Could the current (and worsening) global energy crisis have one small silver lining: halting the advance of the monstrous regiment of sports utility vehicles (SUVs)?

Despite widespread advocacy by media and politicians in most countries—though notably less so in the United States—for energy savings, environmental protection, and public health, the past d…

Read more

Octogenarian Indian tycoons in the pharma and consumer industries are believed to have been not only the buyer but also the seller of an oil on canvas (below) by Raja Ravi Varma, a famous and stylish 19th century artist, that set an unexpectedly high record price of nearly US$18 million for Indian art last week at a Sa…

Read more

Broken incentives are draining talent from Japanese surgery, emergency care, pediatrics, and other essential fields into private aesthetic medicine in a silent but profound restructuring within the healthcare system. Historically, acquiring a medical license was viewed as a commitment to a lifetime of rigorous public service within hospitals. But today, a growing segment of young physicians is treating that same license as a highly specialized business degree.

The catalyst for this shift is a phenomenon known as Chokubi (direct-to-aesthetics)—the practice of junior doctors transitioning straight from their mandatory two-year residency into the lucrative, unregulated private aesthetic clinic sector – specialized, non-surgical, or minimally invasive medical procedures to enhance physical appearance, facial balance, and skin health via Botox or dermal fillers, laser treatments, chemical peels, and body contouring, often designed to reverse aging signs or improve skin texture.

The Japanese are highly receptive to aesthetic medicine, particularly non-surgical, low-downtime procedures, ranking fourth worldwide with a focus on subtle, natural-looking enhancements rather than dramatic transformations, with 70 percent of Japanese women aged 14-23 having had or wanting plastic surgery.

Eyelid surgery (double-lid) and facelifts are the most popular, with clinics emphasizing high-precision techniques, particularly in Tokyo. The market has been growing sharply in injectables and laser treatments, increasing by 174 percent between 2010 and 2019, driven by a focus on “natural” beauty, precision, and an aging population seeking rejuvenation.

While definitive nationwide data is difficult to aggregate given the private nature of these clinics, industry estimates suggest that upwards of 300 junior doctors annually are now bypassing essential clinical specialties in favor of aesthetic medicine. To place this in perspective, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) Physician Statistics indicates an influx of roughly 9,000 new doctors each year.

Losing hundreds of these recruits annually represents a significant, compounding drain on the talent pool. The consequence is a hollowing out of what the Japanese medical community refers to as “gritty” clinical medicine—the high-stress, low-margin, yet socially vital fields like surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, and emergency care.

The Economics of Cos-pa and Tai-pa

To understand this migration, one must examine the shifting values of modern Japanese professionals, which are increasingly defined by two concepts: cos-pa (cost-performance, or return on investment) and tai-pa (time-performance, or efficiency of time usage). The traditional path of a hospital surgeon—characterized by grueling on-call shifts, immense legal liability, and rigid hierarchies—offers notoriously poor cos-pa and tai-pa.

The economic reality driving this labor allocation is stark. In Japan, physician salaries within the public and semi-public hospital sectors are effectively capped by the government-controlled National Health Insurance (NHI) reimbursement rates. These rates artificially suppress the market value of complex, life-saving procedures. Conversely, a Chokubi doctor entering the unregulated, cash-pay aesthetic sector can easily command double the starting salary of a university hospital surgeon, while maintaining strictly 9-to-5 hours with zero on-call duties and significantly lower litigation risks. When viewed through a purely economic lens, the decision to pursue aesthetics is not a moral failing of the younger generation, but a highly rational response to a deeply flawed incentive design.

A Comparative Warning: The South Korean Paradigm

This structural vulnerability is not unique to Japan. South Korea provides a harrowing preview of the logical endpoint of these market dynamics. Both nations share a similar fee-for-service model under national health insurance frameworks, juxtaposed against intense societal pressures driving demand for aesthetic perfection.

In South Korea, the flight from essential fields recently culminated in a systemic crisis. As evidenced by OECD health data, while the overall density of doctors may appear adequate, the distribution is becoming perilously skewed. The concentration of specialists in essential medicine—such as pediatrics, obstetrics, and emergency care—is plummeting. The situation escalated dramatically in 2024 with massive medical strikes across South Korea, highlighting a system stretched to its breaking point. Young Korean doctors have been fleeing to what is colloquially known as “GP-Skin” (General Practitioner Skin Care), driven by the realization that the legal risk-to-reward ratio in essential public medicine has become entirely untenable compared to the lucrative, low-risk private aesthetic market.

Market Failure and the Loss of Public ROI

The Chokubi trend represents a classic market failure in the realm of public health. Medical education in Japan is heavily subsidized by the state; it is estimated that educating a single medical student costs the taxpayer tens of millions of yen. When these newly minted doctors immediately pivot to the private aesthetic sector, the public’s return on investment (ROI)—intended to manifest as a robust workforce providing essential healthcare—is fundamentally lost. Publicly subsidized training is effectively functioning as a pipeline for private, cash-pay enterprises.

Furthermore, essential clinical medicine relies heavily on a “master-apprentice” model of skill transference. As hundreds of doctors bypass this rigorous postgraduate training annually, the “middle management” layer of hospitals—the mid-career physicians who perform the bulk of surgeries and shoulder the burden of night shifts—is slowly evaporating. This skill gap threatens the long-term sustainability of acute care capabilities.

Strategic Interventions: Realigning the Incentives

Addressing this brain drain requires acknowledging that appeals to professional nobility are insufficient against overwhelming economic realities. Structural reforms are necessary to reclaim the profession and correct this misallocation of labor.

First, the NHI reimbursement rates require a drastic overhaul. The budget must be reallocated to significantly increase the financial value assigned to high-risk, high-stress procedures. Policymakers must make essential clinical practice competitive from a cos-pa perspective. Simultaneously, implementing robust “no-fault” compensation systems for high-risk specialties could mitigate the crippling fear of litigation that drives young doctors toward low-risk aesthetic fields.

Regulatory measures are also vital. Similar to discussions recently initiated in the MHLW’s Committee on the Appropriate Implementation of Aesthetic Medicine, Japan must consider establishing mandatory minimum requirements for general clinical experience—perhaps five years of service in essential fields—before a physician is permitted to practice independently in the unregulated aesthetic sector.

Finally, exploring mechanisms for economic redistribution is essential. Levying a targeted “social contribution tax” or licensing fee on highly profitable private aesthetic clinics could provide a dedicated funding stream to subsidize the training and salaries of surgeons and ER physicians, thereby internalizing the externalized costs of this medical brain drain.

The Chokubi phenomenon is not an anomaly; it is the predictable outcome of a system that financially penalizes its most essential workers. A society whose incentive structures reward the pursuit of beauty more reliably than the preservation of survival is a society courting a public health disaster. If Japan and nations with similar healthcare frameworks fail to align the economic realities of their physicians with the public good of their citizens, the dedicated, life-saving clinical doctor may soon become a casualty of market forces.

Tomoaki Takei is a physician at Koza Shibuya Tsubasa Clinic, Medical Corporation Tsubasakai.

With the growing popularity of mindfulness and meditation, as well as a steady stream of converts, it may seem on the surface that Buddhism is expanding around the world. But recent research paints a more complicated—and, at first glance, worrying—picture.

According to the latest analysis by the Pew Research Center, covering 201 countries and territories, Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population declined between 2010 and 2020 despite the powerful charisma of the Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and global recognition as a figure of peace, and Buddhism’s rational self-help approach emphasizing inner peace, compassion, and mental discipline over dogmatic belief or divine authority.

In 2010, an estimated 343 million people identified as Buddhists globally. By 2020, that number had fallen to 324 million—a decline of roughly 5 percent. Over the same period, the global population grew by 12 percent, and all other major religious groups expanded in size. As a result, the Buddhist share of the world’s population dropped from 4.9 percent to 4.1 percent. Two major factors help explain this decline: demographics and religious switching.

Demographics

Demographic trends are not favorable to Buddhism. Nearly all Buddhists—98 percent—live in the Asia-Pacific region, with around 40 percent concentrated in five East Asian societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. These regions tend to have older populations and lower birth rates. The median age of Buddhists globally is about 40, significantly higher than the global median of 31. Fertility rates among Buddhists are also low, averaging 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain population size.

As a result, between 2010 and 2020, the number of Buddhists in these five East Asian societies fell by approximately 32 million, or 22 percent.

