Famous American poet William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician, so he thought of poetry as spiritual medicine that healed wounded souls. Interestingly enough, his contemporary, poet Wallace Stevens, was a lawyer, so he thought of poetry as a quest for the order of the universe. Another American poet, T.S. Eliot, was a banker who regarded poetry as spiritual wealth and treasure. Recently, one of my Spanish friends asked me, “In Korea, how could musicians hold a picket, demanding severer punishme

China caused consternation in the tech world by walling off its internet, blocking foreign cloud-computing firms and forcing companies to store data locally if they want to operate on the mainland: Many fear a full-fledged balkanization of the internet. The worry now is that something similar may be happening in cutting-edge gene research.Late last month, in a move that’s largely been overlooked outside the scientific community, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology announced it had sanctio

They shop in malls and high-end supermarkets, buy condos by the seaside, attend wine tastings, vacation abroad, and push their kids to apply to Harvard. But they aren’t American suburbanites; they are China’s huge and growing urban middle class, which Beijing hopes will eventually consume enough to lower the country’s dependence on exports.Whatever the outcome of the US-China trade war -- and any tete-a-tete between Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping at the upcoming G-20 meeting in Argentina -- Chi

American pop star Ariana Grande had every reason to expect that her new single, “Thank U, Next,” would race to the top of the US charts when it was released earlier this month. When she checked iTunes after its release, though, she met with a surprise. Kris Wu, a superstar in China, not only had the No. 1 spot on the iTunes’ singles chart but also seven of the top 10 songs. It was an extraordinary achievement for an artist with almost no North American profile, and Grande and her camp weren’t bu

While the bombastic US-China “trade war” has been getting the headlines, US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been waging a quieter battle to combat Chinese theft of trade secrets from American companies -- a practice so widespread that even China trade boosters regard it as egregious. The Trump administration’s much-ballyhooed campaign of tariffs will eventually produce some version of a truce -- economists say that any other result would amount to a mutual suicide pact. But the ba

One of the assumptions that economists sometimes use to frame their models is to specify that some variables will be held constant, a concept that’s expressed with the Latin phrase “ceteris paribus.” We often make the same mistake in politics and foreign policy. We concentrate on our own domestic issues and assume that the rest of the world will remain fixed while we sort them out. We’ll get back to you later, in 2021, say. But the world moves on. It’s dynamic, not static: Erratic changes in one

Countries in the Mekong basin, notably those located in the lower part of the river -- Asia’s seventh longest -- are in need of a collective strategy to secure their future, given China’s control of the upstream part and ongoing changes in global geopolitics.The 4,909-kilometer river runs from Tibet in China through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. But only its lower portion is regulated by an international agreement and an organization.The lower part is popularly known as Mekong w

Ever since he met with Kim Jong-un last June in Singapore, US President Donald Trump has spoken of his North Korean summitry with pride. The nuclear crisis, he has assured the world, is defused. Diplomacy continues. Sanctions remain.Experts have known for some time that these talking points were shaky. On Monday, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies proved it. The center released a report using commercial satellite imagery to show that North Korea continues to work on i