Shen Yaoyi (China), The Red Army conquers the Luding Bridge from the album The Red Ribbon on the Earth, 1993.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental Asia.

This month, ninety years ago, the Long March came to an end. On 22 October 1936, at Huining and Jiangtaibao, on the plateau where Gansu meets Shaanxi, the First, Second, and Fourth Front Armies of the Red Army joined forces. The last of the columns had arrived. After two years of fighting and walking – traversing more than nine thousand kilometres, eighteen mountain ranges, twenty-four rivers, pursued from the air and by hundreds of thousands of enemy troops – the Chinese revolution arrived in Yan’an. The communists had travelled from southern Jiangxi to northern Shaanxi, making that dusty town of ten thousand inhabitants the new seat of resistance.

What arrived in the north was not only an army. Of the 86,000 who left the Central Soviet Area in 1934, some 8,000 reached the end of the road – ‘an odyssey unequal in modern times’, said US journalist Edgar Snow in Red Star Over China. Yet the marchers carried something no encirclement could destroy: the experience of the Chinese Soviet Republic established in Ruijin, Jiangxi, in 1931, an experience of building power before taking power – a state formed from below.

Yang Yanping (China), Fighting in one place after another, en route, 1977.

Never Forget Those Who Dug the Well

Long before the Chinese communists governed from Beijing, they learned to govern in the rural areas. In November 1931, 610 delegates from revolutionary base areas, Red Army units, and workers’ and peasants’ organisations gathered at Yeping, Ruijin, and founded the Chinese Soviet Republic – China’s first workers’ and peasants’ democratic government at the national level. Its outline constitution vested power in workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers, extended the vote from the age of sixteen regardless of sex, and enacted land, labour, and marriage laws that turned the great questions of village life into matters of public right: who would cultivate the land, whether a woman could choose her husband, whether a poor family’s child could go to school.

The republic was dual power in practice: an alternative state growing inside the territory of an old and hostile order, with its own army, law, and money. Its National Bank opened in February 1932 with five staff members and began issuing the republic’s own currency – with Lenin’s face on the one-yuan note.

When the Kuomintang’s (KMT) blockade cut the base off from salt, medicine, and cloth, a Foreign Trade Bureau traded rice and tungsten for what the people could not live without. A news agency founded with the republic printed Red China, which circulated more than forty thousand copies by 1934. By January 1934, 3,052 ‘Lenin schools’ enrolled 89,710 children – about half the school-age children of the base – in classrooms improvised from ancestral halls.

Elections published candidate lists and allowed recall; in one township, voters removed a candidate who had taken good land for himself and another who could not account for donated funds. Cadres were schooled in the method that came to define the revolution: the mass line – learn from the people, concentrate their experience into policy, return to the people through organisation and action.

In the town of Shazhouba, Mao Zedong would sit beneath the old camphor tree outside his residence and talk with villagers about their daily lives. Through these conversations, Mao learned that they drew drinking and cooking water from muddy ponds also used by livestock. Mao investigated possible water sources with cadres and soldiers and argued for digging a well – overcoming local superstitious fears – and took responsibility for beginning the work. That well still stands, with a stone tablet behind it that reads: ‘When drinking water, never forget those who dug the well’.

The Long March was a strategic retreat after the communists understood that they could no longer withstand the KMT’s Fifth Encirclement, but it was not a retreat into nothing. They were carrying with them the experience of the republic – its laws, currency, schools, and method – across China. It was also during the Zunyi meeting of January 1935 – in the midst of the Long March – that Mao’s leadership of the Communist Party of China was established in practice.

Qian Songyan (China), The Red Army Does Not Fear the Trials of a Distant March, n.d.

Three Forms of Power

Here at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been discussing different forms of power in preparation for an upcoming dossier. Social power is the organised capacity of the people to act together and shape common sense. Governmental power is the capacity to enter and use the institutions of office. Systemic power is the capacity to transform the class character of the state and bring the means of production and the social surplus under democratic authority. These distinctions matter because an electoral victory is not a revolution, and a social movement is difficult to sustain without building institutions.