The Problem of Definition

Yet the survey raises important questions—beginning with the issue of definition. Many people who engage deeply with Buddhist ideas and practices, especially in the West, do not formally identify as Buddhists. Mindfulness meditation, for instance, has been widely adopted in secular contexts, often stripped of religious labeling but rooted in Buddhist traditions. Similarly, Buddhism has long coexisted with other religious identities. It is not uncommon for individuals who identify as Christian or Jewish to privately draw on Buddhist philosophy. Such fluid and overlapping identities are difficult to capture in surveys that rely on fixed, either-or categories.

The China Question

There is also the question of China. Some estimates suggest that China alone may have hundreds of millions of people who engage with Buddhist beliefs or practices. Estimates of how many there actually range from 4 percent to 33 percent of its population, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, from 42 million to 362 million people. The Chinese Communist Party’s nearly 100 million members are required to be atheist, meaning any survey is likely to run into problems out of apprehension.

Measuring religious affiliation in China thus is notoriously difficult due to political sensitivities and restrictions on religious expression. Many individuals may be reluctant to identify themselves as religious in surveys, even if they participate in spiritual practices. If this undercounting is significant, it could substantially alter the global picture of Buddhism’s decline.

Religious Switching

Another key factor is “religious switching”—the movement of individuals away from the religion in which they were raised. According to the Pew Research Center, for every 100 adults raised as Buddhists, 12 convert to Buddhism later in life. Proportionally, this is a higher conversion rate than that of Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam.

However, Buddhism also experiences higher rates of disaffiliation. For every 100 people raised Buddhist, 22 leave the tradition, resulting in a net loss of 10 adherents. This trend is particularly pronounced in East Asia. In Japan, roughly half of those raised Buddhist no longer identify with the religion, while in South Korea the figure rises to six in ten. Thailand stands as an exception, where Buddhist identity remains largely stable.

The reasons for this shift are complex. In South Korea, the growth of Christianity has been driven in part by strong institutional networks and active evangelism. In Japan, the decline may reflect broader social changes, including weakening religious institutions and a disconnect between younger generations and ritual practice.

Transformation, Not a Decline

Taken together, these trends suggest not simply a decline, but a transformation. As a formal religious identity, Buddhism may indeed be shrinking. But as a system of thought—as mindfulness, ethics, and a way of understanding the mind—it appears to be spreading beyond traditional boundaries. In a world marked by the conflict we face today, with the Middle East plunged into unimaginable violence, Buddhist teachings of kindness and compassion encourage empathy, fostering ethical behavior and social harmony. Buddhism’s Middle Way offers a lifestyle that avoids the extremes of self-indulgence and severe austerity which are badly needed today. Its principle of interdependence reminds us that all life is connected.

What the data may be missing is precisely this shift: from belonging to practicing, from identity to experience. Buddhism, in this sense, is no longer something people simply inherit or declare. It is something they adopt, adapt, and live—often without naming it.

Tsering Namgyal is a Tibetan journalist and is author of three books including the novel “The Tibetan Suitcase,” a biography “His Holiness the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje: A Biography” (reviewed here in Asia Sentinel), and other works.

Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief, graduated from Princeton University with a history degree and rose through WSJ’s ranks from Hong Kong intern to leading coverage of the Korean Peninsula. In between, he visited North Korea twice, in 2013 and 2017. His forthcoming book, Korean M…

Read more

There were two stars during Delhi’s India Art Fair week earlier this month. One was Ai Weiwei, the leading Chinese dissident artist who was on his first major visit to the country. The other was Tyeb Mehta, possibly the most distinguished of India’s famous “modern” artists whose 100th birth anniversaries…

Read more

British-Indian novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta studied philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, and earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before turning to writing. His debut collection, Tokyo Cancelled—a set of interconnected stories inspired by modern folktales—was published in 2005. This was followed by his novel Solo (2009), which chronicles a Bulgarian centenarian’s reflections on 20th-century upheavals and futuristic visions. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

His 2014 nonfiction book on the impact of globalization on his adopted home city, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, received the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and nominated for the Ondaatje Prize.

Dasgupta’s most recent book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2025), traces the evolution of the nation-state system—from ancient empires to today’s tech-driven crises. It “critiques failures in addressing migration, ecology, and inequality, urging a post-national reimagining of citizenship, law, and economy.”

In an interview with Majid Maqbool for Asia Sentinel, Dasgupta—whose writings explore themes of migration, inequality, and global systems across genres—discusses growing up between two cultures that have shaped his writing and reading life, and how thinkers and writers like Marx, James C. Scott, and Thomas Piketty have influenced his intellectual and literary outlook while critiquing imperialism, capitalism, and global power structures.

Edited Excerpts:

You grew up between two cultures in England, with Indian roots shaping your sense of the world. What kinds of books did you read as a child and adolescent, and how did those early reading experiences influence the writer—and reader—you later became?

Yes, my two cultures affected my outlook significantly. I was a British kid who didn’t fit entirely into the British story, but who certainly didn’t fit into the Indian story either. So I’ve always had some dissatisfaction with the grand stories nations tell about themselves. As an adolescent, I was particularly drawn to stories of outsiders - including Camus’s The Outsider. I loved Dostoevsky.

What are some works of nonfiction that have profoundly shaped your intellectual and literary outlook, particularly influencing your critiques of imperialism, capitalism, and global power structures?

I reached adulthood in the aftermath of Soviet collapse – during the triumph of Western liberalism and capitalism. But that era was very unconvincing. It was supposed to bring peace and freedom, but the opposite was true. I tried to understand why systems built on apparently peaceful principles could never in fact be peaceful. Marx, of course, was a touchstone. But also more recent thinkers such as James C Scott, who had a clearer understanding of state power, colonialism and ecology, and Thomas Piketty, who documented the decline of Western equality.

Your recent book ‘After Nations’ examines how the empire continues to economically and politically rewire Asia. During the research and writing of this book, which texts were most central in helping you develop and sharpen its arguments?

A major theme is international law: how international law has worked to perpetuate the power relations instituted during the period of European empire, and to stop nations from rising or falling in the economic hierarchy. A few books were essential in this: Antony Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Katerina Pistor’s The Code of Capital (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Branko Milanović’s Global Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2016).

I feel the implications of Chinese power are also poorly understood, partly because our conversations are very short term. With his book, The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz began a very important conversation which has been taken up by such other fascinating writers as Peer Vries and Roy Bin Wong.

For readers engaging with your latest book, ‘After Nations’, are there other books or texts you would recommend as parallel or companion readings that can deepen understanding of the issues you explore in the book?

I feel strongly that we are victims, today, of the fact that our picture of the world is very artificial. We are bewildered by the world because our stories of it are fossilized, and have little to do with the world as it actually is. Some books which can correct this: Ntina Tzouvala’s Capitalism as Civilisation; David Graeber & David Wengrow’s, The Dawn of Everything.

In your nonfiction, especially in Capital, you’ve written powerfully about urban transformation and the lived experience of cities like Delhi. Any books or texts you found especially illuminating on cities, urban change, and modernity you’ve also explored in this book?

Mike Davis’ astonishing book, Victorian Holocausts, offered a perspective I wished I’d known about when I wrote Capital. It would have expanded my sense of the traumatic history of colonial urbanism. But after writing three books about cities, I think After Nations has increased my appreciation of the global countryside. One of the most serious charges against the modern nation-state system is that it has destroyed, not only our natural heritage, but also agrarian systems and cultures. Peasants, the upcoming book by my partner, Maryam Aslany, offers a crucial corrective to the urban bias which shapes almost all consideration of “modernity”.

Is there a lesser-known or under-read book that you feel captures the current moment of xenophobia, fragmentation, and global disorder particularly well?

I see the nation-state system as a mechanism for transferring resources from poor regions to rich ones, and for exporting war, poverty and ecological destruction in the opposite direction. In order really to understand what our world is about, it’s essential to look at Africa, which bears by far the deepest scars of this process. Read the Congolese novelist Jean Bofane, for instance.

Is there a recently published novel or work of nonfiction that you’ve found exceptional—one you would highly recommend for both its literary merit and the clarity of its insights?

Lyn Alden’s Broken Money. In much of the world, the inability of states to supply currencies in which populations may reliably store value and transact is another major problem of our present system. She offers a provocative but fascinating account. The ever-brilliant Lea Ypi has just come out with another book, a family memoir tracing the development of Balkan states out of the Ottoman empire - more wonderful insights into the making of our “world order”.

