Letter From the Editors

Welcome to the May issue of The Diplomat Magazine!

In the news business, we tend to focus on concrete events: election victories (or defeats) and signed deals. But the story doesn’t end when the polls close, or the ink dries on a business contract. Governments have to govern, agreements have to be implemented – and sometimes the results fall far short of expectations.

This month, we explore the complicated politics behind the most recent elections in Taiwan, India, and Malaysia, as current events continue to redefine the historical significance of polls in 2020, 2019, and 2018, respectively. We also go beyond the headlines of billion-dollar investments to look at the complicated social and political factors shaping China’s presence in Central Asia.

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen was re-elected in a landslide in January 2020, winning more votes than any presidential candidate in Taiwan’s history. But, as Lev Nachman and Jessica Drun write in our cover story, that doesn’t mean voters were entirely satisfied with her first term. From pension reform to LGBTQ rights, voters on both sides of Taiwan’s political divide had reason to criticize Tsai’s policies. Nachman, a Fulbright research fellow in Taiwan and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California Irvine, and Drun, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, outline the ups and downs of Tsai’s first term, and use that to tell us what to look for in the next four years.

In 2019, various anti-Chinese protests in Kazakhstan resulted in hundreds of arrests and renewed discussion of a rumored boogeyman liable to upset China’s billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative as it passed through the region: Sinophobia. But, as Sebastien Peyrouse of George Washington University explains, while Sinophobia in Central Asia is very real, its ability to complicate Beijing’s business in the region is debatable. China’s economic presence in the region is extensive and irreplaceable.

When the 2019 general election dust settled last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was returned to power and handed an invigorated mandate. Modi’s second term has so far been defined by the implementation of his party’s Hindutva agenda. But did Hindu nationalists catapult the BJP to power, or did the BJP fan the flames of Hindu nationalism to secure more votes? A meaningful explanation of the rise of Hindu nationalism in politics over the last few years, writes Neelanjan Sircar of Ashoka University, must consider key structural shifts in society, politics, and political incentives.

Finally, Nor Arelene Tan, a Kuala-Lumpur-based journalist, retraces Malaysia’s wild political ride over the past two years. The excitement and hope brought about by the Alliance of Hope’s stunning 2018 election win was short-lived, Tan writes, “with the promise of a new democratic paradigm ripped away merely two years after supposedly making history.” Disillusionment among voters, racial tensions stoked by the opposition, and internecine tensions in the unlikely Alliance spelled its doom, throwing Malaysia into political chaos just as a global pandemic arrived.

We hope you enjoy these stories, and the many more inside this issue.