Who is Xi Jinping?

Published on Oct 30, 2012 by Luke Hunt

FAR EAST CORRESPONDENT — It is hard to know what a politician really thinks. Even in a country like the United States, which likes to bombard its electorate with an endless stream of campaign ads, when you scrape off their polished veneers, peel back the layers from their stump speeches, turn off their mics, and get right down to it, one would be hard pressed to find too many people who actually know what a politician thinks and feels. Sure people may claim to have deep insight into Candidate X or Candidate Y – the former schoolmates, teachers, employers, and drinking buddies like to come out of the woodwork to pontificate – but at the end of the day, it....

Regards Asia, Obama or Romney?

Published on Oct 29, 2012 by Luke Hunt

FAR EAST CORRESPONDENT — The foreign policy debate between Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama excluded certain important issues that were not among those questions selected by moderator Bob Shieffer. The three Asian issues given the most attention were Iran, China, and Afghan-Pakistan. And even on these issues the debate deepened uncertainty regarding the presidential candidates’ policies. Read more in The Diplomat. .

Wen Jiabao’s Family Riches

Published on Oct 26, 2012 by Luke Hunt

FAR EAST CORRESPONDENT —  The mother of China’s prime minister was a schoolteacher in northern China. His father was ordered to tend pigs in one of Mao’s political campaigns. And during childhood, “my family was extremely poor,” the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a speech last year. But now 90, the prime minister’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, not only left poverty behind — she became outright rich, at least on paper, according to corporate and regulatory records. Just one investment in her name, in a large Chinese financial services company, had a value of $120 million five years ago, the records show. Read more in the New York Times. .

Bears Face Eviction

Published on Oct 25, 2012 by Luke Hunt

ASIAWATCH — Endangered species rescued from bile farms could now be evicted by authorities looking more to commerce than conservation, Luke Hunt Reports For years environmentalists have battled official corruption, ignorance and a plain lack of interest in a brave attempt to stem wildlife trafficking and save what’s left of Southeast Asia’s endangered species. Successes have been rare and too often defined by government promises to crack down, boost surveillance and enforce laws, promises that have been largely ignored. There have, however, been exceptions. Among the most notable was a project in Vietnam to rescue bears from the barbaric practice of bile farming, where a catheter or a needle is inserted into their bile duct and the bile harvested to....

Killing Altantuya Shaariibuu

Published on Oct 22, 2012 by Luke Hunt

FAR EAST CORRESPONDENT — It will be six years tomorrow since bodyguards for now-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak dragged the Mongolian translator and party girl Altantuya Shaariibuu out of a car in a patch of jungle near the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Shah Alam. As she begged for her life and apparently that of her unborn child, they knocked her unconscious, then shot her twice in the head. That was Oct. 19, 2006. According to court testimony, Chief Inspector Azilah Hadri and Corporal Sirul Azhar Umar, members of the elite Unit Tindakan Khas, both assigned to Najib’s office, then wrapped Altantuya’s body in C4 plastic explosives and blew her up, possibly to mangle her remains so badly that the....