESE AMBITIONS IN THE YEARS AHEAD.

same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of ef forts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India, by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.

But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea, as well as concerns about human rights and Hong Kong, had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In New Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standof f was resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in New Delhi on the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added an additional obstacle to Beijing’s plan.

By early 2021, Chinese of ficials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work.

So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.

The March 12 Quad leaders meeting confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance.

By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

89

produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”

Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and others Chinese of ficials have started talking more frequently about “great power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down in its ef forts to develop alternate trade frameworks, by promoting its membership of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-China investment agreement, and f lirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outf lanking it on the global stage.

Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe — where India and Australia joined a gathering of the G7, and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component — reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-China

90

VOL 3 · 2021

alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”

REASON TO WORRY BEIJING HAS CONSIDERABLE reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, and to a lesser degree in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Japanese, Indian, or Australian military involvement in any conf lict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be Quad coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based anti-ship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s ability to threaten Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles — although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed.

Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.

But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-China coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia of ficial, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an ef fort.

One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is ASEAN, which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions.

Chinese of ficials also take comfort from continuing protectionist sentiment in both Washington and New Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) anytime soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-China ef forts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and its growing share of the global economy remains the most important strategic factor now, as in the past.

China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, President

Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia both serves a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, of fers a way to expand its field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.

The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending.

Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of war-fighting, military of ficials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese of ficials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shif ting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.

Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi Jinping, especially in the run-up to the fall 2022 20th Party Congress, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will of fer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand, by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland and thereby further consolidating his hold on power.

Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia, is president and CEO of Asia Society and president of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

91

WITNESS TO AN ‘AMAZING

TK CREDIT HERE

EXPERIMENT’

Orville Schell works at the Shanghai Electrical Machinery Factory while on assignment for The New Yorker in 1975.

Or ville Schell re f lec t s on a lif e spen t 92

VOL 3 · 2021

tr ying to make sense of China .

O R V I L L E S C H E L L , founder and director of Asia Societ y’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, has spent six decades focusing on China as a scholar, journalist, author, and advocate. He sat down in his Berkeley, California, home to talk with Mary Kay Magistad, associate director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations and a former China and East Asia correspondent for NPR and PRI/BBC's "The World."

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: You made

RICHARD GORDON

your first trip into China in 1975, at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. What was that like?

ORVILLE SCHELL: I got invited to go on a trip that had been approved by Premier Zhou Enlai. He was part of a contingent of leaders who believed that China did need to open up somewhat, and become more practical and less political. And he was, in a certain sense, a counterforce to Chairman Mao. He had allowed a few trips to come in, organized by a fellow traveler, Bill Hinton, who had been in China since the 1940s, when he wa s t here in t he United Nations Relief Administration. I got included, even though I was writing for The New Yorker at the time. That was a real wake up call for me, because of course I was very excited to go, but I thought that I had some fundamental notion about how to interact with Chinese people and I spoke some Chinese. And yet when I got to China, it was utterly insoluble.

When they found out I was writing for The New Yorker, they became very nervous. At one point, when I was working in Dazhai, the model agricultural brigade, they put me in a cave and didn’t let me out for several days. They told me I was sick, that I needed to stay there and get well. What was actually going on was that they knew that I was a writer, and they didn’t quite know how to deal with that. Here I was on this fraternal youth work brigade — we were allegedly

working, but of course, just basically impeding progress — and this was not what they had in mind, that someone was going to write about the experience.

Again and again, if I would wander off to another village to talk to people, they’d come and get me. I remember one time I met this wonderful man, a doctor.

He was taking care of fruit trees at the brigade. And I said, “I’d love to come and see what you do.” He said, “OK.” But when the authorities found out that he and I had connected directly, they immediately turned on him and criticized him. That’s when I got locked up.

So it was a real wake up call for me. I didn’t quite know what was going on, but I knew something wasn't right.

MKM: This was in the last year or so of the Cultural Revolution, 1975-76.

What were people saying to you about what was going on?

OS: We got plunged into criticism sessions and study sessions where we’d study and criticize Confucius and Lin Biao. Conf ucius was meant to be a stand-in for Zhou Enlai, a kind of a Mandarin, as cosmopolitan as they got in leadership.

Chinese facilitators would hold these meetings, and we’d read these documents. Many people on my trip were very naive. They knew nothing about China, and were quite lef tist to boot.

And there was a lot of pressure to conform to these of ficial views. It was important and interesting for me to par-

ticipate in that, and to understand what that’s like, that when the prevailing wind is blowing, you can oppose it, but you’re going to end up getting locked in your cave. It was a light version of what I think was the Chinese experience — very censorious, very intimidating.

MKM: When you went home from that visit, did it change how you thought about how you’d engage with China from that point on?

OS: Well, it was a very bewildering experience, in many ways. But then of course, it wasn't so many years af ter that when China started to open up, in the late ’70s. And from that point on, I visited of ten. I continued writing for The New Yorker as this amazing process unfolded, trying to make sense out of it.

How did the Cultural Revolution generate Deng Xiaoping and his reforms?

And where was it going? When Deng came in, in ’78 and ’79 and waved his wand, and seemed to cancel the past, I remember thinking “not so fast.” You don't go through years of tectonic class struggle and revolution and just wave it away. It gets into your DNA somehow, and it will re-express itself in some way going forward. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening now.

MKM: Did you also see it happening in the ’80s, which was otherwise considered to be a pretty open time?

OS: I did. Even though it was an immensely exciting time, where things were really open in a way that I never could have foreseen in 1975, I was painfully aware that within that reform movement, there was a steel shank of one-party rule that never was dissolved. Deng Xiaoping himself basically said the Party is the center, and everything grows out of the Party — and

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

93

don’t forget it. So even as Deng was catalyzing all of these reforms and marketization and intellectual openness, and elections even — that basic core operating system never changed.

MKM: I’ve heard people in China talk about how robust the conversations were in the ’80s, that there were salons and universities and that it really felt like political reform was possible, in addition to the economic reform that was happening in the countryside and helping farmers lift themselves out of poverty.

OS: It was extraordinary, what happened in the ’80s. People could basically publish almost anything. All kinds of Western works were being translated — including television programs and history programs. Some of them were very exciting, innovative, and interesting.

There was an intellectual yeastiness that matched the sort of marketization of the economy. And then you had figures like Fang Lizhi, the great astrophysicist, who in ’86 and ’87 went abroad and started writing about his experiences, and then went across China on an incredible tear, speaking at every major university in the most intelligent but provocative way, saying that China needed to get rid of its one-party system and become a democracy to become a truly modern society.

And they kicked him out of the Party. But they didn't do anything more than that.

MKM: The Tiananmen protests came out of this era. Did it surprise you that so many people took to the streets?

OS: Yes. There were earlier student demonstrations, in 1986-87, and that’s why Hu Yaobang fell as the Party’s general secretary, and Zhao Ziyang came in.

But the scale of the Tiananmen protests nonetheless did surprise me. You could feel there was some disaf fection, with inf lation, corruption, and other things.

94

VOL 3 · 2021

And then everybody piled on. The permissive environment that the Party had allowed up until then made people feel that the costs of participating would not be high. It was a time of amazing optimism and openness, and the sense that maybe history actually was going to change, and the Party actually would allow a more tolerant sort of society to evolve.

MKM: Were you there for the protests?

OS: Yes, for weeks. Interestingly, in April 1989, we were having a conference out here in California, in Bolinas, with about 30 Chinese intellectuals and American scholars on exactly the topic of what was the intelligentsia thinking and where was it all going to go. There were all kinds of people like Chen Kaige and Liu Binyan and Wu Zuguang, people who were notable intellectual figures at the time. And then the demonstrations began to erupt with the death of Hu Yaobang. Fang Lizhi was phoning in from Beijing at night to tell us what was going on. Af ter this conference ended, we all jumped on planes and went back to China. Then the protests started to get Party pushback and push came to shove, and we know what happened in the end.

It got very dark and very brutal. It was shocking. It was literally unbelievable that it would happen. On the other hand, power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and the Party has the gun.

MKM: What did you make of what you were seeing over those next couple of decades, the ’90s and the early 2000s, that saw the emergence of an increasingly prosperous and powerful China?

What was it saying to you that this was happening alongside the fact that the Tiananmen crackdown had happened?

OS: I thought that China was engaged in an amazing experiment. And I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out. The

covenant was: You can become wealthy and have a better life — just keep your nose clean politically. And I wasn’t sure that was going to work, because having seen the wellspring of sentiment that had erupted in the ’80s, and particularly in 1989, it seemed unlikely that they could tamp that down. In retrospect, I think they actually were quite successful. But I’ve learned over the years that China is a very bipolar proposition. It has within it these sort of opposite tendencies that wax and wane. At any moment, it looks like only one side is there. But the other side is incipient.

And so I think even now where marketization has come to kind of a curious moment, freedom of expression and dissenting views are largely suppressed, it doesn’t mean that that ability, that tendency is completely erased from the sort of historical genome, and won’t come out again, sometime.

MKM: China’s relationship with the United States has swung from one direction to another as well. What do you make of how we got to where we are at the moment?