Ruijin and Yan’an show the three forms built together, as one process, under the most hostile conditions. Social power was built through more than ten thousand cooperatives, women’s organisations, literacy classes that taught peasants to write, and political education that cultivated cadres. Governmental power was built through the soviet congresses, the constitution, and the commissariats of land, labour, finance, and education – institutions answerable to the mass base. Systemic power was built through land redistribution that abolished landlord property, an eight-hour day with equal pay, and a bank that placed finance under revolutionary authority.

In the base areas, social organisation, armed authority, administration, land reform, and new political institutions developed together in territories contested with the old order. This is dual power as strategy in which power is understood as a process, with every institution measured by whether ordinary people increasingly gain the capacity to shape their lives.

Why should the Global South study Ruijin, ninety years on?

For most of the Global South, the state we inherit is a colonial construction – its borders, tax systems, and coercive institutions were built for extraction. Formal independence did not dissolve economies organised around raw materials, foreign finance, and debt. Sovereignty is limited daily by the International Monetary Fund, sanctions, the US dollar, and trade agreements negotiated in rooms we do not enter.

Sovereignty is therefore a real terrain of struggle and a precondition of any transformative programme. But sovereignty is necessary and not sufficient: recovering the flag without transforming the relations of production may merely replace a comprador elite with a national one. Anti-imperialist struggle and class struggle must be seen as two dimensions of the same process.

Ruijin is precious because it shows both tasks accomplished in one movement, under siege. At the same time, it teaches us that learning from the experience of others – be it from Moscow or from any revolutionary experience – must never become mechanical copying. ‘No investigation, no right to speak’, Mao wrote after his survey of Xunwu County in 1930 – an argument against book worship that is also an argument for the right and necessity of every people to think for themselves, based in their own conditions.

Zhang Renyuan (China), The Red Army on the March, 1976.

The Cradle of the Revolution

The Long March’s completion is commemorated in China not as a retreat but as a foundation: from Yan’an the revolution grew into the headquarters of the national resistance, paving the way to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October 1949. The weary and weathered soldiers who arrived in Yan’an ninety years ago went on to – in just over a decade – mobilise tens of millions of peasants, build a party of 1.2 million members and an army of a million soldiers, and produce the institutions and thought that would govern China.

That thread is also material obligation. The remote region that gave the revolution its cradle – the old Central Soviet Area – was among the last in China to receive roads, industry, and reliable public services. It is said that the first-generation leaders, from Mao to Zhou Enlai, always regretted never having been able to return to Ruijin after the revolution. In June 2012, the State Council made the region’s revitalisation a national responsibility, pairing central ministries with particular counties and renovating adobe houses.

In Huawu, a village in Ruijin’s Yeping area, seventeen pine trees stand for seventeen men who left to join the Red Army and never returned. For decades, their families lived in poverty in sight of the trees. By the tenth anniversary of the 2012 policy, all 1.95 million people registered as poor in Ganzhou Prefecture had exited poverty, including Huawu’s families. The village now hosts tens of thousands of visitors a year, among them scholars from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who come through study programmes to Gannan, a field-research base of the Global South Academic Forum.

‘The People’s Republic came from here’, says the inscription at Ruijin’s memorial museum. The PRC has not forgotten where it came from.

The Long March’s completion is a fact of world history that the Global South carries in its memory: a ragged army arrived in the north carrying with it the experience of dual power, and from those beginnings a new world was made.

The power to make a new world is not stored in parliaments or palaces; it is the growing capacity of ordinary people to shape their work, govern their communities, hold leaders accountable, and determine their shared future. Wherever that capacity is being built today – in the villages of Gannan, in the unions and cooperatives of Asia, in every movement that refuses the limits of the old order – the Long March marches on.

