The Third Indochina War called forth dramatic changes in the international relations of Southeast Asia. Foremost among these changes was a shift in the geopolitical orientation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The organization’s founders established ASEAN in 1967 to contain Chinese influence in Southeast Asia. But in the wake of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in late 1978, ASEAN forged a tacit alliance with the People’s Republic of China to pursue a campaign of rollback against Vietnam. This article argues that ASEAN's volte-face and China’s reentry into networks of regional diplomacy depended upon a shift in Indonesian threat perceptions. As political Islam displaced Chinese communism as the key threat fixating Indonesian policy, the Suharto regime abandoned its longstanding attempts to integrate Vietnam into the architecture of regional order and instead accommodated itself to a Thai-led effort to enlist China as a counterweight against Vietnam. The reorientation of Indonesian diplomacy reveals the dynamics of a phenomenon that anthropologist Heonik Kwon has called the “decomposition” of the Cold War – the geographically and temporally uneven erosion of the Cold War as a social reality and the gradual elaboration of a post-Cold War era.
On June 21, 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) went into effect, requiring companies to prove that goods imported from the People’s Republic of China were not made with forced labor. The bill was a reaction to reports of products being made with forced labor from Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities being held in camps in the PRC, chiefly in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. However, implementation of the bill would be difficult. The PRC government denied the existence of forced labor, and this would make it nearly impossible for importers to trace their supply chains all the way to the origins of primary goods and prove that no forced labor was involved. Three industries were chiefly at stake – tomatoes, cotton, and polysilicon – at a time of high inflation and increasing urgency to do something about climate change, but the bill also threatened to fundamentally re-shape U.S.-PRC relations, potentially along the lines of a full-scale economic “decoupling.”
Singapore-based bank DBS went through three waves of purpose-driven transformation, overhauling the bank’s systems, upgrading employee skills, and re-centering its customer focus, with the bank’s purpose growing bolder with each key milestone achieved. Find out how the board, CEO Piyush Gupta and his management committee steered the bank through the waves of change, and the challenges they had to overcome along the way.
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