OS: Just as China has been through very dif ferent totalistic phases of shut down and opening up, of suppression and of a freer environment, so too, it’s been through some very extreme versions of the love/hate, attraction/repulsion mechanism with the United States. And I think both are profoundly deep in China. There is a tremendous fascination with America, and af fection for America, that goes back more than a century. And yet there’s also a deep and abiding uneasiness about being too slavishly admiring, or under the shadow of America. There’s an expression in Chinese — that “the American moon is rounder than the Chinese moon” — that really rankles many Chinese people.

MKM: Do you think the Chinese govern-

Orville Schell stands under a propaganda billboard in Qingdao, China, in 1981.

ment has a blind spot in terms of recognizing what people around the world actually want, and how much that’s going to matter, in terms of whether China can really be the kind of power its leaders want it to be?

OS: I think that the PRC’s form of autocratic rule has a certain logic. And maybe some of it should be maintained in a country as big and difficult to govern as China. But an awful lot of it is excessive and, it seems to me, tremendously counterproductive, and not in the interest of a ruling party. Why piss everybody of f unnecessarily, either within your country by being too repressive, or abroad, by having too much of a “wolf warrior” diplomacy, just because you can throw your weight around? I think this is where there’s a profound, structural weakness in what the Party is doing.

RICHARD GORDON

MKM: What do you think is a robust way that the United States can engage with China, deal with China, and counter China in the world? What’s the right balance?

OS: In a certain sense, the best remedy is to be strong ourselves in every way — militarily, culturally, technologically, economically, you name it. We should also weave together, as tightly as possible, a fabric of allies, partners, and friends who share common principles and forms of governance — a rulesbased world order. But at the same time, we should keep the doors as wide open as possible, not trying to change the way the Chinese live or govern themselves, but also not engaging if it’s not in our interest. But we can’t do it alone. China loves to deal with people bilaterally, and pick them off and kneecap them.

We should also recognize there are areas where we really should cooperate.

If we’re going to lead, we have to lead.

To lead, you have to take chances. And

WHEN THEY FOUND OUT I WAS WRITING FOR THE NEW YORKER, THEY BECAME VERY NERVOUS. AT ONE POINT THEY PUT ME IN A CAVE AND DIDN’T LET ME OUT FOR SEVER AL DAYS. you have to always make it clear that there is a way that we could foresee collaborating and cooperating.

The tragedy is that starting in 1972, we had just such an operating system.

We called it “engagement,” and it worked — not perfectly, but by and large, it worked. We didn't see China as an enemy. But then Xi Jinping came along, and suddenly we began to see each other as hostile foreign forces.

MKM: What is it that you think is important for Americans, in particular, to understand about Chinese culture, and how Chinese people see the world?

OS: There are qualities in many Chinese people that I know — such as my friends, and I certainly experienced it in my marriage — that are really extraordinary and esteemable. So I think the real problem is the different forms of governance, and dif ferent sort of state-sponsored values. I just, frankly, do not believe that governments need to be bullies, to push people around and lock people up.

Yes, it’s messy to be democratic. China doesn’t have to be completely democrat-

ic, but it should be a little more democratic. That's the best way to be.

China’s challenge is to find some middle path. And that’s exactly what China has not been able to find under the Chinese Communist Party, a more temperate balance point in the middle that may be somewhat messier, but is perhaps more durable, and will prevent them from having to lurch from one extreme to another. Mao’s revolution did this, and it was terribly destructive. What a great tragedy it would be now, if China’s extremism destroyed its whole economic miracle, and if it alienated all of the countries around it in the world— countries like the United States, Australia, Canada, and India.

Who alienates Canada and Australia and India? These are the classic places that nobody alienates. Why do it? That’s the pathology that I see is most pernicious and most dangerous.

What should the United States do about it? Just try to be steady, and to recognize that leadership sometimes means you can’t do anything — you just have to be ready when the moment arises. And a moment will come.

This conversation has been edited ASIAfor SOCIETY lengthMAGAZINE and clarity.

95

WHAT THE

DIPLOMATS SAW George Shultz and Henry Kissinger discuss working with China — and how to fix the U.S.-China relationship.

IN CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL RUSSEL ILLUSTRATION BY GLENN HARVEY

WHEN HE BECAME president on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden identified four immediate crises facing the United States: the coronavirus, the economy, racial justice, and climate change. One challenge that Biden did not include, but which ultimately may prove no less consequential for his presidency, is the deteriorating U.S. relationship with China. Under Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, tensions between the two superpowers rose to levels unseen in half a century. Most experts agree that returning to the status quo ante of engagement, the framework guiding U.S.-China policy since the 1970s, isn’t possible — or even desirable. Can the new administration cooperate with its strategic competitor in areas of mutual interest, like climate change? Or is the relationship destined to worsen?

Five days before President Biden’s inauguration, Asia Society Northern California brought together two statesmen who played a direct role in shaping the trajectory of U.S.-China relations: Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; and George Shultz, who held the position under President Ronald Reagan. Their gathering, held virtually as part of the Future of U.S.-China Relations conference, was also an opportunity to celebrate Shultz’ 100th birthday. (For the record, he said it “felt just like being 99.”) He and the then-97-year-old Kissinger, whom Shultz referred to as a “promising young man,” were joined in conversation by the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Daniel Russel, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific af fairs and an architect of President Barack Obama’s Asia policy.

Sadly, Shultz died on February 6, 2021, in Stanford, California.

This conversation was one of the last public appearances of his life. →

96

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

97

DAN IE L RUSSE L: Dr. Kissinger, I heard you say that George Shultz had a tremendous inf luence on your life.

What was it that made such an impression on you?

HENRY KISSINGER: About 25 years ago, I wrote an essay about leadership.

And I said that if I could appoint a president of the United States, I’d appoint George Shultz, because I had seen him in a number of major positions, and I had learned that he studied each subject with enormous dedication. And, in the process, I learned from him about subjects I had not addressed before.

There was one moment in our country, during the Watergate crisis, when it seemed very important to get together a core group of people who could make sure that for a critical period, policy

vindictive terms, and helped lead to the second. They saw 52 million people killed in the Second World War. They saw the Holocaust. They saw the Great Depression, and the protectionism and currency manipulation that aggravated it. And they must have said to themselves, “What a crummy world.” And then they set up something that was the opposite (to our approach) af ter World War I. They said, “We’re part of the world, whether we like it or not.”

And they started to remake it. Remember, at Bretton Woods, there were some 40 countries — we weren’t alone.

And out of Bretton Woods came the International Monetary Fund, to work with currencies; and the National Bank for Reconstruction and Development, now the World Bank; and the General Agreement on Tarif fs and Trade, that

WE HAVE TO REALIZE: WHATEVER STATE THE WORLD IS IN, WE’RE PART OF IT, WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT. THE BETTER IT IS, THE BETTER OFF WE ARE. — GEORGE SHULTZ

would be conducted in a careful and systematic way — and to assist the president in a manner that would hold things together. The person who first came to my mind to do this was George Shultz.

DR: President-elect Biden has pledged to conduct a foreign policy for the middle class — that he will try to ground his foreign policy in the agenda for domestic renewal here at home. Secretary Shultz, I’d love to ask your view on making foreign policy support the domestic agenda.

How doable is that? And in this day and age, what could that look like?

GEORGE SHULTZ: I think the people at the end of World War II — [Harry] Truman, [Dean] Acheson, [George] Marshall, and so on — they must have looked back. And what did they see? They saw two world wars. The first ended in rather

98

VOL 3 · 2021

became the World Trade Organization and stood for open trade. This laid the groundwork for a revolution that happened. These were real changes.

We need something like that now.

Because we have to realize: Whatever state the world is in, we’re part of it, whether we like it or not. The better it is, the better off we are.

DR: Well, that of course makes great sense. And whether we like it or not, we’re part of a world that also includes China in a very substantial way. And so I’d like to pick up on the issue that at the center of nearly every conversation about foreign policy — the future of U.S.-China relations. Secretary Shultz, you took over as secretary of state in 1982, a time of tremendous friction with Beijing over Taiwan. And you lef t of fice in ’89, well before the Tiananmen Square massacre.

But during your tenure, U.S.-China relations flourished. Whereas today, we may be at a turning point along the lines that you just mentioned in histor y. Dr. Kissinger warned we may be in the foothills of a Cold War — if not a little bit further up the mountain.

Secretary Shultz, was there anything in your experience dealing with China in the 1980s that you think is relevant or applicable to today’s situation? Are there any clues from that experience about what could be done going forward today, to put the U.S.-China relationship on a healthier track?

GS: With President Reagan’s approval, I went to Beijing and said to the Chinese leaders: “You put on the table everything you want to talk about, I’ll put on the table everything I want to talk about. Let’s construct an agenda out of that, and then work our way through it.”

And that worked well. We confronted problems, became friends, and trusted each other. One time I was in Beijing and I said to my counterparts: “Every time I come here, you put me up in the same guest house. We always have meetings in the Great Hall of the People. I keep reading that China’s a great country. As far as I’m concerned, it’s two buildings and a road.” And so my wife and I were taken on a one week tour of China. And we had fun, and made friendships. We and the Chinese trusted each other and were able to work together. You have to do these things on a personal basis.

