Perspectives

A series of portraits of people with disabilities (PwD) in Cambodia taken in celebration of their capabilities instead of their limitations. It focuses on their journey of empowerment and crafts a life of independence for themselves. From a farmer to an NGO director, from a tailor to a fisherman, they all have the abilities to do what everyone else does and these photos show exactly that, not their disabilities. Created in collaboration with various local NGOs and Heinrich Böll Foundation.

1 February 2021: Almost everyone in the country woke up in horror to the mounting bad news. An internet blackout and the inability to withdraw cash from ATMs have sparked anger and anxiety nationwide, as most employees in different cities were supposed to get their salaries via the banking system on the first day of the month. But this angst has gone far beyond the first month of the military takeover in Myanmar. It has since become a permanent feature.

As the dust of the 2022 Philippine presidential election settles, the alliances, the compromises, and the policy trajectory become more visible under the Marcos-Duterte government.  The well-run campaign and the curated candidate branding must now give way to the real governance work, so as to address the pressing issues faced by the post-pandemic Philippines. 

In an interview, Hong Kong activist Kaspar Wan talks about his experience of becoming a transman and the transgender rights movement in the city.

Population policies should be devised within a reproductive justice framework as women’s bodies have been easily objectified and utilised for national development when maternity is only understood as a woman’s duty. South Korea’s current pronatalist approaches have failed to address the real issues of low fertility trend.

Pakistan is in the middle of the demographic transition. The right investment in young people is required to realise the “demographic dividend”.

As long as hydrogen production relies heavily on fossil fuels, the policy will distract South Korea from its 2050 carbon neutrality strategy and end up emitting enormous additional greenhouse gases. To keep the net-zero pledge on track, South Korea should adopt a renewable-energy based hydrogen scheme by drastically cutting down its reliance on fossil fuels.

In Japan, despite the hiking single elderly population, there is a chronic shortage of caregivers for home visit. As many single seniors struggle to find a conversation partner, what about interacting with a robot instead of a human? Recently, the United States introduced communication robots to minimise medical costs incurred from the elderly’s social isolation. What can the world learn from Japan?

At the end of March 2022, Shanghai was plunged into surreal silence, and scarcity. The country’s strictest Covid-19 pandemic lockdown lasted for two months. Never, since decades, had the people minded their three meals that much, to the extent of becoming the only thing they cared about. In their struggles for self-sufficiency and survival, group buying came to rescue. Did dwellers find a new sense of community or were they more fragmented?

Change is all around us; experiencing it can be exciting or worrisome, confusing or even disturbing. By contrast, the idea of “transition” stands to provide a sense of direction, in a sea of change and insecurity. Change may be happening to us; a transition has direction, it can be planned, perhaps even be initiated. It moves into a positive, sustainable direction – or so we hope. The equivalent German term “Wende” and its numerous composite terms play a prominent role in the programme of the German Green and in the international work of Heinrich Böll Stiftung (hbs).

This pandemic has dragged the world into a puzzling time warp that resembles one of the popular “stop-and-go” childhood games such as the one known in Hong Kong as Red Light, Green Light. Depending on local transmission waves of the disease and health policies, in some months we have found ourselves socially isolated, with work nearly ground to a halt and life plans jeopardised. In other months the clock ticks again – people take a deep breath and walk in the open, hurriedly trot along old routines to make up for lost time, and some have dashed around the clock to set up massive quarantine, vaccination, or aid facilities within tight constraints.

In Asia and globally, the fight against the coronavirus has illustrated the importance of public trust in authorities, particularly when it comes to the effectiveness of various policy approaches. But what does public trust stem from? Why is it so easily lost, and what does it mean to citizens during a crisis? As the world slowly recovers and opens up, countries in Asia are continuing to grapple with new outbreaks, vaccine hesitancy and other challenges. Reflecting on the past year and a half, we take a closer look at how countries in the region have managed the relationship between the people and the state, as well as the successes – and failures – that are defining their pandemic stories.

Nine years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, fundamental issues remain unresolved. Many domestic critics saw the Olympics as a ploy to distract from the nuclear disaster. The larger question remains: Should a country with an ongoing nuclear disaster be hosting these games?

This should have been a summer like no other for Tokyo. After 56 years, the Games of the XXXII Olympiad and the Paralympic Games should have returned to the city to bolster former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s grand project to revitalize Japan. Like in 1964 – when Tokyo, as the first Asian city to host the Olympics, sought to demonstrate to the world that it had emerged from the post-war period and transformed into a strong, liberal democracy – the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were meant to show the nation and the world that ‘Japan is back’ and that the 2011 Fukushima triple catastrophe was a thing of the past.

East Asians take the hosting of major sporting events very seriously. The three previous Summer Olympics in East Asia all had symbolic meanings for the respective hosts and for the Olympic movement. But the Coronacrisis has upset Japanese ambitions for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, bringing not just additional socio-economic costs but casting a shadow over Prime Minister Abe's political legacy.