- Chinese New Year has begun, and with it chunyun (‘spring rush’), the world’s largest annual human migration. Nearly 1.4 billion people will make 9 billion trips in the next month, as they return to their hometowns or take holidays abroad. State railways and airlines have quadrupled capacity for the festive period, the busiest since Covid.
- Regulators in Hong Kong ordered the liquidation of the beleaguered property giant Evergrande. Once the world’s most valuable property company, Evergrande owes its investors at least US$300 billion after failing to deliver on projects across China. Though some foreign commentators have claimed that China is now facing its own ‘Lehman moment’, such comparisons are overblown: much of the firm’s remaining wealth is stored in saleable physical assets rather than derivatives; even upper-bound estimates of its debts are half those of Lehman’s in 2008.
- Fujitsu, the Japanese IT company, is reportedly considering privately compensating British sub-postmasters embroiled in a scandal caused by faulty software supplied by the firm. Between 1999 and 2015, 700 sub-postmasters – many of them British Asians – were wrongly prosecuted for fraud and theft, leading to dozens of prison sentences and suicides; after a decades-long grassroots fight for justice, minuscule compensation was grudgingly arranged by the British government, only for many postmasters to see it immediately taken back by tax authorities.
- A Japanese arsonist who killed 36 people in 2019 has been sentenced to death. Shinji Aoba, now 45, broke into the offices of an animation studio in Kyoto against whom he had a grudge and started a fire. Aoba was caught up in the blaze and seriously disfigured, necessitating years of surgery before he could stand trial. Judges dismissed his defence’s claim of mental illness and ordered him to be hanged.
- Foreign diplomats have begun returning to North Korea, with the Mongolian ambassador, Luvsantseren Erdeneddavaa, reported to have taken up residence last month. The intensely secretive Stalinist state closed its borders in 2020 and expelled all foreigners in response to COVID-19. As of this year, only nine countries have missions in Pyongyang; no Western diplomats have yet been allowed back.
- South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yoel has warned that the North will continue to interfere with domestic affairs before April’s elections. The Kim family regime has been unusually bellicose recently and started this year with a series of nuclear-capable cruise missile tests aimed at the South and Japan.
- A conservative campaigner in Thailand is seeking the dissolution of the Phak Kao Khai, or Move Forward Party, on obscure constitutional grounds. Ruangkrai Leekitwattana has already twice tried to convince courts in Bangkok to ban the socially progressive anti-junta party, claiming it’s a threat to the monarchy. Move Forward won national elections in May last year before its presidential candidate, Pita Limjaroenrat, was forced to step down by parliamentary factions linked to the country’s powerful military.
- A new railway between Bangkok and Vientiane, the capital of Laos, will open by April. The line will be one of the last missing pieces in a giant new rail network connecting China and Southeast Asia and will make it possible to go from Singapore to Beijing overland.
- India has celebrated its 75th Republic Day, marking the anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of India. The day was marked with a national holiday and impressive military displays. It marks the end of India’s yearlong celebration of its 75th birthday.
- A Russian private jet has crashed in mysterious circumstances in Afghanistan while transiting the Wakhan Corridor en route from Bangkok to Moscow. The Taliban say that four survivors have been found and taken to Kabul. Few visit the country now, and international air traffic has avoided Afghan airspace since the Taliban takeover in 2021.
- Iran and Pakistan have carried out airstrikes on each other’s territories. The two are not at war, but fighting the same nebulous group of Balochistani militants in their respective frontier districts. Tensions remain high but have not escalated as feared.
- Lord Cameron, the British foreign secretary, has abruptly announced that Britain will no longer transfer the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, as had previously been agreed after the UN ordered a handover. The island chain, in the northern Indian Ocean, is home to a strategically important American airbase at Diego Garcia. The announcement has enraged the native Chagossian community, who were forcibly removed from the islands in the 1960s and now live in exile in the UK; but has been well-received by parts of the British press.