THIS ESSAY BY L.A.-BASED BUSINESSMAN AND PHILANTHROPIST SPENCER H. KIM IS REPRINTED FROM THE INFLUENTIAL SEOUL-BASED NEWSPAPER JOON-GANG DAILY, WITH PERMISSION: SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – I couldn’t figure out why, but it really bothered me. Why are there so many cars in Korea with dark windshields? The occupants drive around…
Author: Tom Plate
Tom Plate is a journalist and university
professor who has worked at Time magazine,
the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and other
media institutions.
LOS ANGELES: DOES THE UN HAVE A SECRETARY GENERAL GENDER DEFICIENCY?
ASIA MEDIA WRITES — Does the UN have a future? Of course it does; in a sense this is a silly and misleading question. The real question is what quality of future this world organization will have. The surpassingly competent Ban Ki-moon wraps up his second five-year term at year’s…
HONG KONG: SO WHO IS XI JINPING?
TOM PLATE WRITES – Begin with the unpretentious wisdom of the late Yogi Berra, a notably inarticulate Hall of Fame baseball player celebrated for memorable ‘Yogi-isms’: “It’s tough to make predictions,” one went, “especially about the future.” But the wish for the better can parent premature thoughts; the caring media…
US-KOREAN ALLIANCE: TRUMPTED BY A NEW ISOLATIONISM?
Professor Moon Chung-in of Yonsei University Writes (courtesy of JoongAng Ilbo, April 9, Page 27) — “The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance survived 600 years, and the U.K.-U.S. alliance continued for more than 100 years,” Yoichi Funabashi, former editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun, told me a few years ago. “I believe the U.S.-Japan…
CHINA: A PESSIMISTIC VIEW OF XI JINPING
ASIA MEDIA WRITES – Orville Schell has been writing about China for decades and is not viewed in the West as a China-basher by any means. But in the current New York Review of Books, the former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism offers a rigorous recounting…
HONG KONG: THE ‘FOOLISHNESS’ OF ZUCKERBERG – AND THE TOM PLATES OF THE WORLD
TOM PLATE WRITES – They say some things have to be seen to be believed, which is probably why the sight of a jaunty Mark Zuckerberg social-networking through Tiananmen Square on a bicycle (of all things) was almost unbelievable — unless you were there. Am I saying that the chairman,…
CHINA: COLUMNIST KRISTOF ON WHAT MAY BE ‘CHINA WORST POLICY MISTAKE’
ASIA MEDIA WRITES – Ever wonder what in the world Beijing was thinking in Sept. 1980 when the national government took the first fateful step in implementing the ‘one-child’ policy? Writing in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof…
INDONESIA: NO MORE ‘MR NICE NATION’? BETTER WATCH OUT, CHINA
INDONESIAN SCHOLAR RISTIAN ATRIANDI SUPRIYANTO WRITES (courtesy of The Diplomat) – Yet another incident involving a Chinese coastguard vessel and an Indonesian patrol boat has occurred in the vicinity of Indonesia’s Natuna Islands in the South China Sea. Unlike the previous incidents, this time the Chinese coastguard vessel almost intruded…
SINGAPORE: BEHIND THE TRUMPET OF THE PESSIMISTS
COURTESY OF THE WORLD POST, KISHORE MAHBUBANI WRITES FROM SINGAPORE — The rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in American politics has shocked the world. America has consistently projected itself as the country that could be trusted for political predictability and stability. While extremist or fringe movements might emerge…
BEIJING: THE QUESTION OF CHINA’S IMAGE
TOM PLATE WRITES – I have been traveling to Asia and writing about it in various newspapers and journals for two decades, and I have visited China enough times to know it closely. My observation about China is substantially different from most of the written accounts I read or video-view…
MALAYSIA: MAYBE MAHATHIR IS RIGHT?
TOM PLATE WRITES – When “Conversations with Mahathir,” the second of four volumes in the Giants of Asia series, was published a few years ago, some of my friends and colleagues were utterly aghast. How could you ― gullible American author ― dignify this vulgar man with such semi-reverential treatment?…
BANGKOK: THE FLOWERING OF THE NOIR ARTIST
TH FOLLOWING COURTESY OF THE NATION NEWSPAPER IN BANGKOK- Chris Coles, the American expressionist painter who’s spent so many years in Thailand that every evening stroll becomes a neon nightmare, has suddenly gone all flowery. Faced with the predicament of having no paintings that his mother back in Maine would…
CHINA AND THE POPE: HEAVEN ON EARTH?
TOM PLATE WRITES — You don’t have to be a saint to be a great and effective leader, but you do have to be audacious. So when an audacious leader comes along that a good many admirers suspect to be a saint, you probably have got something special in front…
THAILAND: WARNINGS FROM FORMER ELECTED PRIME MINISTER THAKSIN
THE INDEPENDENT NEWS SITE ASIAN CORRESPONDENT WRITES – Thailand’s former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has criticized attempts by the ruling military junta to push forward a constitution, calling it “crazy” and part of a strategy to avoid a long overdue election. Speaking to the Financial Times in Singapore recently, the…
AUSTRALIA: BE EXTRA CAREFUL IN MALAYSIA, TOURISTS!
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITES – Australia warned Sunday that terrorists may be plotting attacks in and around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s largest city. The Australian High Commission in Malaysia said in a travel advisory that there was an ongoing terrorism threat in Malaysia, noting that authorities there have arrested a number of…
WASHINGTON: PRESTIGIOUS GEORGETOWN JOURNAL FOCUSES ON ASIAN LEADERSHIP
ASIA MEDIA WRITES – From one of America’s most prestigious universities, from one of our most prestigious foreign-affairs schools – and at a time when the U.S. is trying to decide on its own next new leader – comes an issue of a major journal devoted entirely to the issues…