[Letter to the editor] Korean schools need proper writing courses

Korean students memorize everything to study for exams. Almost no teachers in school teach students how to write creative answers on exam papers. Thus, students feel lost when they are asked to submit papers in university. Nonetheless, university students are expected to write essays and papers in the majority of the classes, with a huge gap of students’ abilities in writing. However, there are not many professors in universities who teach the students how to think critically and write down thei

June 17, 2018

[Hal Brands] China’s master plan: exporting an ideology

The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017 is sure to loom large in future accounts of China’s relations with the world. It was then that the party cleared the way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely, and when Xi himself advertised China’s global ambitions by declaring that Beijing would now “take center stage” in world affairs. It was also when Xi threw down the gauntlet in an equally consequential way. 　In his three-hour speech to the assembled delegates, Xi extolled the

June 17, 2018

[Joshua Pollack] Trump-Kim summit marks a return to engagement, but it’s not a breakthrough

The outcome of the Donald Trump-Kim Jong-un summit in Singapore brings to mind the old Army quip: “Hurry up and wait.”　The urgency of holding a meeting between the top leaders of North Korea and the United States, rather than diplomatic professionals, is perhaps best explained by the personality and mind-set of our first reality TV star president. The freshly signed joint statement of this “epochal event” — not merely historic, mind you, but epochal — is roughly what could be expected to emerge

June 17, 2018

[Jay Ambrose] Trump, North Korea and positive possibilities

Once upon a time it was fire and fury and loads of sanctions like nobody ever saw before, and look, it was said, President Donald Trump is going to get us into a nuclear war. But then North Korea came around, saying it wanted to talk. So Trump met with Kim Jung-un who promised to denuclearize, and now it’s said Trump has elevated a murderous dictator to hero status and set us up as dupes.　What I want to say is wait and see and quit trying to make Trump out to have handled this so badly when ther

June 15, 2018

[Mihir Sharma] West’s crackup reshapes the East

If US President Donald Trump wanted to discredit the West, he could hardly be doing a more thorough job of it. The hostility he directed at ostensible allies in the G-7 last weekend was bad enough, especially when contrasted with the obsequious praise he lavished on North Korea’s murderous Kim Jong-un in Singapore.　Worse perhaps was the visual contrast between the G-7 and a third, recently concluded summit -- a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Qingdao. There, Trump’s counterpa

June 14, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] World Cup extravagance shows Russia hasn’t mastered cost control

If the record cost of the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014 was the embodiment of Russian government wastefulness, the soccer World Cup, which starts on Thursday, appears far more restrained. Yet, despite its best efforts to bring expenses under control, President Vladimir Putin’s regime still hasn’t learned how to be parsimonious.　 The most-often quoted cost assessment for the Sochi Olympics is $51 billion, $11 billion more than the second most expensive Olympics, the 2008 Beijing summer games. The

June 14, 2018

[Mark Buchanan] Why de-nuking North Korea is so difficult

President Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true, but following his historic meeting Tuesday with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his repeated assertion during a press conference that “it does take a long time” to “pull off complete denuclearization” stacks up pretty well. It will probably take a decade at the very least.　 It’s not hard for a nation to dismantle or destroy its nuclear weapons, as well as the technological infrastructure used to create them. North Korea may have as many

June 14, 2018

[Michael Schuman] This time is different with North Korea. But better?

I should have been excited as I watched a historic event unfold in Singapore. The summit meeting of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un held out hope that the last ugly conflict of the Cold War could be brought to a close, alleviating the threat of nuclear war in Asia and possibly opening up the vicious North Korean dictatorship to the world.For me, the matter is more personal. I lived in South Korea for several years in the 1990s, and I’m forever connected to the peninsula by bonds of family and frien

June 13, 2018

[Kristalina Georgieva and Marie-Claude Bibeau] Gender inequality has high price

There is no doubt that ensuring that women and girls enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men and boys is the right thing to do from a moral and ethical standpoint. But it also makes economic sense -- $160 trillion worth, to be precise.A new report released by the World Bank Group, with support from the Canadian government, finds that if women had the same lifetime earnings as men, global wealth would increase by $23,620 per person, on average, in the 141 countries studied, for a total of

June 13, 2018

[Chichago Tribue] When Trump met Kim

Meeting in Singapore on Tuesday, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a feel-good document that outlines lofty ambition but no specifics. It could -- emphasis on could -- eventually lead to substantive negotiations. It could -- emphasis on could -- eliminate the threat of nuclear attack against the US by North Korea.Or it could lead to nothing but the next round of trouble.That’s because Kim’s words alone, his signature on a piece of paper, are worth nothing. Just as

June 13, 2018

[Adam Minter] China’s spies elude US vacuum cleaner

President Donald Trump could never be accused of underestimating the impact of Chinese economic espionage and technology transfer on the United States. “We’re talking about big damages,” he said when discussing retaliation for intellectual property theft in a January interview. “We’re talking about numbers that you haven’t even thought about.”His tariffs and a recently floated proposal to restrict certain Chinese researchers in the US are calibrated to be equally tough. But will they work?To ans

June 12, 2018

[Therese Raphael] Brexit a la Trump is a hard-liner’s fever dream

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson reportedly once said that he enjoyed trying to change the course of history, even if that meant “throwing rocks into glass houses and listening to the shattering of glass.” So it’s no wonder he thinks that US President Donald Trump would be a great Brexit leader.“Imagine Trump doing Brexit,” Britain’s chief diplomat told a room of 20 Conservative Party guests at a private dinner Wednesday night, in an off-the-record talk leaked to Buzzfeed. “He’d go in bloody h

June 12, 2018