Timothy McLaughlin

On Thitu, a tiny dot of coral reef and palm trees in the South China Sea about 300 miles off the coast of the Philippines, the inaugural Mrs. Kalayaan Pageant was the event of the night, the week, and quite possibly the month. When I was there in May, the entire island’s population, some 250 people, seemed to have gathered around a nautical-themed stage to see who would win the sash and crown. You might think that a local beauty contest would not involve geopolitics. You would be wrong.

First came the concrete markers engraved in multiple languages. Naval aviators from the Philippines would spot them during surveillance flights in the mid-1990s and dispatch forces to remove them. Then came the huts—small, wooden structures teetering on stilts on uninhabited islands, fit maybe for fishermen to take shelter during storms. They looked innocuous enough, one of the pilots, Alberto Carlos, recalls thinking.

Andrew Chiu, a prodemocracy district councilor in Hong Kong, was attempting to stop a knife-wielding assailant from attacking protesters in November 2019 when the attacker broke free and lunged at him. The man pulled Chiu close in a belligerent embrace, sank his teeth into Chiu’s left ear, then snapped his head back and, as Chiu reached up to find blood spilling from his head, spat a sinuous chunk of flesh onto the brick sidewalk.An attempt to reattach Chiu’s ear was unsuccessful.

Changi Naval Base, which sits on the east coast of Singapore near the busy shipping lanes of the Singapore Strait, has in the first months of 2023 been welcoming well-armed American visitors. Less than two weeks into the new year came a visit from the USS Makin Island, an amphibious assault ship. Days later, the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier with a small city’s worth of crew members, made a port call—accompanied by three destroyers.

HONG KONG—When Beijing imposed the national-security law on Hong Kong in 2020, its goal was not simply to stifle free expression and lock up dissenters. The idea was to subordinate every institution in the city, leaving the “one country, two systems” framework that granted autonomy to the Chinese territory an empty slogan. Henceforth Beijing would no longer tolerate criticism from Hong Kong, or protests on its streets.

In early March, Han Yang, a 50-year-old Sydney resident, was invited by a friend to join a WeChat group with other members of Australia’s Chinese diaspora that focused on Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Yang found that the others began posting a stream of offensive material—stories filled with vitriol toward Ukrainians, Russian-state disinformation, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—accompanied by user comments cheering on Moscow’s violence.

In early March, Han Yang, a 50-year-old Sydney resident, was invited by a friend to join a WeChat group with other members of Australia’s Chinese diaspora that focused on Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Yang found that the others began posting a stream of offensive material—stories filled with vitriol toward Ukrainians, Russian-state disinformation, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—accompanied by user comments cheering on Moscow’s violence.

To avoid drawing unwanted attention, Tommy and the four others dressed as if they were heading out for a leisurely day. It was July 2020, and the weather was perfect for some time on the water. The young men acted as though they knew one another well, and were excited to reconnect. But inside, Tommy felt panicked and desperate. He was about to attempt an escape from Hong Kong, where he faced a near-certain jail sentence for his role in the prodemocracy protests there.

On Friday afternoon, supporters of John Lee gathered for what his adviser described as a preelection rally, a final push in Lee’s campaign to secure victory in the election to be Hong Kong’s next chief executive.Don’t let the vocabulary fool you. No members of the general public attended Lee’s event, a stage-managed flourish to a weeks-long show masquerading as a contest.

Four years ago, the State Department began an investigation into the Myanmar military’s brutal operation against the country’s Rohingya Muslims the prior year, which had resulted in scores of deaths and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya being pushed into Bangladesh.

In the summer of 2019, Ronson Chan, then an editor for the independent news outlet Stand News, took a delayed honeymoon to Germany with his wife. The timing was terrible. Prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong were at full tilt. Chan was distracted. He checked his phone at all hours, obsessively looking for updates from his colleagues.

One day in January 2020, a team of experts from Beijing arrived in Wuhan, China, to investigate the origins and assess the scale of an outbreak of a mysterious virus. At least 60 people in Wuhan had already fallen ill. Troublingly, cases had begun to surface in Thailand and Japan.The same day, Chinese President Xi Jinping departed from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, where he had met with the country’s leaders.

The wedding ceremony held in November on a verdant farm in the Philippines was for the daughter of a senator. Most of the guests’ attention, though, was paid not to the bride and the groom but to another duo in attendance.Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the country’s late dictator, escorted Sara Duterte-Carpio, the daughter of the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, past guests sitting in white trellis-backed chairs.

In November 2019, Nixie Lam suffered the same fate as nearly all of her pro-Beijing compatriots running in Hong Kong’s local elections. The two-term district councillor was roundly defeated by a prodemocracy candidate whose campaign had been buoyed by months of sustained protests.