As a writer who reads across cultures and disciplines, what kind of reading do you find yourself drawn to of late, and how does it influence the direction of your future writing?

Like many people, I’m currently finding the world as it is very wearying. Partly in preparation for my upcoming novel, and partly because it is a relief to retreat to beauty and grandeur. I’m reading a lot of Jewish philosophy at the moment. Writers on Jewish mysticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s a new world to me, and thrilling.

Although a work of fiction, this book addresses two real issues: the historic problem of the Japanese Imperial Army recruiting by deception and trafficking women and girls as young as 11 years old into providing sexual services to Japanese troops in ‘comfort stations’ across the Asia Pacific during World War II, and the ongoing global is…

Read more

In what is regarded as an attempt to suppress press freedom in India’s troubled Kashmir region, several journalists including two reporting for national media have been summoned by authorities over their reporting without being told why, earning international criticism from national and international press organizations.

Over the past w…

Read more

The dominant political ideology in India today is Hindu nationalism, a spectrum of thought that represents a “New India.” In the words of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Indi…

Read more

History tells us that the first emperor of unified China, Qin Chi Huang, sent his court alchemist and sorcerer Xu Fu on two expeditions to find the elixir of immortality. We know he failed, don’t we ever, but we don’t know where Xu ended up. Legend says it was Japan.

Foreign correspondent and author Tim McGirk takes Xu’s tale much further in his novel “The Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers.” His protagonist Ned Sheehan, a down-at-the-heels Indiana Jones working without tenure for a third-rate university, stumbles upon Xu’s burial tomb on a Maya archeological dig in Chiapas. Included in the tomb are hundreds of clay tablets inscribed in Chinese, which when translated, provide the back story. In an adjacent tomb, Sheehan finds another corpse buried with more grandeur. It is the mother of the first Chinese emperor, and she brings the romance promised in the book’s title.

McGirk’s Xu is a guileless monk forced into adventure by an immortality-crazed emperor. He had accidentally stumbled upon a legendary chih plant, which has the effects of Viagra. That achievement lands him on a large raft dispatched to find Mt. Penglai, the home of China’s Eight Immortals, and the elixir.

The Emperor also sends his mother as punishment for a wicked past. Empress Dowager is not a title that usually quickens the pulse, but McGirk’s Zhao Ji is hot, with wrists “as delicate as willow boughs” and fetching robes concealing “her two blushing peaches of immortality.” A fearsome storm literally throws them together, and soon the 40-year-old virgin’s Jade Stalk is finding the Empress’s Red Gate in such positions as the Tiger’s Tread and Overlapping Fish Scales, which really rock the raft.

The contemporary romance is a slow-burn between Sheehan and Li Siqin, an academic researcher escaping an arranged marriage in Harbin. She flies into Chiapas to translate the clay tablets and unwittingly becomes the contact point for a group of diabolical Chinese diplomats who get around in a silver Mercedes that “glided past cantinas that exhaled drifts of sad, wounded song.” They and a separate group of Japanese hackers believe the archeological dig promises treasure beyond the material or historical: immortality itself.

McGirk warns us on page 18 that the Chinese will not be given credit for Maya architecture or any other cross-cultural pollination. His real interest is bringing together two civilizations he covered in a long career as a correspondent, and on the most fond and respectful of terms. Along with a couple of cold-blooded murders, sea monsters, and a hero of true innocence. “You are probably the only man I’ve ever lain with who doesn’t have blood on his hands,” Zhao Ji tells Xu, “whose mind isn’t elsewhere—devising plots and schemes—as he seduces me.” I love it when you talk mayhem, Empress!

According to the Records of the Grand Historian, the first great historical work of China, the real Xu Fu brought 3,000 virgin girls and boys on his final trip to hunt for the elixir. You can’t blame McGirk for reducing them to 300 colonists from good backgrounds. If one follows Chekhov’s dictum about the loaded rifle on a stage, there’s only one way to bring 3,000 virgins to a successful dramatic conclusion, and McGirk’s two Chinese lovers could never have competed—although one suspects he would have enjoyed writing it.

Inside a dim recycling unit in Panipat, Haryana, 100-odd km north of New Delhi, 26-year-old Rekha Devi cuts through heaps of discarded clothes from Europe and America. The room vibrates with the sound of rag-pulling machines. Fibers swirl in the air before settling on her skin and hair like fine dust.

Rekha has been worki…

Read more

This is an autopsy of a century of rupture and decline in Iran’s authentic arts, a decline not built on natural evolution but the product of three successive waves of structural, political, and ideological interventions by ruling governments.

It is a decline built on tragedy. Iran boasts one of the world’s richest art heritages, spanning millennia and encompassing disciplines like architecture, textiles, calligraphy, miniature painting, metalworking, and pottery. It encompasses ancient monumental structures like Persepolis, intricate Safavid-era tilework, Persian carpets, and detailed engraving and marquetry.

They are now in a cage, sometimes adorned with the golden bars of modernization and at other times with the steel walls of ideology. Over the past century, the state has become the primary patron, buyer, and commissioner of art, destroying the independent market and suppressing creativity. The artist is forced to answer to power, not to society.

The direct consequence is a devastating brain drain. The continuous exodus of artistic elites has hollowed out the country’s creative body. This is not a “brain circulation” that enriches the homeland upon return; it is a one-way flight. While this exodus has created a vibrant diaspora—a “second bloodstream” of Iranian art in the pop studios of Los Angeles and the galleries of Paris and New York—it severs the artists’ organic connection to their primary source of inspiration and depletes the cultural capital within Iran.

The root of the decline lies in the totalitarian nature of all three of Iran’s ruling ideologies. Whether the archaistic nationalism of Reza Shah, the superficial Westernism of Mohammad Reza Shah, or the religious doctrine of the Islamic Republic, all have been fundamentally at odds with the essence of art, which thrives on plurality, ambiguity, and doubt. By imposing a single worldview, these ideologies have suffocated the space necessary for authentic creation, reducing art to the repetition of state-approved clichés.

The direct consequence is a devastating brain drain. The continuous exodus of artistic elites has hollowed out the country’s creative body. This is not a “brain circulation” that enriches the homeland upon return; it is a one-way flight. While this exodus has created a vibrant diaspora—a “second bloodstream” of Iranian art in the pop studios of Los Angeles and the galleries of Paris and New York—it severs the artists’ organic connection to their primary source of inspiration and depletes the cultural capital within Iran.

The first of these three waves was the “authoritarian modernization” of the first Pahlavi era, which led to a rupture from immediate traditions. The second was the showcase art of the second Pahlavi era, which alienated art from its social context. The third was the cultural engineering of the Islamic Republic, which transformed art into an ideological tool. These interventions severed the traditional chain of knowledge transmission, created a paralyzing dependency of the art economy on the state, and led to the migration of artistic elites, ultimately imprisoning art within the cage of power structures.

In the life of a nation, art is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon. It acts as a sensitive body, a vital sign reflecting the health, dynamism, and internal contradictions of a society. The health of this body depends on an organic bond with its social and historical contexts. When that bond is severed, collective memory and cultural identity are endangered. The fundamental metaphor of Iranian art over the past century is that it has been confined, managed, and engineered by successive power structures instead of growing in free interaction with its society.

Cultural Decline vs. Cultural Transformation

There is an essential distinction between cultural transformation and cultural decline. Transformation is an organic, internal process of renewal. In contrast, decline is an imposed, inorganic state in which an art form loses its vitality, complexity, and connection to its social context. The root of such crises often lies in the nature of the ruling power. When a regime lacks legitimacy, it demotes culture from a site of growth to a tool for social control, and art’s decline begins.

The reality of Iran’s contemporary history is a story of deep and repeated ruptures, the most significant manifestation of which has been the collapse of the master-student apprentice system, the centuries-old bedrock for transmitting arts like music and calligraphy. This system was based on a deep, spiritual relationship.

With the introduction of Western academic models, notably by figures like André Godard, the French archaeologist, architect, and historian who served as the director of the Iranian Archeological Service in the first Pahlavi era, this sacred bond was replaced by a bureaucratic structure of “superior and subordinate.” Art was reduced from a living tradition to an academic subject. This rupture detached art from its intuitive, oral, and practical context, dealing a fatal blow to its organic connection with the native culture.