Warmly,

Tings Chak and Grace Cao

Tings is the Asia co-coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and an editor of Wenhua Zongheng, and Grace is the project manager of Wenhua Zongheng and a Chinese–English interpreter.

Ranbir Kaleka (India), Conference of Birds and Beasts, 2010.

Dear friends,

At a moment of war and genocide, when words such as Gaza and Sudan have become tragedies, it is easy to ask whether the United Nations (UN) has outlived its usefulness or can be reformed. But the better question is: reform what, and for whom?

The UN Charter (1945) promises that states must settle disputes peacefully, refrain from the threat or use of force, and cooperate on common problems. Powerful states’ violations are a reason to defend and enforce the UN Charter, not discard it. After all, every country in the world is a party to the UN Charter and therefore obliged to follow its rules.

The UN can be understood as at least three different entities.

The first, and most public, face of the UN is the Security Council, which has come to stand in as the executive of the UN body. The UN Security Council (UNSC) is made up of fifteen countries, five of them permanent members (the P5: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the others elected by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) for two-year terms. The P5 hold veto power over the decisions of the UNSC, allowing any one of them to use their veto to scuttle a decision not to their liking. The non-permanent members are allocated on a fixed regional basis: three for African states; two each for Asia-Pacific, Latin American/Caribbean, and Western European states respectively; and one for Eastern European states. By tradition, one of the seats allocated to Asia or Africa (on a rotating basis) is held by an Arab state.

The UNSC stands in for the UNGA, whose 193 members are able to pass resolutions that try to set the tone for world opinion. However, these resolutions have often been ignored since the end of the Cold War. The relationship between the UNSC and the UNGA is fraught, with the former seeing itself as independently able to chart policy while the majority of the world’s states see the latter as the embodiment of a true democratic institution. The UNGA resolutions are unable to bind any discussion in the UNSC.

The second part of the UN is its myriad agencies, each set up to deal with the various crises of the modern age: there is the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which advocates for the rights of children; the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which promotes respect for the world’s cultures, and so on. The third part comprises the UN staff and international civil servants across the globe, headed by a secretary-general.

Anupam Sud (India), Composition, n.d.

The Asian Case for Reform

The UN is clearly hampered. Three of the permanent members (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) are part of the Global North. They set the terms of the UN’s political branch due to their ideological and institutional domination of the UN’s political system. Decisions about wars, sanctions, and peacekeeping are made within a structure in which much of humanity must seek permission from powers whose position in that small club is guaranteed.

There are no permanent seats in the UNSC for Africa or Latin America, nor for India, now the world’s most populous country. But there are permanent seats for France and the United Kingdom, two former colonial powers with diminishing authority in the world.

Asia makes the case for reform vivid. The region includes enormous populations, nuclear powers, small island states, and countries living with conflict and climate danger. Yet ‘Asia’ is not one geopolitical voice, since South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and West Asia have different interests. Giving one more state – such as India – a permanent chair on the UNSC would not make those societies heard. Reform should expand long-term and elected representation and open Council deliberations to those living with the consequences of its actions. China and India are large states and can well represent Asia, but if India joins China as a permanent member of the UNSC, they should consult a future Asian Union to gauge continental opinion and not just act in national self-interest.

The opinions of the UNGA should be tested before an important matter goes to the UNSC. The large body – the parliament of the world – should be consulted before the UNSC makes its adjudication. Otherwise, the decisions totally ignore the vast majority of the world’s people, who have no access to the UNSC or to its veto power. When a majority of the UNGA votes to end Israel’s illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestine or the illegal US embargo on Cuba, the UNSC should act in accordance with that opinion or else international democracy is mocked. This should be central to any UN reform.

Erbossyn Meldibekov (Kazakhstan), Mountains of Revolution series, 2014.