DR: Dr. Kissinger, do you have thoughts about the formula for engineering a U.S.-China relationship that serves the best interests of the United States, given where things stand today?

HK: I encountered China when Mao was the leader, and the United States had had no diplomatic dialogue with China for 25 years. The meetings we did have all followed the same formula. The Chinese would say that we had to begin by recog-

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

nizing Taiwan as part of China. And we would say that they had to begin by renouncing the use of force. And that would be the end of the meeting.

When we reopened relations with China in 1971, we decided that we would do what George has described: namely, discuss the issues that existed around the world. The then-Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and I would spend long hours talking almost like college professors, on the theory that when practical problems arose, we should understand the basic thinking of the other side.

At that time, China was a developing country. And it has really gone through three phases, at least, in my observation of it. The first was when both China and the U.S. were concerned with the impact of the Soviet Union on international stability, when we and China had parallel interests. Then there was an intermediate period in which China began to develop its economy, and the early pattern of our relationship still was maintained. Then there came the fairly recent period, where the evolution of technology has been so explosive, that both countries now find themselves in a unique position.

Each country has exceptional qualities.

Our history, our notion of exceptionalism, is based on human liberty. China’s notion of exceptionalism is a performance of a magnitude, one that other countries respected, or were even in awe of. So how do we reconcile this? Cooperation requires both of us to learn a new approach to the idea of global influence. That’s our challenge today, and that’s a big opportunity for the new administration.

DR: Is there a way to integrate our values, our support for human rights, in our relationship to China? Can this be part of our policy towards China, but still allow us to actually get things done and to make progress?

GS: We want to be sure that when we travel, our values travel with us. So we’re not afraid to say what we’re for,

and how we think our society should be organized. But they have their way of organizing t heir societ y, and we shouldn’t think that we’re going to tell them how to do it. If they adjust, OK — but we can talk to them sensibly on the basis of two dif ferent systems. There’s no reason why that can’t be done.

DR: Secretary Shultz, you’re also famous for your analogy of diplomacy to tending a garden. But, you know, even gardening has been transformed by technology.

And diplomacy, of course, is increasingly conducted on Zoom and on Twitter.

What are your thoughts on what is or isn’t dif ferent in terms of practicing diplomacy in today’s environment?

GS: I think on a personal level, you need to build trust. Trust is the coin of the realm. And there’s no reason why you can’t build it with people who are your adversaries. It’s a personal thing.

I’ll give an example. When I served as secretary of state, Eduard Shevardnadze was foreign minister of the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. And he came to me and said, “We have decided to leave Afghanistan. We haven’t decided when, and we haven’t decided when to announce it. But we’re going to leave.

So I’m telling you this so you and I maybe can talk a little bit about how to have this come about in a way that minimizes the loss of human life as it proceeds.”

The only person I told was Ronald Reagan. [Shevardnadze] knew he could trust me; that I wouldn’t go blaring this out even though it was a huge piece of news. You can build trust with people — even though you’re adversaries — by the way you behave.

DR: Dr. Kissinger, you and I have also talked about the pace of technological development and how that complicates the strategic equation. Do you have some thoughts about what we need to bear in mind in conducting effective diplomacy in today’s environment?

HK: I have suggested, in dif ferent periods, that each president should appoint somebody in his of fice with primary responsibility for Chinese relations — and the Chinese should do the same, but for American relations. Because we are the two largest economic countries in the world. We cannot help interacting with each other, and we are bound to have an impact on each other by the very nature of our actions. We have to be careful in this period that, historically in such situations, conf lict was the dominant characteristic.

But we have to find a way of dealing with each other based on an element of cooperation, together with recognition by each side of the limits beyond which conf lict becomes too likely. We are in this strange situation now. For almost half a century, the main weapons of the big countries have been refined year after year. They’ve never been used. And they haven’t been used for a very good reason — that the consequences of using them would be so appalling and would destroy humanity. It is necessary to do two things: to have an understanding on what can be done together, like say climate change, or other practical things, and how we can limit the possibility of conf lict.

DR: What I’m hearing from both of you, which I think is very profound and wise, is the need to establish a relationship of mutual understanding that builds trust as a foundation for collaboration on areas where our interests overlap, but also as the basis for collaboration on risk management and on risk reduction.

GS: I think we’re working on our Chinese problems now from the outside in — we’re pounding away from the outside to get changes. I think we should be working at it from the inside out. We have a chance to say, “Hey, there’s this problem. Maybe we can resolve it, and maybe we can’t, but at least let’s set the parameters.”

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

99

100

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

W H O S TA N D S TO BENEFIT FROM T H E S U P P LY CHAIN SH U FFLE?

TK K H ACM R E/DA I TL A HM ER YE

Countries and companies are scrambling to adjust to a world where the pandemic, geopolitics, and other fac tors have upended traditional paradigms.

We n d y C u tl e r & J e n ny A . K a i ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

101

In August, the world’s third busiest container port, China’s Ningbo-Zhoushan, was partially shut down for two weeks due to a positive COVID-19 case, leading to significant shipment delays in products, from toys to auto parts. The closure led to waves of congestion at ports globally and higher transport costs, stoking fears that this may impact retailers and consumers alike this holiday season.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg in a long list of disruptions that have been pushing global supply chains to the edge in recent years, including those caused by natural disasters and geopolitical tensions.

In response, companies are urgently exploring diversifyPartnership among 15 Asian countries in November 2020, ing their production and sourcing to alternate locations, the region will become even more integrated, reducing barnotably in the Indo-Pacific region. Governments, in turn, riers for goods and trade, establishing common rules of have discovered a window of opportunity to capitalize on origin, and streamlining customs paperwork. this development by strengthening incentives for foreign Beyond pursuing trade agreements, Asian governments direct investment. Both companies and governments alike are implementing bu siness-f riend ly measures and will need to act quickly and adapt this reality in order to incentives, including tax breaks, financial assistance, and thrive in a world of increasing uncertainty. The question deregulation, to attract foreign direct investment. Vietnam remains: Who will ultimately benefit from this shif t? And and India, for example, stand to benefit when it comes to what steps could be taken to seize these gains? manufacturing due to their relatively young workforces, Supply chain disruptions are costly — and what is becomtheir improving infrastructure, policy incentives, special ing increasingly evident is that successful companies are economic zones, and competitive labor costs. More investing in resilience, whether it be diversification or the advanced economies including South Korea, Japan, and Sinuse of advanced technologies to anticipate and minimize gapore also have the potential to attract more investment, risks. And while disruptions are not new, the COVID-19 including research and development centers for emerging pandemic’s global scale and prolonged impact has only reintechnologies. Governments, such as South Korea, Japan, forced the importance of strengthening supply chains and and Taiwan, are also providing generous tax and financial accelerated companies’ plans to employ strategies to mitiincentives to bring their companies back home. gate risk. A Gartner survey conducted in 2021 revealed that Supply chain disruptions are only expected to increase 87% of 1,300 supply chain professionals reported plans to in magnitude and frequency. According to McKinsey, cominvest in supply chain resiliency in the next two years. panies will experience disruptions lasting at least a month Although China continues to be the world’s foremost destiapproximately every 3.7 years. The stakes are high — but nation for high-quality and low-cost manufacturing, more those firms and governments that are able to anticipate and and more companies are at the very least considering a adapt to change stand to benefit. Specifically, companies that “China+1 strategy.” This involves maintaining a manufacturing restructure their supply chains to be more resilient and agile base in China, which continues to be a critical market, while will be able to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and interdeveloping smaller-scale operations elsewhere to prevent connected world. Governments that leverage this shif t to over-reliance on a single country. Another strategy includes their benefit by introducing attractive financial incentives nearshoring or regionalization, which involves setting up while simultaneously strengthening infrastructure, upskillmanufacturing in multiple locations globally to supply goods ing workers, and improving business climate, will be able to to consumers in nearby markets. Finally, companies are lookmove up the value chain in a wide variety of sectors, boost ing to alternative sites as they look to expand production. economic growth, and create new jobs.

The Indo-Pacific region is particularly Supply Chains: A Shifting Indo-Pacific well suited to absorb supply chain shifts Wendy Cutler is a vice president of the Asia A new Asia Society Policy Institute online tool from China to other economies due to Society Policy Institute and managing director examines the relocation, diversification, and reshoring its proximity to China and position as of ASPI’s Washington, D.C., of fice. of supply chains by mapping out the foreign one of the world’s fastest growing mar- investment policies of economies in thew Indo-Pacific kets. Furthermore, with the signing of Jenny Kai is a senior program of ficer at the Asia region in a dynamic and easy-to-use format.

Explore: AsiaSociety.org/SupplyChains the Regional Comprehensive Economic Society Policy Institute.

102

VOL 3 · 2021

A version of this story was originally published by The Hill.

THE GLOBAL CITIES EDUCATION NETWORK

Education for Equity —a key initiative of Asia Society’s Center for Global Education—supports youth to build empathy, respect for differing opinions and perspectives, and the confidence to take action.