The reign of Reza Shah from 1925 to 1941 and which established the Pahlavi dynasty marked a fundamental rupture in the history of state intervention in Iranian art. His policies of “authoritarian modernization” were based on two pillars: secular modernism and antiquated nationalism emphasizing a pre-Islamic identity. This dual approach simultaneously targeted religious art and immediate cultural traditions, especially the Qajar heritage, leaving no room for independent creativity.

Architectural Destruction as Cultural Cleansing

One of the most prominent manifestations of this policy was the systematic destruction of historical architecture. These demolitions were ideological acts aimed at cleansing historical memory to build a “new” Iran. In Tehran, the city’s 12 magnificent Qajar-era gates were demolished to develop modern streets. In Tabriz, the Qajar dynasty’s birthplace, valuable structures like the Safavid Aali Qapu Palace were destroyed. This architectural violence severed the people’s visual and emotional connection to their past, transforming art into a state project for building a modern nation-state.

The second Pahlavi era from 1941 to 1979 fostered a bifurcated art world: a modern, elitist scene presented to the West as a showcase of progress and a marginalized realm of traditional arts. The regime’s cultural policies were a contradictory mix of massive investment, selective patronage, and severe political censorship.

The Shiraz Arts Festival (1967–1977), under the patronage of Empress Farah Pahlavi, is the symbolic apex of this “showcase art.” While internationally recognized for its innovative programming in music and cinema, its more radical performances alienated it from the Iranian public. The festival became a symbol of the cultural chasm between a Western-facing elite and the broader society. Events like the infamous play Khook, Bacheh, Atash (Pig, Child, Fire), which featured nudity and simulated sexual acts, provoked widespread public outrage and even a reaction from the SAVAK secret police.

Ultimately, the festival’s symbolic meaning was one of alienation—a performative modernity designed for foreign consumption, not domestic cultural enrichment.

With the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the most radical wave of state intervention began, with the first decade after the revolution marked by extensive purges to cleanse the cultural scene of Pahlavi-era heritage. Art forms were declared haram (religiously forbidden). Dance was completely erased from the public sphere, and the Iranian National Ballet was dissolved.

Sculpture faced a decade of silence, with many Pahlavi-era statues destroyed as symbols of tyranny. Music was suspended, pop was banned, female voices were silenced, and even traditional music faced severe restrictions. Many prominent artists fled into a massive exile, while those who remained, like Mohammad-Reza Shajarian and Mohammad-Reza Lotfi and Hossein Alizadeh and the Chavosh group, fought to keep the flame of authentic music alive.

From the 1990s, the state shifted from elimination to active “cultural engineering,” a paradigm of designing and directing the entire cultural system based on an ideological ideal. This policy, a clear example of what the Italian philosopher and antifascist Antonio Gramsci termed cultural hegemony, aimed to manufacture consent by propagating state-approved values through cultural institutions. It created a deep dichotomy: a well-funded “official-commissioned art” and a precarious “independent or underground art.”

The state’s cultural bodies effectively became what the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), using art not for expression but for reproducing the ruling ideology. This was particularly evident in the post-2000s, as state-run media (IRIB) and government-funded events like the Fajr Festivals began promoting an “ideologically sanitized” pop music to compete with the popular but un-Islamic exiled pop scene based in Los Angeles.

The Legacy of Rupture

The impact of these interventions is visible across all artistic disciplines. This state capture of art is not unique; similar processes occurred in Stalinist Russia and post-1949 China, where art was mobilized as state propaganda. Yet Iran’s case differs in its potent fusion of political power with metaphysical legitimacy, making the state’s ideological grip uniquely pervasive.

The rupture in the master-student system weakened the intuitive and improvisational essence of traditional music. After the revolution, the 1980s saw an unprecedented recession in music. While artists like Lotfi and Alizadeh and Shajarian and Meshkatian produced seminal works that captured the social mood, the overall landscape withered. In later decades, the rise of state-managed pop music often led to a decline in auditory taste. Today, traditional music faces a crisis of innovation, trapped in repetition and unable to engage in the “creative destruction” necessary for growth.

Sculpture’s fate mirrors Iran’s political trajectory. A tool of royal propaganda under the Pahlavi dynasty, it was nearly eradicated after the revolution as a symbol of tyranny and idolatry. Its managed return came primarily in the form of state-commissioned war memorials, transforming it into a functional, ideological art. Similarly, mural painting, a powerful medium of popular protest during the revolution, was quickly co-opted by the state to serve as official propaganda.

The destruction of historical buildings during the first Pahlavi era fueled a deep identity crisis in architecture. Cities became a chaotic museum of unrelated styles: neoclassical imitations next to archaistic fantasies and traditionalist reproductions. This rootless eclecticism, born of ideological contradictions, prevented the formation of an authentic contemporary architectural language and left an enduring legacy of visual incoherence.

Dance was the ultimate victim. Declared haram, it was completely erased from the public sphere, its institutions dismantled, and its artists forced into exile or silence. Cinema, however, was recognized as a strategic tool of power. Both the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic regimes heavily invested in and censored cinema to propagate their respective ideologies, from promoting a Westernized lifestyle to disseminating revolutionary values. Its growth was not organic but engineered. Art as a Tool of Power

A common thread links all three regimes: an instrumental view of art. In each period, art was weaponized for propaganda, legitimization, and social control. Art lost its pulse. The state dictated its heartbeat. An art form intended to be the vigilant conscience of society was demoted to its mouthpiece, its mission of “expressing truth” subverted to the function of “consolidating power”.

The Prospect of Art Freed from the Cage

The autopsy of a century of Iranian art reveals a bitter narrative of creativity subjugated by power. The observed cultural decline is not a story of the inherent failure of Iranian art or artists, but a story of the success of ruling powers in instrumentalizing and controlling one of the most vibrant dimensions of social life.

Authentic art, in this sense, is not a nostalgic return to tradition, nor a nationalist essentialism, but the free unfolding of creativity within the moral and historical consciousness of a people. It is an art that breathes with its society, not for its state.

Freeing art from this cage requires fundamental transformations that go beyond superficial policy changes. It depends on the independence of cultural institutions, the formation of a dynamic private art economy, the guarantee of free expression, and the re-establishment of the broken link between art, history, and society. Only then can Iranian art escape the tight cage of ideology and politics and play its true role as the vigilant conscience, the true mirror of society, and a force for the cultural transcendence of a nation.

Tiangai Temple sits atop Mengding Mountain in Sichuan. It honors Wu Lizhen, the first person to plant tea for cultivation, which he did on this spot in 53 BC At an elevation of 1,450 meters and with four surrounding peaks, it’s an appropriately dramatic setting for a defining moment in human civilization. With the first harvest, one can imagine the horns and timpani of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and the appearance of a black monolith.

Some 2,023 years on, the greatest tribute to Wu Lizhen is the fact that all of Mengding Mountain and much of the surrounding region are carpeted in tea bushes. There are other tangible monuments, as I discovered on a recent visit, including – why not? – a giant teapot.

I live in Hong Kong but rarely explore mainland China. The only genuinely adventurous assignment I ever had there was to Ruili, the rambunctious town of gamblers, jade merchants, hookers, drug addicts, and HIV victims on the Burmese border, and that was 26 years ago. China had no high-speed trains then.

Since they first started rolling in 2007, China has built the longest high-speed network in the world. I want to use it to go somewhere far: Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. What I am exploring is China itself, to see how far decades of rapid development have brought it into the modern world. I wonder how welcoming China is to a visitor, how easy it is to navigate, how prosperous it has become, and – no offense intended – how normal. From the Hong Kong perspective.

West Kowloon Station is the Hong Kong terminus of China’s high-speed train system. Although it opened in 2018, it isn’t seamlessly connected to the local transport system, requiring a hike from nearby subway stations or bus stops, a metaphor for the disconnect between semi-autonomous Hong Kong and the rest of China. It’s an impressive structure, with an interior like a spaceship’s. Part of it is not Hong Kong at all: the Mainland Port Area was ceded to Beijing for a token yearly rent. In other words, you enter mainland China before you board the train.

From tiny Hong Kong, that self-contained and prosperous pimple on China’s rump, traveling to Sichuan seems less a tourist’s schlep than an odyssey: 1,650 kilometers (1,025 miles), eight hours and 17 minutes on a train that can hit 300 kilometers per hour. As it turns out, it’s an easy odyssey. The cars are full because it’s National Day Golden Week, and although Second Class looks unruly – giant suitcases jammed behind seats, legs protruding arrogantly into the aisle even before departure – First Class is civilized. (Even more so Business Class, the most expensive seats.) No goats or chickens, just a lot of screens, earbuds and headphones, solid middle class leisurewear and chattering, well-behaved kids.