Coalition for Reform

Every year, the United States mocks the UN by denying visas to country representatives trying to attend the UNGA sessions in New York in the opening week in September. This year, the US barred the Palestinian delegation and decided that Iran’s delegation had to be smaller. It is ridiculous that the US and UN welcomed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity – while denying visas to the victims of those crimes.

The UN should enforce its host-country agreement and develop credible arrangements for holding major meetings elsewhere when equal participation is obstructed. The UN week can be held in any number of places in the Global South, such as Nairobi, Kenya, which has already been positioned as the UN headquarters in the South, or one of the four cities in the South that host UN regional commissions – Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Beirut, or Santiago.

If Africa or Asia had the opportunity to develop an agenda for the United Nations, the continents might focus attention on more than drug trafficking and countering violent extremism – important agenda items for North America and Europe. They might focus on topics such as commerce in weapons, the exploitation of trafficked people, and fairer financial institutions.

The UN has an Arms Trade Treaty that establishes standards for weapons transfers, and it has a UN Office on Drugs and Crime that reports on trafficking of people. But these instruments need to be strengthened, and enforcement needs to be made a priority. A UN mechanism could track transfers to parties credibly implicated in grave abuses (such as in the Israeli genocide in Palestine), publish the corporate and state supply chains involved, and present evidence to competent authorities. The new book by Andrew Feinstein, Ruth Rohde, and Jack Cinamon, Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen (Verso, 2026), should have been a UN report that led to sanctions on a range of companies.

None of this work is abstract. As Making a Killing shows, weapons transferred into conflicts in West Asia can prolong civilian suffering far from the boardrooms and ministries that authorised their sale. Meanwhile, people have been trafficked into online scam operations and forced to commit crimes under threat, while migrant workers across the region face exploitation that crosses borders more easily than legal protection does.

Tiffany Chung (Vietnam), Operation Lam Son 719, 2018.

A UN that listens chiefly when insecurity reaches wealthy countries has misunderstood the meaning of collective security. It must follow the money, the weapons, and the labour routes, while protecting and uplifting survivors rather than treating them as statistics or offenders.

The debate over UN reform must avoid a competition for prestige among aspirants to permanent membership. Countries such as India and Brazil have a powerful claim to a greater role, as do other underrepresented regions and states. Yet reform cannot simply add new privileges to the old ones. Asia’s largest states should use their influence to strengthen equal sovereignty and regional inclusion, including for smaller neighbours whose interests they do not automatically represent. Africa’s longstanding demand for fair representation and Latin America’s exclusion from permanent membership are part of the same argument. A coalition for reform must cross these regions rather than bargain them against one another.

We should be frank about the difficulties. The P5 can block changes to the Charter that reduce their own power and veto independent secretary-general candidates. But the Charter is also a common language with which the rest of the world can judge their conduct. That is why the UN remains worth struggling over. From Palestine to the Pacific, Asia’s peoples need an institution able to insist that law applies equally, that their voices count, and that the costs of violence are traced to those who profit from it. The purpose of reform is not a more impressive UN; it is a UN capable of serving those for whom its promises have so often been deferred.

Warmly,

Vijay Prashad and Karim Makdisi

The authors are the editors of Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations in the Arab World (University of California Press, 2016). Karim teaches at the American University of Beirut and Vijay is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Dear friends,

The recent two-day BRICS summit in Delhi was important because it indicated that even the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – which had earlier attempted to enter into a strategic relationship with the US and Israel – now realises that its future lies in maintaining strategic autonomy.

Rosana Paulino (Brazil), Atlântico vermelho (Red Atlantic), 2017.

The objective reality is that the US, EU, NATO, and the G7 (clubs of settler-colonial and ex-colonial powers) are no longer the decisive forces in the world. Instead, the world is moving towards a much more flexible multipolar world order. The writ of the West, whether through their financial sanctions or military interventions, no longer runs. The BRICS Delhi Declaration strategically focused on creating alternative channels of trade and financial flows. These are to be independent of US banks and the SWIFT system through which most global transactions are negotiated. It is through US control of the SWIFT system and the Western banks that the West can impose what it calls ‘global’ sanctions on Russia and Iran, with which they are at war – either directly, as in Iran, or through their proxy, the Volodymyr Zelenskyy-led Ukrainian government against Russia.