We provide resources to classroom teachers and parents to enable all students to know their history and affirm their inherent dignity.

Our goal is for youth to understand and act on racism and issues of social justice as a personal, local, and global issue.

Learn more: AsiaSociety.org/EducationEquity

Asia 21 \ ˈā-zhə twen-tē-ˈwən \ n.

1 . an unparalleled global network of Asia-Pacific influencers

under the age of 40; 2 . a highly collaborative group of young leaders, from all walks of life, who are changing the world

For more on how Asia 21 is defining the future visit AsiaSociety.org/Asia21

CAN THE U.S. A N D C H I N A S AV E TH E WO RLD? In the first year under President Biden, the U.S. and China began re-engaging on climate. But what really matters is whether this will now translate into joint action.

BY THOM WOODROOFE

W

ithin a week of President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021, his new climate envoy, former Secretary of State John Kerry, established two clear conditions for a renewed relationship with China on climate change. First, the U.S. wanted climate to be treated as a “standalone” issue in the relationship, untethered to disagreements on issues like the South China Sea, intellectual property, or human rights. Second, Kerry insisted that China demonstrate its willingness to do more this decade to reduce emissions. In other words, the U.S. wanted to avoid cooperating simply for the sake of cooperating — without any national or planetary dividend.

The stakes for the planet could not be greater. As the world’s two largest carbon polluters — accounting for 40% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions — China and the United States are indispensable to global ef forts to combat climate change. And while President Biden’s first year featured an encouraging level of bilateral engagement on the issue, whether this translates into concrete joint action could have a pronounced effect on the course of this century.

On Kerry’s second condition, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made four new announcements regarding near-term climate action since Biden’s election. Xi

104

VOL 3 · 2021

indicated that China would at least update its existing 2030 targets under the Paris Agreement with its current trajectories of action (but stopped short of headline improvements); ratified the Kigali Amendment to phase down super-polluting hydrof luorocarbons; committed to peak domestic coal consumption by 2025; and halted China’s construction of coal-fired power plants overseas through its signature Belt and Road Initiative. These announcements followed China’s groundbreaking carbon neutrality pledge issued on the eve of Biden’s election.

Washington, however, still wants to see more from Beijing — especially since President Biden has doubled down on the United States’ own near-term ambition to reduce emissions.

Kerry’s first condition, that climate action be separated from other aspects of the bilateral relationship, has at times seemed remote. Zhao Lijian, spokesperson for China’s ministry of foreign af fairs, dismissed the prospect of such compartmentalization early on, while State Councillor Wang Yi — despite citing a desire for the two countries to work together — has warned that this cooperation cannot simply be an “oasis” surrounded by desert, lest it be consumed by the sand iself.

Domestic politics in the two countries

have only made matters more dif ficult on this front.

Pessimism aside, there’s been no shortage of engagement between the two countries on climate change. Kerry has visited China twice and has conducted more than 30 virtual meetings with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua. While these meetings have not yet resulted in major announcements, they have at least enhanced trust in the bilateral relationship, allowed both sides to better understand the perspectives and expectations of the other, and strengthened the hands of those in both governments pushing for more ambitious domestic action.

So, the key question for 2022 is this: Can this intense engagement on climate change now translate into practical cooperation? There are reasons to believe that the answer may be yes — especially after the recent joint declaration at last fall’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.

Beijing, for its part, has a clear appetite for it. A joint statement released by Xie and Kerry in April was notable not only for its use of the term “climate crisis” — a first for an official Chinese pronouncement — but also because it identified eight practical areas for cooperation that also formed part of their COP26 declaration.

This dovetails with the outcome of a series of policy dialogues involving both American and Chinese climate experts, which Kevin Rudd, president of both Asia Society and the Asia Society Policy Institute, convened with Xie and former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta throughout 2020. A key outcome of these dialogues was the need to re-establish the U.S.-China Climate Change Working Group, which first met in 2013, in order to provide a new framework for both governments, as well as subnational leaders, scientists, and business leaders, to engage across these areas.

In 2022, the broader international milieu of climate action will now be more conducive to allowing this U.S.-China cooperation to flourish. COP26 marked →

A project of Asia Society

Visualizing the climate crisis

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, D.C. | March 15-April 22, 2022 coalandice.org

An immersive documentary photography exhibition and programming series

a shift from the process of countries setting near-term targets to countries now implementing their promises. This provides more diplomatic space for U.S.-China climate engagement to assist with that implementation, rather than for it to be seen purely through the lens of timelines and targets which characterized climate diplomacy in the leadup to COP26.

But that doesn’t mean cooperation will be easy — especially during what will likely be a tense bilateral environment in the lead-up to China’s 20th Party Congress, at which Xi will seek an unprecedented third term as leader. The Chinese government will be tempted to also maintain the current approach, which is to be open to cooperation while at the same time not wanting to isolate climate from serious disagreements in other matters.

However, Xi himself knows that being — and being seen to be — a climate leader on the world stage will remain important for his leadership, both at home and abroad. This could help strengthen the hand of those eager to see this cooperation take root. So too does the fact that former President Donald Trump’s indifferent approach to climate unintentionally narrowed the gap in terms of international perception of the two countries. Xi will also be keenly aware that while his carbon neutrality pledge for 2060 was groundbreaking, its credibility depends on now taking major steps toward achieving it. Therefore, it is crucial that China move further and faster to reduce emissions. By mid-century, China is projected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest historical carbon emitter, eroding any remaining claim that it should be treated any differently. What the world will look like then depends, in no small part, on action, from Beijing and Washington.

Thom Woodroofe is a former climate diplomat and a fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute, where he manages a project on U.S.-China climate cooperation.

106

VOL 3 · 2021

A Partnership to Save the Planet Why U.S.-China climate cooperation is critical to the world’s survival

BY B ET T Y WANG AN D TH O M WOO D ROO FE DATA VISUALIZ ATIO N BY VALERIO PELLEG RINI

In 2014, the United States and China made a landmark joint announcement to work together on addressing climate change. As the world’s two largest emitters, this was a seismic shif t and helped ultimately pave the way for the Paris Agreement. It was followed by two further joint announcements in 2015 and 2016 and underpinned by cooperation on a number of initiatives. After four years of inaction by the Trump administration, and as the climate crisis worsens, rebuilding this cooperation is in the interests of the United States, China, and ultimately the world.

How big of a role do renewables — wind, hydroelectric, solar, etc. — play in terms of overall energy consumption?

With a massive population, China’s per capita emissions remain comparatively modest.

to ns

to n s

Source: Our World in Data, 2019

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration 2019; Chinese National Statistics Bureau, 2019

­ January 2007

June 2008

December 2009

July 2013

­ ­

­

­

­ ­

­

­ ­ ­

­

­ ­ ­

­ ­ ­

­ ­

EachEach circlecircle represents represents the annual the annual carbon carbon emissions emissions for afor specific a specific country. country.

FRANCE FRANCE

CANADA CANADA GERMANY GERMANY JAPAN JAPAN

CHINA CHINA

UNITED UNITED STATES STATES

10,174,6 10,174,6 81,10 81,103 3 tonton s s

5, 25,824,6 8 4,6 9 69,6657 ,6 57 to ntos n s

AUSTRALIA AUSTRALIA

INDIA INDIA

SOUTH SOUTH KOREA KOREA

UK UK Source: Source: Our World Our World in Data, in Data, 2019 2019

Working Working withwith leading leading policymakers policymakers and and experts experts fromfrom the U.S. the U.S. and and China, China, AsiaAsia Society Society Policy Policy Institute’s Institute’s A Partnership A Partnership to Save to Save the Planet: the Planet: Rebuilding Rebuilding U.S.-China U.S.-China Climate Climate Cooperation Cooperation project project establishes establishes why why cooperation cooperation is soiscrucial so crucial at this at this time,time, and and also also lays lays out aout a blueprint blueprint for how for how it could it could be rebuilt. be rebuilt.

AsiaSociety.org/USChinaClimate AsiaSociety.org/USChinaClimate

HowHow manymany EVs EVs are on arethe on road? the road?

What kindskinds of energy projects havehave the U.S. What of energy projects the U.S. and and China financed abroad?

China financed abroad? U.S. U.S.ChinaChina CoalCoalRenewables Renewables

Source: Source: IEA, 2020 IEA, 2020

November November 20142014

September September 2016 2016

June June 20172017

­ ­ ­ ­

­ ­

­ ­

­ ­

­

­

­ ­

­ ­ ­ ­

­ ­

­ ­

Source: Source: Financing Financing Carbon Carbon Lock-in Lock-in in Developing in Developing Countries, Countries, Xu et Xu al., et 2000-2018 al., 2000-2018

September September 2020 2020

January January 2021 2021

­ ­

­ ­

­ ­ ­ ­

­

­ ­ ­

­ ­ ­ ­

­ ­

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

107

TK CREDIT HERE 108

VOL 3 · 2021

’ WHO S Alice Su on the challenges foreign journalists face in

THOMAS PETER / ALAMY

today’s China

NEXT? ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

109

DORINDA ELLIOTT: What has it been like for journalists in China?

