Simon Denyer

President Biden was making a point as he welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to the White House on Friday, using the first in-person visit by a foreign leader to emphasize that his administration sees Asia as its highest priority. The…

TOKYO — President Biden has vowed to rally the United States' partners to respond to Myanmar's military coup. But persuading Asian allies to support sanctions or moves to isolate the regime will be no easy task, given extensive business interests, a…

TOKYO — Japan is paying 87 companies to shift production back home or into Southeast Asia after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted supply chains and exposed an overreliance on Chinese manufacturing. While China’s economy is already recovering from…

TOKYO — Their story is a depressingly familiar one. An indigenous people live as hunter-gatherers practicing animist beliefs, before settlers sweep across their land, bringing disease and discrimination and almost wiping out their culture. On Friday,…

GIFU, Japan — Twenty-seven-year-old War Nu left her village in central Myanmar at the end of last year bound for Japan. She had borrowed nearly $3,000 to pay an agent for a job in the garments industry here, lured not only by the offer of much higher…

YOKOHAMA, Japan — As the United States and Europe take steps to keep more people out, Japan is cautiously moving to let more people in. This is a country that has long sought to defend its culture and its ethnic homogeneity by discouraging…

TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stood before African leaders in Nairobi two years ago and outlined his vision for a vast stretch of the globe — from the Pacific to the Indian oceans — united by trade and a common political worldview. It…

Tens of thousands of foreign women are flocking to China for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s shortage of women. Chinese men surf websites that offer foreign brides, and may wind up paying upwards of $8,000 for marriage…

Li Chunke began carving ivory after leaving school as a 15-year-old boy. Today, at 68, this master craftsman is working until the early hours of every morning, trying to finish a 20-inch statuette of Buddha on an unforgiving deadline — before China…

BEIJING — When President Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in January, critics said he was leaving a vacuum at the heart of the Asia-Pacific region, ceding the United States’ role as regional economic leader. On Sunday,…

BEIJING — China promised Friday to halt its domestic ivory trade completely by the end of 2017, a decision greeted by environmentalists as offering real hope for an end to a poaching crisis that is wiping out tens of thousands of elephants across…

For China’s President Xi Jinping, the recently concluded summit of G-20 leaders was a resounding success, a chance to strut his stuff on the world stage and underline his nation’s ever-growing global leadership. China arrested five citizen…

The price of raw, illegal ivory has almost halved in China in the past 18 months because of growing public awareness, a promise from President Xi Jinping to ban the trade, a far-reaching anti-corruption drive and a slowing economy, according a new…

BEIJING — Not since the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has there been this much diplomatic concern about the direction China is taking. And for once, in a highly unusual show of frustration and unity, Western nations are speaking…

It was supposed to be an art exhibition exploring China’s censorship of the Internet. It became an example of how that censorship can reach all the way around the world, even onto Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Firewall, a Pop-up Internet Cafe, was…

BEIJING — Burma’s historic general elections and signs of a landslide victory for backers of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi have raised some uncomfortable questions in giant northern neighbor China. The first is how China’s Communist Party rulers…

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Faced with slower growth at home and rising labor costs, Chinese entrepreneurs are seeking foreign markets as never before. But as they rush abroad, they are grappling for the first time with unruly trade unions, independent…

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — China released a new image of a “suspected floating object” in the Indian Ocean on Saturday as Australians spotted debris in the search area, bringing fresh hope to the massive hunt for a missing Malaysia Airlines…

RANGOON, BURMA — A new English word has entered colloquial Burmese, a word that could not even be uttered in public until recently. The word is “crony,” and it describes the business elite who exploited their closeness to the country’s military…

RANGOON, Burma — For most of two decades, while Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest, her deputy Win Tin was condemned to solitary confinement in prison, denied even pen and paper by his jailers. When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for…