The argument for train over air travel is that you see something of the country. On this route, we pass the dramatically sculptured limestone peaks of Guilin, ink paintings come to life, which poets have instructed us to savor on slow boat trips on the Li River. We whiz by in minutes. What you notice most in today’s China is the infrastructure built or under construction: new highways, tunnels galore, mighty bridges between mountains, train lines on spindly, aqueduct-like supports that make you gasp and cross your fingers.

There’s a historical poignance to entering Sichuan by a lightning-fast train. For most of China’s past, the province was isolated and almost sublimely so. “It has lived behind its forbidding mountain barriers as a law unto itself throughout Chinese history,” wrote Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby in Thunder Out of China in 1946. Sichuan’s nicknames – Land of Abundance, The Heavenly Land – refer to its wealth of resources, particularly agricultural. In the past, it was said Sichuan could feed three or four other provinces and solve any food shortage in China if better means of transportation existed.

But they didn’t. “[Pack] Animals are rare,” wrote American academic George B. Cressey in 1934’s influential study China’s Geographic Foundations, “carts unknown, railroads but dreams, canals impossible, and the rivers too swift.” Abundance was no protection against misrule: under warlords in the mid-1930s, a famine killed millions in fecund Sichuan, followed by a worse one caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mao’s successors abandoned voodoo economics, knit together their vast country with roads, rails, and airports, and identified key strengths for each region. For Sichuan, they focused on a unique native species, the Giant Panda. Wherever your eye alights in Chengdu, it finds a representation of a panda: in cartoon images, gazillions of plush dolls, on the heads of less-than-self-aware tourists wearing headbands, giant models hanging off skyscrapers, or projected onto them at night in lighting effects. There’s plenty to see and do in Chengdu, China’s fourth most populous city, including a fiery cuisine to be explored at one’s gastrointestinal peril. But the overwhelmingly main draw for tourists is the adorable pandas.

Chengdu’s East Railway Station is far huger than I expected. The swollen river of holiday tourists dims the likelihood of engaging a taxi. But the hordes head into the Metro. With a trickle of others, I continue on to the taxi stand—to find more waiting taxis than I’ve ever seen anywhere in my life.

I am obviously unprepared for modern Chengdu.

We drive through a redwood forest of apartment towers, if redwoods can be imagined as newly grown. From my balcony in the Mao-era Jinjiang Hotel, it seems like mine is the only building in the city center that isn’t spanking new, at least at night. In the morning, I spot a few more, but only a few.

Over the next week, I explore Chengdu’s old neighborhoods, some tarted up for tourists, others run-down. I take morning walks along the Nanhe River, where groups of people do qigong exercises with agile arms, fans and even swords, as they may have forever. What really stands out in Chengdu are the manicured boulevards with their shiny cars, many of them quietly electric, and the seemingly eternal march of new office towers or civic buildings with arresting architecture. The only touch of chaos comes at crosswalks, which are shared by pedestrians, bikes and motorbikes with no apparent rules of engagement.

Lookwise, modern Chengdu resembles the Gangnam section of Seoul, although Seoul had only one direction to expand—south—because of the border with North Korea. Chengdu has expanded in every direction.

The Metro is only 15 years old. I’m stunned at its resemblance to Hong Kong’s MTR. When changing lines, I forget I’m away from home. The subway’s cars are almost identical except for the straps, which are fashioned to look like panda heads.

The passengers wouldn’t be easily mistaken for Hong Kongers with their dolorous-in-repose Western Chinese faces, leathery skin, center parts on women and men who seem to have been born with crewcuts and trainers. People who can’t find a seat squat in place, which you won’t see in Hong Kong. There are greater levels of security: before descending to the train, you must pass through a metal detector and have your bag scanned. As you swipe your ticket, your face is scanned, as it will be when you swipe out.

The other thing I notice about the Metro is that it’s not particularly crowded. I’m usually the only person in the passageway leading to the exit near my hotel. Some 6 million trips are made every day by a population of 21.4 million. That’s not much more than the MTR’s 5.5 million trips per weekday, and Hong Kong’s population is only 7.5 million.

After a few days, I think I have figured this out. Like everything else in Chengdu, the Metro has been built for growth.

Isolated Sichuan “has never been a center of conquering power,” wrote British Sinologist C.P. Fitzgerald in 1969, “perhaps because its people were too well off at home to wish to go elsewhere.” They traced their origin to the ancient Kingdom of Shu, which was acknowledged in Chinese historical records but only vaguely.

That historical fog started to clear in 1927, when a farmer dredging an irrigation ditch outside Chengdu stumbled upon jade artifacts. In 1986, a sacrificial burial pit containing thousands of gold, bronze, and jade items was accidentally found, and a month later, a second pit nearby. It was a historical archeological discovery: a Bronze Age civilization to rival ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley.

The Shu civilization won’t be overlooked again: a museum has been built in Guanghan, near the Sanxingdui archeological site, an hour from Chengdu. It’s been designed on a huge scale to take advantage of the panda tourism boom. The highway from Chengdu looks new and has sparse traffic beyond tour buses. A sign posted by Guanghan County describes the museum as “an important part of Sichuan Province’s tourism brand.”

To a traveler like me, it’s a sober reminder of the many components of Chinese culture, including an entire civilization lost to history for 13,000 years—and only stumbled upon in our lifetimes. This includes Hong Kong, of course, which was in British hands for only 155 years—blink!

I discovered that people in western China aren’t shy, nor are they wary of foreigners. One of my cab drivers doesn’t even recognize the concept. He’s eager to converse and totally puzzled as to why I don’t understand him. A hurt silence reigns until he slams his horn at a woman crossing against the light and hurls insults out the window. When I chuckle, he treats me to some follow-up abuse, but does seem resigned to my not responding verbally.

An older cabbie is savvier but unpleased with the communications hassle I represent. He looks at me sideways—I’m in the front passenger seat—points at his nose and says in a thick accent, “I China!” I don’t get it, so he repeats himself. “I China! I China!”

Back at the hotel, the elevator makes announcements in Mandarin and English: “Second floor…The door is closing…Sorry to keep you waiting.” A married couple greets me with “Ni haos.” I reciprocate. The husband wants to engage more, but his English fails him. He ends up repeating the English elevator announcements. “Third floor…Sorry to keep you waiting...”

On another morning, a mother enjoys a post-breakfast fart in the elevator. Her pubescent son objects, on my behalf, I suspect. She laughs mischievously.

Chengdu was very important to Du Fu, one of China’s two most revered poets, along with his Tang Dynasty contemporary and friend Li Po. After bitter career disappointment, family tragedy, and bad health during the violent demise of the Tang, Du spent his happiest years in a thatched hut on a creek in Chengdu from the age of 47 to 52. The hut is a tourist attraction. I expect to find truculent youngsters dragged along by parents who don’t remember the special hell of memorizing Du’s poems as centuries of Chinese students have had to do.

What I don’t expect is a giant, lush theme park dedicated to the varied glories of the Chinese past: nature, art, ascetic isolation and stupendous grandeur, with a dose of superstition—kids compete to touch the beard on a bronze bust of Du. A Disneyland comparison comes to mind, if Walt Disney could ever have thought of basing his monument to Americana on a single artist, a poet no less.

Du Fu has been turned into an embodiment of all the best elements of Chinese civilization. Much is made of a mighty wind that blew down his thatched hut—a symbolic stand-in for the real cataclysm of Du’s life, the crumbling of China’s Golden Age, the Tang Dynasty. The main idea is that everything this man stood for has lasted more than a millennium. It’s basically indestructible—China is indestructible. Every succeeding dynasty understood the symbolic power of Du’s hut and maintained and expanded it, as did the Communist Party. Mao Zedong visited in 1958 and praised the “political nature” of Du’s poems.

After pandas, the second most common sight in today’s Chengdu is the flag of the People’s Republic. A pair fly from every street lamp in Chengdu, so no matter what you spot from a car or a bus or just walking around—that impressive structure, this overpass, that park—a red Chinese flag is included in the frame, often directly superimposed like an imprimatur.