Something I think about a lot is this: Chinese people are smart. Chinese people are political survivors. They know what’s beneficial and what has absolutely no benefit.

And talking to a foreign journalist has no benefit for most Chinese people.

110

VOL 3 · 2021

ALICE SU: There were a series of escalations — and to be honest, things haven’t really cooled down. First, there was COVID-19. That was a big story, and it was intense. It was scary. But it was a story, and we could cover it.

Early in 2020, journalists started getting expelled from China. First, there were three Wall Street Journal reporters who had their visas revoked due to an opinion article in the Journal calling China the “sick man of Asia.”

Then one day in March of that year, all of the American reporters for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal were expelled at once. That caused a lot of worry in the foreign correspondents community.

People were thinking, “Who’s going to be next? Is this going to escalate?”

For a long time, foreign correspondents have thought that the worst thing that could happen to us is that we’d lose our visas and would have to leave. In that event, we’d actually be more worried about our sources, because they’d stay in China where much worse things could happen to them.

But in August 2020, an Australian reporter who works for CGTN, Cheng Lei, was detained on national security grounds, something most of us

didn’t find out about until that September. She’s still in detention now.

The details are still really unclear.

Then about a week af ter the news came out about Cheng Lei, two Australian reporters [Bill Birtles and Mike Smith] had security of ficers show up at their doors in the middle of the night and tell them that they weren’t allowed to leave China — they were under an exit ban. They went to the Australian embassy and lived there for a few days. Only after the intervention of diplomats were they allowed to go back to Australia, when they told their stories.

For a lot of us, especially Americans, tensions between our country and China had recently escalated. So there was a real fear that we could become pawns in a hostage situation, and if something happened in our home country that we weren’t aware about, we could be retaliated against.

DE: How does your background give you a dif ferent perspective from other foreign correspondents in China?

AS: Prior to coming to China with The Los Angeles Times on a journalist’s visa, I experienced life here as a student and then as an expat living in a foreigner’s bubble. As soon as you’re here on a journalist’s visa, the experience becomes very dif ferent — you feel like you’re walking around with a target on your back.

I see my work as understanding what’s happening in China. I want to seek accountability and do work that speaks truth to power, but I’ve never seen myself as an enemy of the authorities. At the same time, being treated as an enemy because you’re a Westerner, I think, really affects your reporting. It makes it very hard to not want to fight back.

TK CREDIT HERE

SINCE HER HIRING in 2018, Los Angeles Times Beijing Bureau Chief Alice Su has crafted stories that deepened our understanding of China’s social, economic, and political changes under the country’s leader, Xi Jinping — who, meanwhile, has overseen a crackdown on foreign journalists working in China. Su’s work includes on-the-ground reporting of Beijing’s erasure of ethnic populations across China, including Uighurs, Mongolians, and the Hui minority; the early government missteps that contributed to the rapid and deadly spread of COVID-19; and more.

Su — winner of Asia Society’s 2021 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia — spoke with Dorinda Elliott, a member of the Oz Prize jury and senior vice president and director of programs at the China Institute, about the challenges of reporting in China today.

DE: How does being Asian American affect your work?

AS: I think it helps a lot. In recent years, when it’s become more dangerous for Chinese staf f at news organizations to be involved in sensitive stories, and as the scope of what’s considered sensitive has continually expanded, it’s a great advantage to be able to get around on my own and not involve them. Another advantage is that I’m not noticed as easily, and people trust me faster.

But it can also be a negative. Sometimes in initial encounters with security forces, they treat me in a rougher way because they think I’m Chinese.

TK CREDIT HERE

DE: You can say that there are two Chinas: one in which people are satisfied and proud and support Xi Jinping because he makes them feel proud, and one in which individuals are oppressed. How do you strike the right balance between reporting on government oppression — which has certainly increased over minorities, Muslims, freethinking intellectuals, and dissidents over recent years — and the “other” China, which is the China that most people live in?

AS: I struggle with that a lot. As a one-person bureau with limited capacity, I have to decide what to prioritize. I felt that my purpose here was clarified in the last year, when so many other journalists had to leave. I decided that I needed to focus on stories that would not have been told if not by a foreigner or by someone who’s here on the ground. I do worry that if L.A. Times readers who don’t know anything about China except from what they read in my stories actually visited the country, they might be surprised. “You’re always writing about these oppressed minorities,

and how there’s no freedom of speech, but I just see people doing yoga in the park, packed cafes and bars, and high-rises in Shanghai,” they’d say.

There can be a big gap there.

DE: Is that China that visitors see a false China?

AS: It’s not a false China. It’s the China that many people live in. I’m trying to plan stories where I get across that there are two Chinas, two worlds that you live in. Even we journalists live in the two Chinas: One moment we’re talking with someone who’s under house arrest, and the next we’re going out to dinner and having a normal time. But what I want to convey in my stories is that what matters are those moments when people drop from one China to the other, and typically that occurs when something happens to them or their family. It doesn’t have to be that they went out for a protest.

It can be that there was an explosion near their home, or that they were in a city that got suddenly locked down because of the pandemic and now their mom is dying. And the government hotlines aren’t working. And when they complain about it online, people tell them “you must be backed by foreign forces.”

I’ve done so many interviews in the past few years with people who have this defensive, self-explaining tendency to say, “You know, I’m a good citizen. I’ve never done anything wrong. And I’ve always believed everything I see on CCTV.” When there was the horrible ultramarathon race in Gansu Province where 21 people died, a young girl who lost her father went on Sina Weibo [China’s Twitter] and asked for help. “I need to know what happened to my dad,” she said.

People attacked her. “Why are you

complaining? Are foreign forces behind you?”

A lot of people in China, perhaps a majority, are basically satisfied, and see dissidents or people who complain and petition the government as being crazy and foreign-backed.

The satisfied majority feels they don’t have to think about these people, because their own lives are getting better and better. But when a person becomes a victim, they become a target of stability maintenance. That’s when they realize that it’s important to protect individuals — that individuals matter. Whereas before, they’d think that what mattered was just what the majority wanted.

I try to capture both worlds. And what I find interesting is the psychology — how a person can change based on what they’ve experienced.

DE: We of ten think in the United States that people should, or inevitably will, follow an American system of government. But it’s not happening. You have a recent study that shows that 95% of Chinese people are happy with their government. How do you make sense of this?

AS: Well first of all, I don’t think I can predict what’s going to happen. I’ve cited that survey in one of my stories, but I’d take it with a grain of salt. Something I think about a lot is this: Chinese people are smart. Chinese people are political survivors. They know what’s beneficial and what has absolutely no benefit. And talking to a foreign journalist has no benefit for most Chinese people. Answering a survey in which you say you’re not satisfied with the government has no benefit.

This conversation, part of a June 16, 2021, awards program, has been edited for clarity and length.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

111

‘None of the Approved Candidates Were Worthy’ AMIR FARMENESH IN CONVERSATION WITH MAT T SCHIAVENZ A

112

VOL 3 · 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

After an unusual 2021 presidential election, an Iran public opinion expert offers a peek into the mind of the Iranian voter.

TK X I NCHRUEAD /I TAHL EARMEY

ON JUNE 18, 2021, Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s

hardline judiciary chief, was elected the country’s president in a vote that was widely viewed as a fait accompli: Several would-be contenders were disqualified, and Raisi was thought to have the tacit support of Iran’s powerful supreme leader, 82-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei.

Measuring public opinion is an inexact science in the best of circumstances, much less in a complex society such as Iran. But Amir Farmanesh is better at it than most. Farmanesh’s Toronto-based organization IranPoll predicted the voting results of three of the four candidates in Iran’s election within the margin of error of the valid ballots — and was a mere 1.6 percentage points off for the remaining candidate.

Farmanesh, an Asia 21 Young Leader, spoke with Asia Society Magazine about how public opinion polling works in Iran — and what the country’s elections say about its future.

This year, the Guardian Council, which oversees elections, disqualified some prominent candidates, including insiders such as former speaker of the parliament Ali Larijani, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and incumbent first vice president of Iran Eshaq Jahangiri. The reason behind the disqualifications is not well known; and anyway, pre-election polls show that Raisi would have probably still won even if the Guardian Council hadn’t disqualified these candidates. There are many theories about why these disqualifications happened. Some people suggest that it has something to do with succession planning for the future supreme leader of Iran, some say it was to prevent a surprise result elevating someone else, while others have even hypothesized that the Guardian Council wanted to deny Raisi a stronger mandate by preventing a high turnout. The fact of the matter though is that we don’t know.

How did this year’s Iranian election differ from those in the past?

What are the biggest challenges in measuring accurate public opinion in Iran?

This year’s Iranian presidential election saw a historically high share of invalid ballots — they actually surpassed the number of votes received by every non-winning candidate. Invalid ballots exist in every election, but their prevalence this year was extraordinary. You can conclude that for about a tenth of Iranians who voted, none of the approved candidates were worthy of their vote. The coronavirus likely also played a significant role in dampening the participation rate, since less than 5% of Iran’s adult population was fully vaccinated at the time of the election. From an opinion polling perspective, this made it hard for us to predict the results with the same accuracy that we had in 2017 in which our prediction for every presidential candidate was within two percentage points of that election’s outcome.