As Aung San Suu Kyi climbed the steps of the gargantuan parliamentary building into her first session as an elected lawmaker, I watched along with my colleagues in the offices of The Myanmar Times, where we crowded around and turned our heads upward to the boxy televisions that hung precariously above the newsroom.This was July 2012. Suu Kyi’s arrival had been delayed by a whirlwind 17-day lap around Europe.

Under the relentless crush of Beijing, the courtrooms of Hong Kong have become some of the few venues safe for protest in the city. Defendants accused or convicted of political crimes have turned otherwise banal hearings and bail applications into opportunities to voice dissent and challenge the arduous legal process.

Shortly after Jarrett Wrisley arrived in Bangkok in 2008, the global financial crisis hit the media industry, forcing outlets to slash budgets. Wrisley, a food and travel journalist, saw his opportunities to write rapidly diminishing, so he pivoted to the only other thing he knew how to do: cooking. In September 2010, Wrisley opened Soul Food Mahanakorn, serving northern and northeastern Thai fare in the capital’s trendy Thonglor neighborhood.

Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times. For 15 days this month, prosecutors and defense lawyers in a Hong Kong courtroom wrangled over the history and parsed words in this phrase. The back-and-forth included numerous forays into the obscure in an attempt to pinpoint the exact meaning of the slogan, created five years ago and popularized during 2019’s pro-democracy protests.

Earlier this month, I stood in line alongside an aide to Tam Tak-chi, both of us readying to meet with the imprisoned political activist at the Hong Kong prison complex where he is being held. As Tam’s assistant waited her turn for supplies she brought for Tam to be inspected, a woman approached from the nearby waiting area and the two exchanged excited hellos before hugging and chatting briefly.

Since Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup on February 1, an initial sense of shock has given way to vibrant protests, and most of the ire has been concentrated on the junta: Hundreds of thousands of people in towns and cities from the foothills of the Himalayas to the far southern border on the edges of the Andaman Sea have marched in defiance of an armed force known for its durability and cruelty.

Since Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup on February 1, an initial sense of shock has given way to vibrant protests, and most of the ire has been concentrated on the junta: Hundreds of thousands of people in towns and cities from the foothills of the Himalayas to the far southern border on the edges of the Andaman Sea have marched in defiance of an armed forces known for its durability and cruelty.

Hong Kong’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic has put it in an enviable position. Bolstered by a public that learned difficult lessons from the 2003 SARS pandemic, and because of a relatively swift government response this time around, this city of roughly 7 million people has suffered fewer than 12,000 cases and only 205 deaths. It never underwent the large-scale, harsh lockdowns implemented elsewhere.

The police report refers to it simply as “the Scheme.” It was, in law enforcement’s telling, a conspiracy aimed at overthrowing Hong Kong’s government. For seven months, an eclectic array of prodemocracy activists and political hopefuls held meetings, raised funds, and gave media interviews in preparation for an unofficial primary election. One of them, the police report states, went so far as to locate “appropriate venues for polling stations.

Protesters in Yangon have in recent days gathered near the imposing red doors of the Chinese embassy in the city, denouncing China for what they say is its support of this month’s military coup in Myanmar. Conspiracy theories have swirled about the arrival of Chinese technicians to help Myanmar’s new junta build its own “firewall” to control the internet.

When Myanmar was summoned to The Hague last year to face allegations that its armed forces had carried out a genocide against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, no military officers attended. Instead, it was the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi lamenting that the horrific reports and photos seen by the world were “an incomplete and misleading factual picture of the situation.” Domestically, her speech was viewed as a defense of her country.

Tam Tak-chi has spent much of the past two decades talking. First as a popular radio host, then as a prodemocracy activist, Tam had opinions, many of them, and cared little about holding them back. So it was not entirely surprising—perhaps even expected in Hong Kong’s rapidly atrophying space for dissent—that his words eventually drew the ire of authorities. Early one September morning last year, Tam was arrested at his home.

Bundled against Mongolia’s frigid late November air, thousands clamored to see and hear the Dalai Lama four years ago, their boots crunching against a dusting of snow at the Gandantegchinlen monastery in Ulaanbaatar. Mongolia’s officials insisted then, in 2016, that the visit was strictly religious, and had nothing to do with politics: The country has connections to Tibetan Buddhism that reach back hundreds of years—the title Dalai Lama is actually of Mongolian origin.

This month, two young men stood outside a high-end Hong Kong shopping mall, clutching bouquets of white flowers as they held a memorial for a protester who had died nearby last year. The event, like any marking the milestones or memories of the prodemocracy movement, drew police attention; more than a dozen gathered to keep watch, one holding a video camera to record the events. When a passerby stopped to join the pair, police stepped in.

Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, stood in front of reporters yesterday for the most consequential press conference of her time leading the city. Prior to Lam stepping behind the podium, news had begun to stream in that officials in Beijing had passed a national-security law to be imposed on Hong Kong, the most significant altering of the ostensibly autonomous territory’s status since it was handed back to China from Britain in 1997.