The presence of the government is felt in many ways. Facial recognition is used not only on the subway but on ordinary trains, buses and entrances to museums. When you buy a ticket in China, it’s not just proof of payment. A recognized ID must be used—for foreigners, usually a passport—and if there’s any fumble in the inputting of the details, you won’t be allowed onto a train or out of a station until they are straightened out. Your name is on the ticket: your movements are being tracked.

Then there’s the Great Firewall, China’s control over what you see on the internet. Foreign visitors often use virtual private networks (VPNs) to access websites blocked by Beijing like Google, Facebook, X, and Western news outlets. But even with a VPN, everything on your computer or phone slows down. At first, I wondered if 4G connections were the problem, but I didn’t remember lags when we were all on 4G a few years ago—and they persist when I’m on WiFi. The Notes on my Apple devices won’t sync. Pastes from one Apple device to another, right next to each other, take an agonizing minute. This gives me plenty of time to drum fingers on a desk and imagine what’s going on. I picture a slack-jawed apparatchik wearing a Great Firewall jumpsuit in a windowless data center staring at my Google searches — “Is the Chengdu Shu Brocade and Embroidery Museum worth going to?” “Who invented brocade?” “What is brocade?”—and taking way too long to let them through because he’s texting his girlfriend.

The paradox is that smartphones and the Internet have made it possible to get around China easily and without an interpreter. The Great Firewall undoes that triumph of technology. Whenever I felt lost, desperate for help, rebuffed by an unhelpful ticket counter clerk or obdurate taxi driver, I was usually staring at my phone and wondering why it wasn’t offering a solution.

I had that feeling in the city of Ya’an as I tried to find my way to Mengding Mountain. I travelled to Ya’an in a six-seat tourist van. Before we could leave Chengdu’s Xinnanmen Bus Station, an inspection was required. I figured it was for IDs. Nope: an official with a cruel face and unforgiving manner had to check whether we were wearing our seatbelts. The guy next to me had settled in without the strap across his shoulder. He was commanded to make it right. An old man was found to be unsafely secured. The official rebuckled him, but roughly. The old man squawked. The official resented being upbraided. Recriminations flew, anguished interjections came from the old wife, everything escalated until the official took a quick snapshot of the inside of the van and brutally slammed the van’s door shut. It was a micro-demonstration of modern China’s desire for order, control and safety, overly harsh enforcement and occasional rebellion. (Five minutes later, the guy next to me wriggled out of his shoulder strap.)

Chengdu claims to be the birthplace of paper money. The iron coins of the Song Dynasty were heavy, so merchants started using promissory notes in the 11th century. But in today’s China, cash is an overthrown king: almost everything is paid for electronically by Alipay or WeChat. Some merchants won’t take cash at all. I heard that beggars flash QR codes for electronic alms but couldn’t confirm it: I didn’t see a single beggar.

When cash does change hands, I found, everyone is scrupulous about giving the correct change. Offers of tips to cabbies are accepted very nervously, as if they think they’re doing something wrong and might get caught. I get used to China’s rock bottom prices with obscene speed: any taxi ride over 15 yuan ($2.10) makes me bristle over possible cheating. (That’s around half the flagfall in Hong Kong.)

In fact, no one tries to rip me off, take advantage of me, or take me to some place I hadn’t intended. Not once do I feel avoided or intentionally ignored, as happens in Japan and Korea. Only twice am I singled out as a foreigner. A male on a subway escalator greets me with a hearty “Ni hao!” While waiting for the cable car on Mengding Mountain, a brassy middle-aged female says, “Hello I love you,” and demands a pic be taken together.

In other words, I find Chengdu orderly, welcoming, confident and—this may surprise Hong Kong friends— clean. Perhaps a little enlightened too. The city is considered gay friendly and word has gotten out. On a street-food tour I take on my first night, half the participants, foreigners all, are gay.

High-speed trains run on both long-haul and short routes. I return to Chengdu from Ya’an on one that has but three stops. Shorter routes come into a different station and have cars designed to be more commuter-friendly. Everything is so new, so spotless, serenely orderly, and the passengers are so blase that I feel like I’m in Japan.

When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the oft-stated fear was that it would be degraded into just another “dirty Chinese city.” At the time, we never considered the reverse possibility: that China would build up more Hong Kongs.

Finally, the pandas.

The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, despite its wonky name, is a kind of a panda Disneyland set in an actual countryside. If you think of Third World theme parks as exercises in delusion—chicken-wire-and-plaster statuary and death wish rides—the Chengdu base will cure you of that notion. It’s a world-class tourist destination in conception, execution, and design that combines panda viewing with walks in a lush, exotic Sichuan mountain park—and it’s easily reached by Metro and a shuttle bus. The newer West Gate entrance has particularly wide staircases and visitor ramps, clearly designed for heavy volumes of visitors in the future.

Arriving early is advised because pandas sleep in the afternoon. As in any zoo, you pity the animals, especially the ones behind glass in pavilions. It’s less obvious how to feel about the pandas in outdoor, custom-built habitats that visitors peer into from elevated walkways. They have it pretty good. It’s their native land and climate. They’re eating the bamboo they’re made to eat. Some pandas were actually born abroad and repatriated, part of the loan agreement with foreign zoos for their parents. Now they spend their days climbing their native trees to curl up into a fork of branches, or gamboling on treehouses constructed by their human captors. Everything is spruced up and made as nice as possible.

All they lack, really, is freedom.

For most people, even those well-versed in colonial history, the word “partition” mainly conjures up images of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Hindus who were killed in 1947, fleeing between northern India and Pakistan at the time of independence from Britain. Little is even remembered about similar crossings in the east between what is now West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Sam Dalrymple explores these events in detail in his book Shattered Lands and then goes on to break important new ground by taking the story much further to include Imperial India’s little-known total of five partitions. Delhi’s writ stretched from the Indian Subcontinent across the Arabian Sea to what is now Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. That was in addition to India’s neighbors Burma (Myanmar), and the somewhat reluctant protectorates of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim.

The Indian Raj “housed a quarter of the world’s population and was governed by the Indian rupee,” Dalrymple writes. He has left out Afghanistan, which never became part of the empire, even though Britain fought several wars there and controlled its foreign policy for 40 years.

The Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire, we learn, were usually left off Imperial maps to avoid annoying Constantinople, while Nepal and Oman never officially recognized their protectorate status. Yet they were all legally part of “India” – run by the Indian Political Service and subservient to the Viceroy of India. Defended by the Indian Army, they paid Indian taxes with Indian rupees.

That establishes the contours that Dalrymple has devised for this wide-ranging book, which shows how haphazardly many historically significant decisions were taken. Some were hurried with almost random implementation, creating problems that remain today – notably trouble-torn Kashmir, which is divided and claimed by both India and Pakistan. Some claims for partition were rejected – Nagaland has never fully accepted being a state in northeast India and could have become part of Burma (Myanmar).

The partitions began in 1937 when Burma was separated from India as a crown colony to meet anti-Hindu-India nationalist demands and enable London to establish direct links separate from Delhi. Also, that year, the separation of Aden began the Arabian Peninsula partitions that continued until the Persian Gulf states joined in 1947.

India’s political leaders did not oppose losing the (Muslim) Gulf states, and Dalrymple describes this as “India’s greatest lost opportunity” because of the oil wealth that was discovered later. But for these partitions, he says, the countries “might have become part of India or Pakistan after independence”. That, however, is surely a most improbable “what if….”, not least because of the unreality of expecting those Muslim nations to accept life run from Hindu India.

The bloody creation of Pakistan in 1947 came next, which Dalrymple presents as an idea that flowed from the partitions of Burma and Aden. After years of discussions, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was about to become independent India’s first prime minister, admitted “we are tired men” and said the plan for partition “offered a way out and we took it.” Dalrymple, however, doesn’t adequately blame Nehru for killing off an earlier “way out.” In a July 1946 speech, he had refused to honor what was known as the widely accepted “Cabinet Mission” plan for a federal set-up, which would have avoided the violent partition and all that followed.

Next came the fourth partition when the new Indian government headed by Nehru and his tough Home Minister, Sardar Patel, virtually instructed India’s 562 princely states to cede to Delhi. Britain had only directly ruled 60 percent of the Indian land mass. The rest belonged to these states that were independent, up to a point. They were subordinate to the British crown in foreign policy, defense, and communications, and their maharajas and lesser princely rulers were subject to advice from an often-interfering British Residents (political agents).