The biggest challenge we face in difficult and complex environments such as Iran is a significant lack of prior research on which we could build our studies. For this reason, pre-data collection research, pilots, and experiments consume a lot more of our time than when analyzing Western countries.

In societies where little scientific opinion research is conducted, every interest group can claim that the public supports their policies without there being any data to either substantiate or disprove their claims. Our hope is that we can help fill this void by facilitating the availability of high-quality opinion polling data.

We operate multiple polling call centers — we have 106 active stations — and conduct over 160,000 interviews per year. Unlike other polling agencies,

which only conduct interviews in Farsi — the native language of about 55% of Iran’s population — we employ staf f f luent in nine additional languages and dialects found in the country: Azerbaijani, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Kurdish, Luri, Arabic, Balochi, Turkmen, and Tat. This allows us to accurately communicate survey questions and record responses.

In many developed countries, it is standard practice to weight the polling results or impose quotas during data collection because the response rates are too low. But in Iran, since there is almost no telemarketing, and since the public is generally more interested to share and talk about their views, our probability-sampled telephone surveys enjoy high enough response rates that generally do not require any weighting or the imposition of quotas. ​​What can we expect from Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s president in terms of both domestic and foreign policy?

His presidency is unlikely to change the course of Iran’s foreign policy in a drastic manner, as such decisions are made at Iran’s Supreme National Security Council through a consensus-building mechanism.

We are very likely to see shifts at the domestic level, however. Raisi’s administration will try to shift Iran’s economic and developmental orientation towards further self-reliance. Managing the COVID-19 pandemic and dealing with endemic economic corruption will probably be his top priorities.

Based on our most recent polls, a majority of Iranians are still hopeful that Raisi’s administration will change the situation for the better. We will continue to track where the Iranian public stands on this and other issues of national and international significance and will report on them on a regular basis.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

113

The Silent Games As Tokyo hosted the 2020 Olympics — a year late — a journalist found Asia’s largest city shrouded in an eerie calm.

FOR MONTHS, the Tokyo I saw was the view from my bedroom window.

My desk overlooks a sea of apartment buildings and of fice towers, and the main changes I observed while working from home were in the sky, as it cycled from crisp blue to puffy clouds that appeared drawn from an anime film to dark and stormy and back again.

Now, whenever I have the chance to go out into the city, I am hyper-attuned to what has changed, and what, despite all that the world has endured over the past year and a half, remains the same.

This was supposed to be the summer when tens of thousands of foreign visitors descended on Tokyo for the Olympics. Instead, with international — and ultimately domestic — spectators banned, the Games were staged in hermetically sealed bubbles, with the city

114

VOL 3 · 2021

outside barely showing any sign that the largest spectacle on the international sports calendar was taking place here.

Even so, despite the “state of emergency” that was in place in Tokyo for weeks, of fice workers in white shirts and black trousers still disgorged from the subways, albeit all wearing masks.

Lines formed at lunchtime at food trucks parked outside of fice buildings, and people sat in cafes, hunched over their cell phones.

On a summer morning, I boarded the subway to Tsukiji, the site of Tokyo’s former wholesale fish market. When that famed market moved to a new location in 2018, a retail section aimed primarily at tourists remained open.

Tsukiji is close to the of fice building where the Tokyo bureau of The New York Times worked before the pandemic, and

we occasionally ventured to the market for a sushi lunch.

Sometimes I wandered over to one of the many stalls to buy dried fruit or nuts or tea leaves, or to meet a friend or source for a cup of cof fee. Back then, popping into the market meant forging through a mob of tourists wielding selfie sticks and ogling the fishmongers’ wares. If we arrived too late into the lunch hour, the lines for the sushi restaurants could entail long waits.

But Japan’s borders have been closed to overseas tourists since early 2020.

Now, as I wandered down the familiar alleys, hardly anyone was there.

I walked past one fish stall af ter another, their freezers brimming with beautiful cuts of tuna and salmon alongside whole squids, octopus legs, sea urchins in their shells, and over-

TK CREDIT HERE

BY MOTOKO RICH

the Tokyo Olympics. The Games, once much anticipated, ended up being quite controversial as organizers pushed ahead in the face of public opposition and a new wave of coronavirus cases in Tokyo. As a journalist, I had the odd privilege of being one of the few people actually allowed to see the competitions live, watching athletes wave to their families on video screens and listening to the eerie soundtrack of piped-in applause in empty stadiums.

When I visited Tsukiji another day, in the middle of an unseasonal rainstorm in August, most of the stores were closed for a regular day of f. I saw a vision of what it could become: washed out, empty, boarded up.

But another day, in search of a stand that sold f lavored mochi that my daughter used to love, I wandered to the end of an alley. It wasn’t the stand my daughter

remembered, but it was a new one, selling mochi in multiple f lavors.

The owner told me he had just opened up shop two months earlier. “Wow,” I said. “You are brave to start a business here now.”

“We figure this is the bottom,” Hisanori Hori, 45, told me. “It can only go up from here.”

Mr. Hori said he had previously worked at the wholesale fish market and at a vegetable stand inside Tsukiji.

“I love it when it is crowded and bustling,” he said. “It is very lonely without people right now. But we can only endure, and we will work hard.”

I bought some chocolate, strawberry, and cafe au lait f lavored mochi. And I told Mr. Hori I would be back.

Motoko Rich is Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times.

T KPAC /R EADLIAT MHYE R E D

f lowing plastic bowls of salmon roe.

Few customers were buying. At a butcher shop, the workers trimming fat of f chicken breasts outnumbered the pair of customers at the counter. Plump peaches, priced at 800 yen each — more than $7 — sat waiting for a sale.

At many of the stands, the workers looked forlorn. Out front of several restaurants, large signs adorned with colorful photographs designed for tourists who cannot read Japanese advertised shimmering tuna rice bowls or luxury sushi sets. Servers shouted, “Welcome! Would you like to try some sushi? It’s delicious!”

Before being hammered by the coronavirus, Tsukiji had already undergone one seismic change with the departure of the wholesale market af ter 83 years.

That section of the market has been transformed into a bus depot, used for

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

115

How Bhutan Tamed COVID-19 What the world can learn from the tiny Himalayan kingdom.

BY NAMGAY Z AM

116

VOL 3 · 2021

D A N I TA D E L I M O N T / A L A M Y

FEW NATIONS IN the world have handled the COVID-19 pandemic as well as Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom of a little more than 700,000 people. As much of the world struggles to contain the infectious delta variant of the virus, Bhutan has already begun looking to a post-COVID future.

Almost all eligible people, including teenagers, have been vaccinated — no minor feat for a mountainous country (much of which remains unreachable by paved roads) with limited medical and economic resources. Health workers trekked for days at altitudes of more than 12,000 feet above sea level in order to vaccinate the remotest corners. The health ministry, during the second vaccination campaign in July, dispatched almost 5,000 health workers to 1,217 separate locations in order to vaccinate Bhutan’s population. Thousands of volunteers from all walks of life assisted with the push via a program called Desuung (“Guardians of Peace”), initiated by Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck to encourage active citizenship.

Not that everything has been easy for Bhutan. Af ter patient zero — an American tourist — was diagnosed with COVID-19 in March 2020, tourism, one of the country’s main revenue streams, was halted immediately, impacting the 50,000 people employed in the sector.

Following the closure, the government quickly adopted an economic contingency strategy that included a tourism stimulus plan amounting to about $3.8 million. Tourism employees were reassigned to work in infrastructure, product development, waste management, agriculture, and research.

As elsewhere in the world, schools and colleges in Bhutan were shut down.

Education in Bhutan experienced a paradigm shif t with the incorporation of technology, moving online and to national TV. Volunteer teachers camped at schools in the capital and taught stu-

WHAT ENSURED BHUTAN’S SUCCESS WAS THE TREMENDOUS PUBLIC TRUST IN THE COUNTRY’S LEADERSHIP. THE PRIME MINISTER AND FOREIGN MINISTER ARE DOCTORS, AND THE HEALTH MINISTER IS A PUBLIC HEALTH SPECIALIST. dents from the studios of the national broadcaster. Google Classrooms became the norm. Despite concerted ef forts by the government to ensure equitable access, including providing free student data packages, there was a digital divide that saw many students being lef t behind. Not everyone had access to a smartphone or a television or a good internet connection. COVID-19 revealed both shortcomings as well as opportunities in the education sector.

What ensured Bhutan’s success, though, was tremendous public trust in the country’s leadership. The king established a royal relief fund and trekked across the country to provide comfort and support to workers on the frontlines of the pandemic, as well as ordinary folk. Under his leadership, financial institutions deferred loans and waived off interest payments.

Bhutan’s COVID success story can also be attributed to the fact that the prime minister and foreign minister are doctors, and the health minister is a public health specialist. The government maintained clear channels of communication with the media and the people in order to check misinformation. Government officials delivered daily press briefings on television as well as on Facebook in the early days of the pandemic. The health ministry and the prime minister’s of fice updated their social media pages daily, even addressing public concerns live, while WhatsApp groups were created to provide journalists and social media inf luencers with access to of ficials in order to share information and engage in fact checking.

