Day: April 28, 2023

WASHINGTON —  An unprecedented bilateral nuclear declaration that Washington and Seoul just announced may not be enough to assuage South Koreans’ worries about a U.S. pledge to protect them from North Korea’s nuclear attacks as it was designed to do, according to experts. U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol presented the Washington Declaration on Wednesday at a post-summit news conference. With it, the U.S. agreed to “make every effort to consult with the ROK on any possible nuclear weapons employment on the Korean Peninsula” and…

HONG KONG —  Like most people in Hong Kong, taxi driver Leung Tat-chong says it feels like the city is recovering after years of protests, crackdowns and pandemic restrictions, while it also has changed forever. He’s earning almost as much as he did before the pandemic. But, Leung said, the city has been divided since the 2019 protests, in which hundreds of thousands of people marched, and many battled with police, in opposition to a government they saw as a proxy for Beijing. For the first time since the start…

“Evan,” a Chinese grad student at Columbia University in New York, looks around a campus coffee shop anxiously as he explains why he’s helping form a group to challenge the orthodoxy of his government back home.  “We can do something we can’t do in China,” he says, a black Yankees cap pulled low.   But as Evan’s demeanor suggests, doing “something” carries risks even here, 7,000 miles from Beijing. He speaks more forcefully about the motivation behind the Columbia White Paper Society when there aren’t as many Asian students – potential…