Nehru and Patel never recognized them as having any right to independence, but they were less committed about the kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim, which had varying treaties with the British raj. Nehru was sympathetic to their Himalayan identity, and they were left off the list. Nepal became a sovereign nation, and Bhutan and Sikkim kept special independent status. (Indira Gandhi annexed Sikkim in the mid-1970s, and China is now trying to undermine Bhutan’s friendship treaty with India.)

As the empire gradually “shattered,” some colonies became republics, cutting all links with Britain, while others settled for dominion status and became part of the Commonwealth, which later also admitted republican India and others. Dalrymple sadly does not deal with this aspect of international affairs. That may be because he focuses on the gradual decline of the empire, rather than tracking later institutions, though the idea of the Commonwealth goes back to the 1880s.

Within the Indian subcontinent, the colonies of Pakistan (with Bangladesh hived off in 1971 as Dalrymple’s fifth partition) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) did join the Commonwealth, but Nepal and Bhutan did not because they prized their independence. Neither did Burma. The Gulf states were technically eligible but chose the regional Gulf Co-operation Council that was set up in 1981. That was in line with earlier opt-outs by Palestine and others in the region, though Palestine and Yemen did apply for membership in 1997 without any decision. (Palestine’s case and the role of the Commonwealth is now being informally discussed (see this link) at a time of growing international support for its statehood).

Dalrymple vividly covers the collapse of British rule in the Gulf once these countries had lost their role in the Indian raj, and an energized Arab nationalism clashed with fading British imperialism. After almost coming to hostilities, there was the Sultan of Oman’s US$3 million sale of the important Arabian Sea port city of Gwadar to Pakistan in 1958. The Sultan held the city that lay on the Pakistani coast under a 1783 treaty. (Gwadar, in Balochistan province, is now a key nautical link in the Pakistan leg of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and a center for Baloch nationalist opposition to rule from Islamabad).

Significantly, Dalrymple shows how the current Indian government’s Hindutva focus has roots in these years when the British tacitly agreed that “India belonged primarily to the Hindus” and hived off the largely non-Hindu parts. Hindu nationalism “was a key driving force in those earlier partitions” of Burma and Aden, as well as the later divide of India and Pakistan.

As he weaves his way through this history, Dalrymple introduces gems that would not be picked up by most historians. Tracking the rise of Abdel Nasser as Egypt’s president, and the beginning of the Arab oil boom just a few years after Britain’s departure, we hear about Dhirubhai Ambani, father of Mukesh who is now one of Asia’s richest men, arriving in Aden from Gujarat. He was 17 and was soon managing ship refueling for A. Besse & Co., a French trading firm. As Nasser took over the Suez Canal and Arab nationalism became more violent, Ambani returned to Gujarat at the end of 1957 with his wife and eight-month-old Mukesh to found what became Reliance, now India’s biggest conglomerate.

On a different wavelength, we hear early in the book about the “open marriage” of “pretty Dickie” Lord Louis Mountbatten, Britain’s last Viceroy, and his wife Edwina. Her most widely researched and analyzed relationship was with Nehru, which had “raised many eyebrows” within just 10 days of the Mountbattens’ arrival in Delhi in March 1947. Later, when writing about the Nagaland people’s call for independence in north-east India, Dalrymple has an aside that mentions Edwina again, just after logging Indira Gandhi’s alleged affair with a possible CIA plant in Nehru’s office. Watching Naga dancers in Delhi, just two weeks before she died, Edwina exclaimed to a friend, “Don’t they have beautiful bottoms!”

Such light-hearted references add to this magnificent (and massive) first book by Sam Dalrymple. It misses out or underplays one or two turning points, and could have usefully included the evolution of the Commonwealth. But it does add a new perspective to the region’s history, and the accidents of history, covering a wide canvas with an appealing writing style that makes for compelling reading.

Since he is the son of author and historian William Dalrymple, many of whose books explore the Indian Raj, there is inevitable curiosity about family involvement. Sam told The Indian Express that the book began as a documentary project with National Geographic until Covid prevented filming. His father then suggested turning it into a book, and he read the first and final drafts, but his mother, the artist Olivia Fraser, was “the real editor-in-chief, reading everything meticulously.”

**This is an expanded version of a book review published by Taylor & Francis in “The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies” on October 15, available at The Round Table.

John Elliott is Asia Sentinel’s South Asia correspondent. He blogs at Riding the Elephant.

In a deeply fractured international order comprised of armed conflicts from Ukraine to Yemen and from Cameroon to Israel, biodiversity protection and marine protected areas in the South China Sea are of paramount importance for the earth’s sustainable future, as the economic well-being of upcoming generations will depend on it.

In such …

Read more

When I was a teenager, I was in the same year at the same school in Singapore as Chee Soon Juan. I remember seeing him get into a fight at a soccer game and leaving the fight crying. After his school days, Chee, who is now secretary general of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), got into legal and political fights with the People’s Action Party (PAP). The PAP, which has won every election in Singapore since 1959, likewise always bested Chee.

As Chee related in his latest book, “Unbroken: The Power of Tesilience,” “For more than 30 years, I have walked a path that few in Singapore have chosen, a path of dissent in a political climate that punishes it…. Over the decades, I have stood for elections in Singapore seven times. And I have lost seven times.”

In his baptism of fire in early 1993, Chee, who was then an academic in psychology at the National University of Singapore (NUS), was summoned to the Dean’s office by his Head of Department, Dr S Vasoo, who was also a PAP Member of Parliament (MP), Chee recalled. Dean Ernest Chew, who headed the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS, sat with Vasoo. They questioned Chee over a reimbursement of S$226 (US$175) he had made using his research funds.

Months earlier, in December 1992, Chee had stood as a candidate for the SDP in a by-election. In March 1993, Chee was dismissed from NUS for misconduct and dishonesty. Chee publicly disputed the dismissal and charges. In response, Vasoo, Chew, and the department’s administrative secretary sued him for defamation. A Singapore court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor and ordered Chee to pay damages of around S$350,000.

There were further lawsuits against Chee. Two former Singaporean prime ministers, Goh Chok Tong and Lee Kuan Yew, successfully sued Chee for libel. In 2006, Chee was declared bankrupt after failing to pay hundreds of thousands of US dollars in damages to Goh and Lee. In November 2012, Chee was cleared of bankruptcy. From 1998 to 2022, in the strictly controlled city-state, Chee was fined and jailed several times for making political speeches without a permit.

I attended a political rally in Singapore’s financial district around Boat Quay during the late 1990s, when Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, derided Chee for supporting the Dalai Lama.

Chee’s book cited a scathing criticism of his first book published in 1994, “Dare to Change: An Alternative Vision for Singapore”, by Lee Kuan Yew’s son, former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who said, “Dare to Change is a rehash of some old Western liberal ideas which have failed, and Chee Soon Juan packages them together, calls it a book.”

Chee’s latest book explained what made him endure those decades of lawsuits and opposition by the powers that be, “But stress isn’t always destructive. If recognized and processed with support and reflection, it can also be the crucible of growth. What makes the difference? Resilience.”

Chee’s book cited Viktor Frankl, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, who wrote that suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds meaning.

“I came to realize that resilience was the capacity to locate a purpose that could withstand the weight of your pain,” Chee wrote.

When Lee Kuan Yew was Singapore’s prime minister during the 1960s, he urged Singaporeans to create “a rugged society” similar to the resilience discussed in Chee’s book. In those days, Singaporeans needed resilience to afford a home and a car. Now, with Singaporeans enjoying a far higher standard of living, they should seek meaning beyond a home and a car. By having a purpose beyond material aspirations, Singaporeans will nurture the resilience to withstand future challenges, instead of being softened by empty comfort.

Beyond personal resilience, Chee’s book advocated critical thinking as indispensable for organizational resilience. Two US media firms, Pixar and Disney, were successful because they fostered a culture of critical thinking where employees were allowed to speak up without being put down, his book said.

The book gave another example of organizational resilience in Airbnb, the online vacation residence company. During the COVID pandemic in early 2020, the US firm’s revenue plummeted by 80 percent in a few weeks, and it laid off a quarter of its staff. Many thought Airbnb would not survive.

“Despite massive losses, it stayed true to its mission. It adapted by sticking to what it believed in and thinking critically about how to live them differently. By the end of 2020, Airbnb completed a highly successful IPO, was valued at over US$100 billion,” Chee wrote.