The war on Iran provided the strategic backdrop of the summit, even though it was not directly mentioned in the proceedings. The US military interventions, either through Israel in West Asia or directly as in Venezuela, show that the US is not willing to leave its position as the world’s sole hegemon – or as Francis Fukuyama called it, the ‘American Imperium’. This is also in the context of the Modi government surrendering many of India’s earlier geostrategic positions, most importantly on Palestine. Its cosying up to Israel has been in sharp contrast with the larger consensus among African, Asian, and Latin American countries that see the settler-colonial state of Israel as the key problem in West Asia.

Hannibal Alkhas (Iran), Victory Over Fascism, 1996.

Commons Problems

Given the differences within BRICS, and particularly with India as the host country, it is not surprising that the summit focused on what is a common problem for all countries that are not part of the US-led neo- and settler-colonial alliance. That problem is how to conduct trade with each other without negotiating the US Trade Rules – a set of tortuous documents that allow the US to ‘ban’ virtually any trade it wants to stop. Under the administration of President Donald Trump, US trade rules can be used to impose higher tariffs (up to 100%) on all India’s exports to the US because India imports oil from US-sanctioned Russia. At the same time, the US hypocritically continues to import enriched uranium from Russia that it requires for its nuclear power plants.

Given that the US is still the world’s largest economy in nominal terms (though not in purchasing power parity terms), and that it can freeze any country out from most bank and financial transactions through the SWIFT system, the Delhi summit decided to focus on trade as its most important issue. This is central to most countries’ desire for independent foreign and economic policies, and to maintaining their autonomy.

The strategic route the BRICS has taken is not to try to create an alternate currency that every country can use. Such an alternate system would require either a new currency or a currency of a member state to be backed by the central banks of the BRICS countries. Instead, it has chosen a system that allows each country to transact in their domestic currencies for goods they buy from others. Several problems must be addressed if this is to be done. One is a simple mechanism for transferring money from one side to the other, provided both sides have agreed on a conversion rate. The other is how to link the central banks on both sides to enable such a transaction.

Global GDP Share (%) in PPP Terms: BRICS 5 vs. G7

A major advantage most of the BRICS countries have today, particularly those likely to handle the largest share of transactions, is that they already have payment gateways for internal transactions within each country. The challenges are as follows:

• Interconnecting each country’s payment systems, such as India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, China’s CIPS, and Russia’s SPFS. South Africa is left out for now unless it links itself to one of the four above.
• Pricing each commodity in the currency of the country selling its product and applying the exchange rate fixed for the day between the two countries’ currencies.
• Fixing each country’s currencies with respect to the others. Because only four countries’ payment systems are involved, the central banks of these countries have to fix the exchange rates between them every day.

While a single internal reserve currency made life much simpler in days when only banks communicated with each other, advanced digital payment gateways within BRICS make the problem far more tractable today. Computer systems and digital connectivity are a relatively easier problem than creating a BRICS reserve currency. This also prevents any country from emerging as a hegemonic power within BRICS, as the US does within the G7.

Towards Sovereignty

Why are countries trying to move away from SWIFT and the Western financial systems? This stems from the enormous financial power the US wields within such a system: the power not only to impose financial sanctions on any country for political reasons, but also to seize money held in Western banks that operate through the SWIFT system. In 1979, Iran’s money in US banks was seized by the US. In 2022, Russia’s money in European banks was seized by the EU countries.

Pu Yingwei (China), A Study in Scarlet: Sovereign Police (Celebration), 2021.

