Letter from the Editors
From the highest level of government to the individual lives of each citizen, politics touches everything, everywhere.
Welcome to the May 2021 issue of The Diplomat Magazine!
This issue is devoted to politics, but not simply the act of casting ballots or governing countries (although there’s plenty of that, as well). As the saying goes, life is politics – and politics is life. The decisions made at the top inevitably impact the lives of individuals. But the opposite can also be true: Popular sentiments at the grassroots, especially popular anger, can remake governments and political parties alike. As this issue shows, politics, writ large, truly touches every aspect of life.
Our cover story is a particularly brutal example of how political decision-making impacts individual lives – in this case for the worst. James Leibold, associate professor and department head at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, examines the politics behind the crackdown on ethnic minorities– not just the Uyghurs – in Xi Jinping’s China. Leibold, an expert on the politics of ethnicity, race, and national identity in China, notes that there is a common thread from the calamity in Xinjiang to the quieter sidelining of the Korean and Mongolian languages: an attempt to create a single, top-down definition of what it means to be part of the “Chinese nation.” And for those living within China, there’s no opting out of that project.
In South Korea, meanwhile, Youngmi Kim of the University of Edinburgh takes a look at politics in the more traditional sense. She explores the state of the country’s two biggest political parties after by-elections in Seoul and Busan, and with less than a year to go before presidential polls. But even here it’s clear that politics is all-encompassing. The mayor races in Seoul and Busan hinged on economic and social issues, namely soaring real estate prices and reverberations from the sexual harassment charges that necessitated the by-electons in the first place. How ordinary South Koreans responded to these challenges decided the mayoral elections. Now it’s up to the political parties to react, with all eyes on the big prize next year.
The Philippines, too, has a 2022 presidential election surging beneath its present political currents. Phlippine President Rodrigo Duterte is closing in on his final year in office. As he does, freelance journalist Michael Beltran writes, a cacophony of crises are reaching their crescendo: an elite-driven economy failing to serve society, a government prone to lies and obfuscation, and a pubic health emergency of worsening proportions. Barrelling into office back in 2016, Duterte promised decisive action and big results, but as the coronavirus pandemic continues to lay bare, his administration struggles with “an inability to solve its problems without shooting at something.”
And finally, we turn to Kyrgyzstan, which in April held its third election in six months, this time an avalanche of local council races and a concurrent constitutional referendum. While the controversial referendum, handing President Sadyr Japarov the super-presidential system of his dreams, has drawn much attention, Colleen Wood, a Ph.D. student at Columbia University and regular contributor to The Diplomat, argues that the local council elections have much to tell us about Kyrgyzstan's ever-evolving political landscape.
We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more in the following pages.