Movies and television dramas are excellent social documents in that they faithfully reflect societal change and the alteration of consciousness throughout history. Sometimes they illuminate us with profound insights into and powerful criticisms of contemporary society. Since films and TV shows enjoy enormous popularity, their impact is huge, more widespread and more powerful than traditional literature. The celebrated HBO series “Game of Thrones” is a good example. In the eighth and

You know times are hard in provincial South Korea when the guy selling walkers and hearing aids can only make ends meet by day trading. Lee Ho-cheol, 52, keeps his eyes on flashing stock quotes while his shop, crammed with wheelchairs, canes and other equipment for seniors, sits empty. Lee has run the store for roughly two decades, and his plight shows just how dire things have become. Few of his neighbors make enough money sticking to their day jobs, he says, and many have turned to selling bea

A long-held belief of analysts in India is that the economy is supply-constrained. Demand isn’t even worth a footnote, while a temporary squeeze in the onion market deserves obsession because it could be inflationary. It’s increasingly obvious that this view is outdated. In October, inflation quickened more than expected to 4.62 percent because of, yes, an onion shortage. Yet core inflation, which strips out volatile commodity prices, slumped to 3.4 percent, the lowest since the

The most dismaying thing about the impeachment proceedings against US President Donald Trump is that they are falling so short of the constitutional gravamen of the issue. True, some Democrats in the House of Representatives, particularly Adam Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, do appear to understand the seriousness of the question before them. But most Republicans -- egged on by Trump, who often complains that they are not doing enough for him -- are o

A crown jewel of President Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 plan is faltering.Tsinghua Unigroup is the business arm of the prestigious Tsinghua University, Xi’s alma mater. The company has been trying to establish itself as a leader in China’s nascent memory-chip industry since 2015, when it famously tried to acquire stakes in US rivals Micron Technology and Western Digital. Both advances were rejected amid concerns that US regulators wouldn’t approve the deals on national

Thirty years ago this week I was on my way to Prague to watch Czechoslovak communism end with the Velvet Revolution. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, the Soviet communist party was headed for collapse, and the Cold War would soon end.Five months earlier, Chinese leaders had cracked down on student admirers of Western democracy in Tiananmen Square. That tragedy didn’t stir the same geopolitical shock waves as the events in Europe, because China was still a poor, developing country.Yet 30 ye

People all over the world are resorting to mass demonstrations to express grievances and press unmet demands. While, in some ways, popular protests are a triumph of democratic principles and civic activism, they also carry serious risks, including violence by and against protesters. Their pervasiveness today points to a failure of governments, democratic and authoritarian alike, to hear, let alone meet, the needs of their people.The issues at stake are wide-ranging. In Catalonia, demonstrators a

On every visit I’ve made to China, I’ve looked at issues connected with rule of law, a concept interpreted very differently here and in the US.On this trip, I decided to check out a joint program between Temple University and the law school at Tsinghua University, one of China’s finest, a program that is celebrating its 20th anniversary.Temple’s “Rule of Law” master’s degree program, taught on the sprawling, leafy Tsinghua campus, draws Chinese professio

In the 1970’s when the South Korean economy bypassed North Korea, the foreign press reported that it was finally in the stage of taking-off after a long taxi on the runway. Indeed, the whole world was watching South Korea’s successful take-off at the time. The South Koreans were very excited because they finally made their way out of the long, dark tunnel of postwar poverty.Recently, however, I came across a rather depressing newspaper article by professor Kim Young-min entitled, &ld

The island of Tsushima, halfway between Japan and South Korea, is about as close as you can get to the frontline of their trade war. Now part of Nagasaki prefecture, waves of Korean cultural, commercial and military influence have crested and receded over the hills of this verdant island since the Middle Ages.Here it’s apparent that centuries-old ties between the nations can’t be unwound by political rhetoric spewing from capital cities hundreds of miles away. Economic life crawls al

Although many societies aspire to provide equal opportunities for everyone, that is easier said than done. People born into different economic and social statuses have unequal educational or financial starting points. This often leads to very different career and life opportunities.Digital technology was not invented to tackle inequality, and there is even a risk that it could widen existing economic and social disparities. But, as the case of China illustrates, new platforms also offer many pos

One of the first things I learned on my current trip to Beijing is that foreigners are marooned if they don’t have a Chinese bank account.That’s because China, a global leader in e-commerce, has become a nearly cashless society. Everyone from school kids to grandmas pays for everything with a personal barcode on their cellphone. I mean everything, including bottles of water, rides with DiDi (the Chinese Uber), takeout dinners and haircuts.　International credit cards are rarely accept

The fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 8, 1989, dramatically and suddenly accelerated the collapse of communism in Europe. The end of travel restrictions between East and West Germany dealt a death blow to the closed society of the Soviet Union. By the same token, it marked a high point for the rise of open societies.I had become involved in what I call my political philanthropy a decade earlier. I became an advocate of the concept of open society that had been imbued in me by Karl Pop

The worst foreign policy decision by the United States of the last generation -- and perhaps longer -- was the “war of choice” that it launched in Iraq in 2003 for the stated purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction that did not, in fact, exist. Understanding the illogic behind that disastrous decision has never been more relevant, because it is being used to justify a similarly misguided US policy today.The decision to invade Iraq followed the illogic of then-US Vice Presi

At the end of the Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a celebrated essay called “The End of History?” Communism’s collapse, he argued, would clear the last obstacle separating the entire world from its destiny of liberal democracy and market economies. Many people agreed.Today, as we face a retreat from the rules-based, liberal global order, with autocratic rulers and demagogues leading countries that contain well over half the world’s population, Fukuyam