2025 EAST ASIA ROUNDUP

In 2025, the world's eyes were rightly transfixed on Israel's genocide in Gaza and ever-escalating regional aggression, the horrific wars in Sudan and Congo, and the imminent threat of a direct US attack on Venezuela. Amidst all this, East and Southeast Asia may have appeared blessedly free of the same kind of kinetic violence, save for brief clashes between Thailand and Cambodia at their colonially-drawn border.

But the year also brought fresh reminders that imperialism had until recently subjected the region to equally genocidal warfare, and is champing at the bit to do so again. China, Vietnam, and Korea solemnly commemorated 80 years since they defeated Japanese colonialism at tremendous cost. And far-right firebrand Sanae Takaichi's ascension as Prime Minister emphatically showed that as the United States' sub-imperial vassal, Japan has never come to terms with that wartime legacy.

In particular, Takaichi closed the year by all but threatening war with China over its island province of Taiwan. Her remarks inadvertently reminded the world that Japan itself first separated Taiwan from mainland China by colonising it in 1895. And they only further exposed the island's increasingly unpopular separatist rulers as warmongers, US-Zionist puppets, and historical revisionists second only to the Japanese far right itself.

But much like China's frozen civil war across the Taiwan Strait, Korea's division at the DMZ is also a thoroughly modern creation of Cold War US imperialism. And it continues to define the terms of popular struggle in the US-occupied South today. Having heroically defeated former far-right president Yoon Suk-yeol's coup attempt in December 2024, the Korean people are now fighting for economic sovereignty in the face of Trump's tariff blackmail.

For all the military might that the US still deploys along the "First Island Chain" -- running from Korea through Japan and Taiwan to the South China Sea -- those trade wars may yet redraw the map of regional alliances. At the end of the year, Trump's National Security Strategy seemed to grudgingly acknowledge that the US could no longer realistically contain China as a "near-peer competitor." The new year will show whether China's seemingly inexorable, yet peaceful rise as a sovereign counterweight to US hegemony can continue without a return to the naked imperial violence of the recent past.