You hear about the Far East in martial arts movies, the travel section of your newspaper, and in numerous financial reports. Pretty exotic. But do you really know what is going on over there and how it could impact your world?
Some experts refer to the Twenty-first Century as the "Pacific Era." Certainly the rapidly-developing Chinese economy is on everyone's radar screen. But major geopolitical factors have been overlooked in the daily news coverage from this critical region. Consider the following:
- A missile test-fired by North Korea in August of 1998 overflew the heavily-populated primary Honshu island of Japan. The incident so alarmed the Japanese that a political consensus was formed which has led to the gradual rearming of a nation which has been living under the post-World War II MacArthur "peace constitution."
- Yes, the Cold War may be over, but two of the remaining communist nations are in Northeast Asia. China and North Korea are the world's leading proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and place military power atop their respective national priority lists.
- Taiwan and Hong Kong seek to be fiercely independent of mainland China but are, at the same time, heavily invested in China's economy, especially its high tech sector.
- North Korea is one of the world's most impoverished nations. Yet it is playing a dangerous game of nuclear blackmail with the world's most powerful nations including the United States and its neighbors in Northeast Asia.
For these reasons, the publishers of WorldTribune.com and Geostrategy-Direct.com have assembled a network of veteran correspondents in the Far East and contributing editors stateside to cover these and other vital stories. The weekly "Inside China" and "Inside North Korea" sections are written by the most authoritative monitors of these secretive countries. You can read their reporting each week by subscribing to East-Asia-Intel.com.
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