So far, the country has seen only three deaths from COVID-19: one in 2020 and two in 2021. All three victims had underlying health conditions. The total number of COVID cases recorded was around 2,600 as of November 2021.

Bhutan’s health infrastructure may not rival the world’s wealthiest countries, but that mattered little to the elderly American tourist who was patient zero.

Af ter he was f lown back to the U.S., doctors there credited Bhutanese medical care with saving his life.

What accounts for Bhutan’s good fortune during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Besides good leadership and careful planning, many Bhutanese will claim — with confidence — that the true answer is divine intervention. Life in Bhutan is entwined with ritualistic Buddhist tradition: The government consulted with the central monastic body for the optimal date for the rollout of vaccines, which were then blessed upon arrival at the airport. A 30-year-old woman, born in the year of the monkey, was chosen as the nation’s first vaccine recipient on March 27, 2021, a day astrologists determined was particularly auspicious. Nationwide daily prayers for protection have also taken place at monasteries since the beginning of the pandemic.

But the likelier explanation for Bhutan’s success is far more mundane: good old-fashioned competent government — a resource that countries with far more wealth and power have so of ten struggled to harness.

Namgay Zam is a Bhutanese journalist and an Asia 21 Young Leader.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

117

F E AT U R E D C O FREYA BETTS is a freelance illustrator currently living of f-grid in a cabin nestled in nature in Cornwall, U.K. She is represented by both Jelly and the Poster Posse, which have brought her commissions with Marvel, Disney, Netf lix, Uber and Apple T V. In 2020 Freya collaborated with Royal Mail to release 12 illustrated Star Trek special edition stamps, which was publicised across all major U.K. media.

TING FANG CHENG is a data visual-

ization designer at Pentagram New York. Her work explores topics such as architecture, environmental studies, and social justice. She has contributed to projects that evoke strong narratives, such as visualizations related to the setting of the “Doomsday Clock”

by Bullet in of the Atomic Scient ists.

Ting has also been featured in PEN Magazine as a core member of “Happy Data,” a series of data visualizations that present positive news during the COVID-19 pandemic.

WENDY CUTLER is vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) and the managing director of ASPI's Washington, D.C., of fice. In these roles, she focuses on expanding ASPI’s presence in Washington and on leading initiatives that address challenges related to trade and investment, as well as women’s empowerment in Asia.

She joined ASPI following a nearly three decade long career as a diplomat and negotiator in the Of fice of the U.S. Trade Representative, including serving as acting deputy U.S. trade representative. In that capacity, she worked on a range of U.S. trade negotiations and initiatives in Asia.

118

VOL 3 · 2021

SALLY DENG creates art for magazines,

newspapers, books, and more in her Los Angeles studio. She is the author and illustrator of two children’s books: Skyward: The Story of Female Pilots in WWII and Warrior Princess: The Story of Khutulun. She was selected by Forbes “30 Under 30” for the 2020 Art & Style list and was named a Young Guns 16 winner by The One Club of Creativity. Her art has been recognized by American Illustration, 3x3, Society of Illustrators, and the ADC. MICHELLE FLORCRUZ is the social media and digital content manager at Asia Society, where she creates and manages digital editorial content.

Prior to Asia Society, she worked in various areas of media in the United States and Asia — with work experience in journalism, corporate communications, and television production.

She was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in Beijing, China. She now resides in New York City.

GLENN HARVEY was born in Quezon City, Philippines, but moved to Canada when he was 7 years old. He went to school at the humbling Sheridan College, where he honed his skills as an illustrator and graduated in 2013.

Glenn is currently the illustrator for The New York Times' Tech Fix column and his work can be found in other publications such as The Washington Post,Barron's, NBC News, Business Insider, The Atlantic, and more. He currently lives and works in Toronto.

MASSOUD HOSSAINI is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer forced to f lee his native Afghanistan in August 2021. Born in Kabul in 1981 during the o cc upat ion by t he Sov iet Un ion, Hossaini was raised in Iran. After the

9/11 attacks and af ter the U.S. war on the Taliban, he returned to Afghanistan in the beginning of 2002 and joined Aina, a non-governmental organization dedicated to media training.

In 2007, Hossaini joined the Agence France-Presse (AFP) and has been covering the War on Terrorism ever since for a variety of publications.

CHRISTINE HSIEH is senior marketing

manager at Asia Society New York. She is responsible for executing marketing campaigns and outreach for the organization, with a focus on driving visibility for its New York presence, programming, and global initiatives. Previously, she has worked in marketing for arts and nonprofit spaces in Beijing and New York. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

JENNY A. KAI is senior program officer

at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) and is based in Washington, D.C. She researches and manages projects related to U.S.-Asia trade policy, investment, regional prosperity, and women’s empowerment. Prior to ASPI, Jenny was a policy consultant at a global boutique firm that advises multinational companies on political and regulatory af fairs and market entry. She has also conducted research and co-published reports with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Strategy Group, Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore.

STEWART KWOH is co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project and is president emeritus of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-L.A., which he led for 35 years and built into the largest Asian American civil rights organization in the U.S. He is nationally known for work on hate

NTRIBUTORS crimes, human trafficking, and race relations. In 1998, he became the first Asian American attorney awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant."

In 1983, he served as co-counsel for American Citizens for Justice and Lily Chin, the mother of Vincent Chin.

AMI LI is a content producer and market-

er for Asia Society. Prior to joining the organization, she worked as a journalist, editor, and music promoter in Beijing, China. Ami was born in Beijing and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and rescue cat.

ARI LILOAN is a Filipino/Italian illus-

trator based in Berlin, Germany. Her work centers on timeless topics such as death, love, science, money, and fried chicken, explored through a lighthearted and pop surrealist lense. Some of her clients include Facebook, Red Bull, TIME, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Ari is represented by the UK-based Roar Illustration Agency.

ANDRIA LO, co-creator of the Chinatown Pretty project, is a freelance photographer whose work has been featured in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, and Wired. She lives in Berkeley, California.

LISA LOK is the design director of Asia

Society Magazine. As an independent designer and art director her work can be seen in pages of Airbnb Magazine, Rolling Stone, Oprah’s Quarterly, Wine & Spirits Magazine, Men’s Health, NYLON, and more. She enjoys working with artists from around the world and creating custom typography. You can find her either playing the drums, snacking, or propagating plant friends in Brooklyn.

VA L E R I E L U U , co-creator of the Chinatown Pretty project, is a writer and one-half of the Vietnamese pop-up restaurant Rice Paper Scissors. She lives in San Francisco.

MARY K AY MAGISTAD is associate director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, and an awardwin­n ing journalist who lived and reported in East Asia for more than two decades, including in China for NPR (1995-99) and PRI/BBC's The World (200313), and in Southeast Asia for NPR, The Washington Post, and others (1988-95).

She has created two critically acclaimed podcasts, On China’s New Silk Road (2020) and Whose Century Is It? (2015-18), and has taught international reporting and audio journalism at UC Berkeley.

MICHELLE YUN MAPPLETHORPE is vice president for global artistic programs at Asia Society and director of Asia Society Museum. She oversees Asia Society’s global arts and cultural programs, the Museum’s exhibitions, and its permanent collection. She is a widely-published author and frequent lecturer on modern and contemporary Asian art. She has an M.A. in modern art and critical studies from Columbia University and a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College. She completed the Getty Leadership Institute’s Executive Education Program for Museum Leaders and sits on the advisory board of Mount Holyoke’s art museum.

TOM NAGORSKI is Asia Society's for-

mer executive vice president. He is now global editor for a digital journalism startup, launching in 2022. He spent nearly three decades at ABC News, as managing editor for international coverage, foreign editor for

World News Tonight, and as an international reporter and producer. He won eight Emmy awards, the Dupont Award for excellence in international coverage, and a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation. Nagorski is author of Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.

VALERIO PELLEGRINI is a communication designer based in Milan. Specifically, he deals with data visualization, graphic design, illustration, and editorial design. He collaborates with research laboratories and studios in Italy and as a freelancer for the United States, Great Britain, Holland, Japan, and China.

MOTOKO RICH is Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, where she covers Japanese politics, society, gender, and the arts, as well as news and features on the Korean peninsula. She has been a reporter with The Times since 2003, and has covered a broad range of beats, including real estate, the economy, book publishing and education. She started her journalism career at The Financial Times in London and also worked at The Wall Street Journal in Atlanta and New York. She was raised in New Jersey, Tokyo, and Northern California.

KEVIN RUDD is president and CEO of Asia Society and president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. Previously, he served as Australia’s 26th prime minister (2007-2010, 2013) and as foreign minister (2010-2012). He led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis — the only major developed economy not to go into recession — and helped found the G20. He is also a leading international authority on China. He is chair of the board of the International Peace Institute.

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

119

C O N T. DANIEL RUSSEL is vice president, international security and diplomacy, at Asia Society Policy Institute. Formerly a career member of the senior foreign service at the U.S. Department of State, his most recent U.S. government position was serving as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. During his 33-year diplomatic career, he received numerous awards, most recently the 2017 Presidential Rank Award. Russel was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and University College London.

