Global Asia - March 2022

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When news started filtering out of China in January 2020 of a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, alarm spread initially in Asia where cases — all linked to travelers from the city — began to crop up and then spread. The looming healthcare crisis didn’t take long to explode in country after country. Images of overwhelmed hospitals and morgues or desperate medical workers and relatives of the ill pleading for ventilators and other supplies amplified the global sense of panic. Just how bad could this get and when would it end, many asked.
Few would have thought that in this third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world would still be struggling to come to terms with it and mitigate its effects. To be sure, effective vaccines were developed in record time. But issues such as distribution, supply and equitable access soon emerged. So too did widespread and sometimes acrimonious debates about the most appropriate and effective national and international policy responses. Those debates continue.
In Global Asia’s September 2020 cover package, we highlighted what seemed then to be the relative successes of Asian countries, at a time when Covid-19 hospitalizations and death rates in Western countries appeared to be headed off the charts. But much has changed with the highly contagious Omicron variant of the virus. Western countries, with relatively high vaccination rates and declining hospitalizations and deaths, are increasingly embracing the idea of “living with the virus,” in part to enable their economies to abandon measures that have stymied growth...

Global Asia Magazine Description:

Global Asia is a quarterly publication of the East Asia Foundation. The foundation, established in Seoul in January 2005, strives to promote peace, prosperity, security and sustainability in East Asia by creating an open and creative forum for the exchange of ideas on regional co-operation and integration, among other goals.
The mission we have set for ourselves with Global Asia is both bold and urgent: It is to provide a compelling, serious, and responsible forum for distinguished thinkers, policymakers, political leaders and business people to debate the most important issues in Asia today.
Global Asia is not a journal with a fixed point of view, or a particular agenda. Our aim is to give voice to the global dimension of what is happening in Asia. In our pages and on our web site, we aim for Asia to speak to the world, and the world to Asia. That is important at a time when this region is playing an ever greater role in world affairs.
There are other fine publications on international affairs. What sets us apart is our focus: Asia. We believe that the world is moving into “the Age of Asia,” to borrow a phrase from one of the articles in the inaugural issue of Global Asia in September 2006. This transformation is not going to occur overnight, but it has already begun.
The region’s dynamic economic growth, stable and accountable political systems, maturing democracies, and evolving sense of community are giving Asia greater weight in the world. These developments will have enormous implications for governments, businesses, societies and individuals across the globe. How that transformation is viewed, and shaped, from within Asia and how it is perceived outside Asia is an essential part of the story we have to tell.
The forces of globalization are having a profound impact throughout the world. And they are being influenced and channeled in different ways in different parts of the world. Ours is the story of Asia’s experience with globalization, and the ideas and debates influencing it. In pursuing our mission, we aim to play a part, however modest, in helping to shape the future of Asia.