The Singapore Exchange can learn from Airbnb. In late 2024, the Singapore authorities set up a review group to revive the Singapore Exchange. It is not a coincidence that the Singapore Exchange is far less actively traded and far smaller than the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the world’s biggest market for initial public offerings (IPOs).

Hong Kong has a more entrepreneurial and less legalistic culture than Singapore. For decades, until recently, Hong Kong had more press freedom than Singapore. Hong Kongers have a reputation for resilience, embodied in what is called the “Lion’s Rock spirit.” The Singapore Exchange and Singapore will do well to learn from the Lion’s Rock spirit. Chee’s book said young people need “resilience, not rigidity.” The same applies to the Singapore Exchange.

The book’s lessons in organizational resilience are useful not only to corporates, but also to the ruling PAP which Chee opposed for decades. The first generation of the PAP government under Lee Kuan Yew possessed the resilience to overcome challenges like a cold war with Indonesia and the withdrawal of the British naval presence from Singapore. The current generation of the PAP under Prime Minister Lawrence Wong faces new challenges, like enabling Singapore to thrive in a world fractured by tensions between the two leading superpowers, the US and China.

To do this, Wong’s government needs Airbnb’s adaptability in coming up with creative new solutions. To create innovative ideas, critical thinking is needed. For critical thinking to happen, there must be a safe environment where people are not afraid to share their views. There should be space for opposition politicians to critique government policies and offer alternative ideas. There should also be space for members of the ruling party to challenge the policies of their own party.

“Psychological safety—the sense that one can fail, speak up, or question without fear of punishment—is essential,” Chee said in his book.

A climate of coercion leads to fear of punishment, which engenders passivity and lack of motivation, Chee wrote, leveraging on his studies of psychology. Fear of punishment causes a citizen to avoid breaking the law, but positive motivation gives a soldier the courage to risk his life in defending his country. Positive strokes enable ordinary citizens, opposition politicians, as well as members of the ruling party to proactively contribute to their country.

This book contains useful lessons in resilience for individuals, companies, opposition politicians, and government officials of Singapore and other nations.

Toh Han Shih is a Singaporean writer in Hong Kong and a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel.

Despite years of efforts, including hiring foreign coaches, funding a National Training Center described as a “beacon for football dreams” featuring three full-size pitches, modern facilities including a gym and rehabilitation room, and a commitment to developing future stars, Malaysia has remained lackluster on the international football stage, currently ranking 123rd of 2011 countries and territories across the globe.

The highest level the team ever reached was its 75th ranking 32 years ago, far below the relegation zone of 32 teams (since enlarged to 48) qualified to play in the quadrennial World Cup tourney, considered by many to be the world’s premier sporting event.

It has been a particular frustration for Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, the 41-year-old Crown Prince of Johor (TMJ), who was president of the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) in 2017 and 2018 and who owns his own club, the Johor Darul Ta’zim, and has actually played with the team. His ardor for football is such that he was once accused of beating a rival fan and was suspected of having had acid thrown at a rival star although he was never charged.

So it was a relief when this year Harimau Malaya, or the Malaysian Tigers, in the third round of the 2027 Asian Football Confederation Cup qualifiers, beat Nepal in March 2-0, beat Vietnam in June 4-0, an unprecedented victory, and beat Singapore 2-1 on September 4.

Then it all came crashing down. Shortly afterwards, the disciplinary committee of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) suspended seven Malaysian players for a year and ordered them to pay a fine of 2,000 Swiss francs (US$2,497). and ordered FAM to pay 350,000 Swiss francs (US$437,237) for “doctored documentation.”

Malaysia, it seemed, had taken a page from Indonesia, which had previously dramatically improved its FIFA standing by recruiting grandchildren who could claim connection, however tenuous, to Indonesia from 350 years of Dutch colonization of what had been called the Spice Islands, which ended in 1945.

In January, Tunku Ismail wrote on social media: “We have identified 6-7 heritage players … and hope the Malaysian government could assist in the process of obtaining Malaysian passports in order for them to play in the Asian Cup 2027 qualifiers.”

But the seven heritage players’ “grandparents” who were supposedly born in Penang, George Town, Melaka, Johor, Kuching, and the Straits Settlements had never been anywhere near Malaysia. They were from Argentina, Spain, Brazil, and The Hague.

The result, along with a good deal of outrage, has been massive levity, as demonstrated by this new “FAM map” of Malaysia.

Officially, what began as a routine eligibility check turned into a formal FIFA investigation although some accused the Football Association of Indonesia of ratting Malaysia out. There have been widespread rumors that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto himself had called foul, raising the matter to the level of international incident. Football Association president Erick Thohir was forced to deny allegations that Indonesia was involved in FIFA’s decision to impose sanctions.

Tunku Ismail publicly questioned the abrupt decision to sanction Malaysia’s team, demanding explanations for what he described as a sudden reversal in the governing body’s position and asking in a social media statement, “Fifa had already approved it (the naturalization) before, so why has the decision changed now? What happened that led to such a sudden decision? Was there an external party involved in influencing Fifa’s decision?”

There was none, although one fan, in a phone conversation, said, “It could have been the Singaporeans, Vietnamese, or Indonesians. Anybody, as it was so blatant. They haven’t beaten Vietnam for years. It was pure cheating. Plain and simple for anyone to see.”

Red-faced Malaysian officials attempted to blame a clerical error, but a 6,000-word report from FIFA detailed how the seven foreign-born players were made to appear Malaysian through doctored ancestral birth certificates which turned foreign grandparents into “Malaysians” changing birthplaces from Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and the Netherlands to Penang, Melaka, Johor, and Sarawak. In a damning report, FIFA had found that the certificates submitted to its eligibility proceedings had been forged. The investigating committee, chaired by Jorge Palacio of Colombia, called it “pure and simple, a form of cheating.”

The next question was who was responsible for the forgeries. One angry writer to the news website Malaysiakini denounced the government as “complicit in this scandal. Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail’s defense that ‘due process’ was followed collapses under FIFA’s findings. Saifuddin had assured FAM that it had nothing to fear, as long as procedures followed existing laws. But how do you defend a process when FIFA discovered that none of the players’ grandparents were born or domiciled in Malaysia?”

Malaysians “will now foot the bill for FAM’s dishonesty,” another wrote. “Taxpayers bankroll stadiums, academies, and the very officials who orchestrated this scam – and now they are punished again with a hefty fine. This is not mere negligence; it is criminal dishonesty funded by the public purse.”

The FAM says it’s legally barred from disclosing details about the seven foreign players at the center of the FIFA ruling, citing Malaysian laws governing official secrets and passport procedures. It stressed that FIFA’s claim that the players “obtained or were aware of forged documents” was unfounded, as no solid evidence had been presented to support the allegation.

A clue to the perp’s identity may have appeared on the Instagram page of Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, which showed him bending in apology to kiss the hand of Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah Al-Haj, the Sultan of Selangor, as a gaggle of dignitaries looked on.

“He had to apologize to the Selangor Sultan, but he denied any involvement,” said a Kuala Lumpur-based source with links to the government who asked to remain nameless. “The politicians gave out citizenships to the players on the instruction of the Johor Crown Prince, but nobody wants to say it.”

Accusing the royalty is verboten in Malaysia. The local press is silent. The nine royal families, who rotate the kingship between them under the title Kebawah Duli Yang Maha Mulia Seri Paduka Baginda Yang di-Pertuan Agong, (He who is below the dust of the exalted sole, His Majesty, He Who Is Made Lord) every five years, continue to receive outsize reverence from the Malay Muslim populace, with nobody daring to question a matter like forging the ancestry of the national football team.

The opposition Perikatan Nasional coalition has called on the government to launch a Royal Commission of Inquiry following the allegations of document fraud involving the footballers. Given the possibility of the crown prince’s involvement, that isn’t likely to happen, especially since the head of Perikatan Nasional, Muhyiddin Yassin, hails from Johor.

This important volume by prolific author Vivian L. Forbes, a University of Western Australia professor, makes a timely and valuable contribution to the study of Malaysia’s maritime boundaries. Rich with detailed maps and accurate geographical data, the book offers clarity on an issue that lies at the heart of the nation’s sovereignty and m…

Read more

What has been the biggest setback to the US position in the world in the 80 years since August 1945? The Korean War stalemate? The Vietnam defeat? The failed invasion of Iraq? Afghanistan?

Excluding the current era of Donald Trump, itself a different kind of disaster, from the perspective now of 47 years, the answer seems clear: the 1979 overthrow of the…

Read more