The financial sanctions the US imposes on any country get teeth through the extraterritoriality claims of its laws. For example, in December 2018, chief financial officer and deputy chair of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada based on a provisional extradition request from the United States. This is the extraterritoriality that the US enjoys by virtue of it being the world’s hegemon and the US court’s interpretation of its laws. According to the US, any transaction in dollars anywhere in the world falls under US law and US courts’ jurisdiction.

The move away from SWIFT, the US dollar, and US–EU currencies and banking systems is not merely a convenience for BRICS countries. It matters if they want to exercise their right to trade with whichever country they want, based on their domestic laws and not the extraterritorial reach of US and EU laws. In effect, it is simply asserting that the days of colonialism and neocolonialism are over.

Supporters of the BRICS process believe that the world needs to unite against attempts by the West to control the world through not only direct military means, but also through the existing financial and economic structures. Colonial and neocolonial wars are still being waged, from Venezuela to Iran. Each of these wars will have to be fought by the people of these countries, but the support of progressive forces worldwide is necessary.

Nalini Malini (India), I – that is Africa I – that is Asia, 2015.

The attempt to control the world financially is even more dangerous because it affects all our economies. Countries in BRICS may have different approaches on geopolitical issues – as we are seeing on Palestine, the Russia–Ukraine War, and the US–Israeli war on Iran. But all the BRICS countries share a common interest: freeing their trade from the extraterritorial powers that the West, particularly the US, wields.

If the BRICS can address the critical issue of how we can build a trading system on a one-to-one basis without going through any third-party intermediary, it would be a major achievement. The time for such a system has not only come, but we also have the instruments for it: the payment gateways of four major economic powers in BRICS. This is by no means a major technological problem and only needs the will for such an implementation.

Warmly,

Prabir Purkayastha

Prabir is a scientist and political activist. He is a founding member of the Delhi Science Forum and editor of Newsclick.in.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental Asia.

This August, Nodutdol – a diaspora Korean anti-imperialist organisation based in the United States – brought a delegation of 26 organisers representing anti-war and progressive organisations from the United States, Hawai’i, Guåhan (Guam), Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and India to the Republic of Korea (ROK).

This delegation was named the Jaju Solidarity Brigade – Jaju (자주) roughly translates to sovereignty, independence, or self-reliance. The brigade stood alongside Korean mass movements under the banner of ‘US Out of Korea’ – the slogan for this year’s National Liberation Day (15 August) mobilisations in the ROK.

As delegates, we participated in mass activities across the country at various sites of active struggle and historical memory in the long fight against US military occupation and imperialism.

The decision to bring an international delegation to forge ties of solidarity with the progressive movement at this time was deliberate. The struggle in the ROK is heightening because of its strategic significance to imperialism in East Asia, which is now intensifying its aggression to forestall crisis. This is best demonstrated by the trilateral Japan-ROK-US military alliance, or JAKUS, under Washington’s command. The people’s movements of the region and the world must respond, answering the consolidation of imperialist alliances with a people’s alliance that unites popular struggles against imperialism in the region.

The Jaju Solidarity Brigade. Credit: Craig Birchfield.

A Dagger Aimed at the Heart of Asia

The ROK has the largest permanent overseas US military presence of any country in the Global South – 28,500 troops across 62 official US bases and at least 18 additional facilities. Under the terms of the Mutual Defense Treaty (1953), the US also retains unrestricted access to all ROK military infrastructure. While Washington’s diplomatic mouthpieces frame the occupation of the ROK as a force for peace and democracy, the US military is far more shameless.

US Forces Korea (USFK) Commander Xavier Brunson calls the ROK a ‘fixed aircraft carrier’, or a ‘dagger aimed at the heart of Asia’. Brunson, who is well versed in military history, has chosen his metaphors carefully: ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ was a favoured description of Taiwan by US General Douglas MacArthur, the architect of the postwar imperialist military system in the Asia-Pacific and the commander of United Nations forces during the US war on Korea. Meanwhile, a ‘dagger pointed at the heart of Japan’ was the argument of Jacob Meckel, German military adviser to the Imperial Japanese Army, for why Meiji Japan required the colonisation of Korea. Brunson’s comments demonstrate the continuity of imperialist interests in Korea’s geostrategic place at the heart of Northeast Asia.