ORVILLE SCHELL is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. He is a former professor and dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of 15 books and a contributor to numerous magazines and newspapers. Schell graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at the University of California, Berkeley in Chinese history. He has traveled widely in China since the mid-1970s.

MATT SCHIAVENZA is assistant director of content at Asia Society and senior editor of Asia Society Magazine. Previously, he worked as an editor and writer at The Atlantic, where he launched and oversaw The China Channel. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public A f fairs, Schiavenza lived in China from 2004 to 2010. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Review of Books,and numerous other publications.

120

VOL 3 · 2021

BETTY WANG is a program of ficer at

Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, where she works primarily on U.S.-China climate cooperation and carbon market development in the Asia-Pacific.

Betty has a master’s degree in international relations and a bachelor’s degree in politics from New York University.

MOJO WANG is an illustrator whose work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration. As a former photo editor of ELLE MEN Magazine in Shanghai, he focuses on blurring the boundaries between editorial illustrations and visual narrative. Working with The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, The Washington Post, WIRED, Billboard Magazine, and The Economist, Mojo is currently expanding the horizons of his career in New York City.

DAN WASHBURN is executive director and chief content officer at Asia Society and managing editor of Asia Society Magazine. He is the author of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, named one of the Best Books of 2014

by The Financial Times. Washburn’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, FT Weekend Magazine, Slate, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and The Economist. He is also the founding editor of Shanghaiist. com, which grew into one of the most widely read English-language websites about China.

THOM WOODROOFE is chief of staff to

the president and CEO of Asia Society, and a fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute where he works on U.S.-China climate cooperation, China’s climate diplomacy, and Asia’s transition to net zero.

Thom previously worked as a diplomatic advisor to the president of a Pacific Island nation, including during Paris Agreement negotiations, and also worked with Rohingya leaders from Myanmar. Thom is a regular media commentator and writer having published over 100 opinion pieces. He studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

N A M G AY Z A M is an independent multimedia journalist and producer as well as the executive director of the Journalists’ Association of Bhutan.

She is an Asia 21 Young Leader and a Fulbright Humphrey Fellow. Zam is passionate about social justice, mental health, and equal rights.

HELEN ZIA, former executive editor of Ms. Magazine, is a writer and Fulbright Scholar. Her groundbreaking book Asian American Dreams chronicles the emergence of Asian Americans; her latest, Last Boat Out of Shanghai, was an NPR "best book." The daughter of immigrants from China, Helen was a leading voice in the landmark case of anti-Asian violence, documented in the film Who Killed Vincent Chin? Helen quit medical school to be a community organizer, construction laborer, autoworker, and then discovered her life’s work as a writer.

Asia Society Salutes Its Corporate Partners!

Asia Society’s corporate partners receive access to impactful educational resources, extensive global business networking and relationship-building opportunities, high-profile brand exposure, rewarding community service, employee engagement and corporate entertainment across Asia Society’s locations in the U.S. and abroad.

AsiaSociety.org/Corporate

JOIN US TODAY! Corporate@AsiaSociety.org

CONTACT Christopher M. Belisle, Executive Director of Corporate Relations

212.327.9375

cbelisle@asiasociety.org

BUSINESS COUNCIL LESLIE ARNOLD BHP

JOHN FELL Standard Chartered Bank

AMIT GHAI Chevron

DUSTIN LING Citi

JEFF WONG EY

MARK BARNES KPMG

JON FOX Värde Partners

VICTOR HAN KPMG LLP

XUEJUN MAO China Merchants Bank – NY

KRISTEN BOROWIEC, American International Group, Inc. (AIG)

GERARD FRANCIS Bloomberg LP

MIKA HAYAMA ANA

MANISH MISRA Chevron

YUQIANG XIAO Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (ICBC)

AILEEN FURLONG United Airlines

W. RUSSELL KING Freeport-McMoRan Inc.

SHARON PIERCE United Airlines

APOORVA GANDHI Marriott International

JERRY LEE Goldman Sachs

NATHAN STEIN Morgan Stanley

FRANK J. BROWN General Atlantic TRINH DOAN Bank of America

EMILY YUEH McKinsey & Co.

GLOBAL TALENT AND DIVERSIT Y COUNCIL UMRAN BEBA August Leadership AMANDA BAUM Goldman Sachs MICHAEL BARKER Medtronic ALLEN CHEN Bank of America Global Diversity & Inclusion *JYOTI CHOPRA MGM Resorts International

代丹 DAN DAI Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (ICBC)

ILIANA DE SANTIS Capital One

ERIKA KINGETSU Morgan Stanley

VIKAS SHAH Chevron

MU ZHANG China Merchants Bank – NY

SANA A. MANJESHWAR, JD, SPHR, COOP Chevron

MICHELLE SING McKinsey & Company

WINONA ZHAO EY

LATORIA (TORI) J. FARMER KPMG *APOORVA GANDHI Marriott International LUCY HARRIOT T Standard Chartered Bank

ARINDAM MUKHOPADHYAY Citi NEEL A PAL Goldman Sachs RONALD REEVES AIG

RISING EXECUTIVES NET WORK

MARIE SUESSE Värde Partners

ADVISORS

JASON WILLIAMS ViacomCBS LINDA ZHANG KPMG

* SUBHA BARRY Seramount * PHILIP A . BERRY Philip Berry Associates LLC * Indicates Former Co-Chair of the Council.

TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION COUNCIL

ROMY BASIL Bloomberg LP

AMY NG Bloomberg LP

JEFF WONG EY

DANNY LE KPMG

IVAN BATAC Bloomberg LP

NGOC-VU NGUYEN Bank of America

BRENDAN ALBEE OperatiVärde Partners

RICK LI Goldman Sachs

SAMUEL CHEN Bloomberg LP

DIAN TRABULSY, ESQ. American International Group, Inc. (AIG)

JOHN FELL Standard Chartered Bank

NANCY LIT TLEJOHN BHP

CHRISTIE HONG McKinsey & Co.

SUMUKH SHAH, AINS, ARE American International Group, Inc. (AIG)

SIMON FIGURES SC Ventures

SAMANTHA SANTOS Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC

MIRI KANG Morgan Stanley

YUWEI ZHANG EY

LINDA KIM, CFE Bank of America

JUN “JAMES” FU China Merchants Bank

MATTHEW (XIAOLIANG) ZHANG ICBC

ADVISORS

LISA LIM McKinsey & Co.

ALI ONGVORAPONG Tenshey

DINESH GUPTA Goldman Sachs

Founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd in New York City, Asia Society is a global nonpartisan nonprofit organization that works to address a range of challenges and opportunities facing Asia and the rest of the world.

List updated as of October 14, 2021

BOARD OF TRUSTEES CHAN H EN G CH EE

HAMID BIG L ARI

Co-Chair

Vice Chair

JO H N L . TH O RNTO N

LU LU C . WAN G

Co-Chair

Vice Chair

B E TSY Z. CO H EN

RO B ERT NIEHAUS

Vice Chair & Secretary

Treasurer

KE VIN RU D D President & CEO, Asia Society President, Asia Society Policy Institute

CHAIRS EMERITI

Nicolas Aguzin HRH Prince Turki AlFaisal Edward R. Allen III Isaac Applbaum Mohit Assomull Nicolas Berggruen J. Frank Brown Michael S. Chae Albert Chao Purnendu Chatterjee Duncan Clark O.B.E. Henry Cornell Frederick M. Demopoulos J. Michael Evans Jamshyd N. Godrej Filippo Gori Evan G. Greenberg Toyoo Gyohten Susan S. Hakkarainen George G. Hicks Doris M. Ho W. Bradford Hu

122

VOL 3 · 2021

Stephanie Hui Omar Ishrak Mitchell R. Julis Karamjit S. Kalsi Adrian T. Keller Mahmood J. Khimji James Kondo Chong-Moon Lee Lee Hong-Koo Ido Leffler Josephine Linden Ida Liu Jean Liu Geoff Martha Asheet Mehta John D. Negroponte Gaoning Ning Thierry Porté Emily Rafferty Stephen Riady Gary Rieschel Charles P. Rockefeller Nicolas Rohatyn Denise Saul

Stephen A. Schwarzman Neil N. Shen Shin Dong-Bin Katie Soo Jane Jie Sun Y. Ping Sun Harit Talwar Ernie L. Thrasher Mark Tucker Eunice Zehnder-Lai James D. Zirin Fernando Zobel de Ayala

Ronnie C. Chan Henrietta H. Fore Charles R. Kaye Maurice R. Greenberg PRESIDENTS EMERITI Josette Sheeran Vishakha N. Desai Nicholas Platt Robert B. Oxnam HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEES Peter A. Aron Winthrop R. Munyan Cynthia Hazen Polsky John D. Rockefeller IV

As of November 1, 2021

TK CREDIT HERE

TRUSTEES

TK CREDIT HERE

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

123

TK CREDIT HERE

ASIA SOCIETY MAGAZINE

124