Despite an armistice signed in 1953, the Korean War has never officially ended by a peace agreement. The situation has reached a nadir since 2024. Escalating US-ROK military aggression and decades of diplomatic obstruction pushed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to abandon the policy of peaceful reunification and the June 15 Agreement. Unlike the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, the confrontation in Korea concerns a land border, which makes it much more possible for rapid military engagement to reach a point of no return.

Out of all Asia-Pacific countries in the imperialist camp, the ROK has the largest armed forces as measured by the number of active and reserve troops, surpassing even the United States. Whereas Japan has had no official military under its pacifist constitution since 1945, the ROK has had a massive conscripted fighting force under the operational control of the Pentagon since 1950. The ROK’s armed forces can be conceived of as a modern-day colonial auxiliary army. The metaphor of the dagger proves apt: in the two land wars the US has fought in East Asia – Korea and Vietnam – the ROK’s military was indispensable.

As Washington looks ahead to its next war in the region, it is sharpening its Korean ‘dagger’. Calls to ‘modernise’ the US-ROK alliance are growing by the day. Under the Mutual Defense Treaty, US troops are ostensibly in the ROK to fight a limited peninsular war against the DPRK. Washington now wants to loosen those terms in order to permit the USFK and its bases to be used to fight across the region.

An ‘East-Up Map’ depicting the Korean Peninsula at the centre of East Asia, with lines emanating from Camp Humphreys to major cities in the region. Credit: US Forces Korea.

The Battle for the Future

Across the ROK, the battle for the future is playing out as a battle for memory. Among the many places we visited during the Jaju Solidarity Brigade were Daejeon and Dongducheon, sites where two separate mass graves offer different angles of the necropolitics of US imperialism.

From 28 June to 20 July 1950, in the city of Daejeon, ROK soldiers and police, acting under the watchful eye of US Army officers, executed between 1,800 and 7,000 political prisoners – creating what activists now call ‘the longest grave in the world’. This slaughter was part of the Bodo League Massacre, a series of thousands of such incidents that took place across southern Korea in the early days of the Korean War. Until 1999, the Pentagon officially accused the DPRK of responsibility and kept its own evidence of the killings confidential.

In Dongducheon, near the demilitarised zone, the city itself is a graveyard. Over forty percent of the land in Dongducheon is used for US military bases and facilities. In 1953, the city swelled from a little agrarian hamlet into an urban centre after the arrival of the US bases, which stood out like islands of capital in a sea of poverty. In the hills on the outskirts of the city, as many as 3,000 women, girls, and children of the ‘camptown women’ are buried in an unmarked graveyard – a fraction of the estimated one million Korean women who were trafficked into the state-sponsored US military prostitution trade in the twentieth century. Part of the gravesite has become a city park, resplendent with floral arrangements and manicured walkways, with no indication of the thousands interred there.

A group of activists in Dongducheon are now fighting to preserve two significant sites. The first is the last remaining ‘STD Management Center’ – US Army facilities where women and girls were incarcerated and forcibly injected with dangerously high volumes of penicillin. US soldiers used to see women who tried to escape from the facility hanging from its second-storey window and gave the location an infamous epithet: ‘The Monkey House’. For the past two years, activists have maintained an encampment to prevent the local city government from bulldozing the site, arguing that it should be preserved as a historical monument.

Former US Army STD Management Center in Dongducheon. Credit: Hannah Craig.

A few kilometres away, there is a struggle to preserve the home of Yun Geum-I, a US military ‘comfort woman’ whose brutal murder and mutilation by a US soldier in 1992 sparked a mass struggle against US military impunity. Due to the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement at the time, Yun Geum-I’s killer nearly escaped justice, as he was able to hide out at Camp Casey where ROK authorities could not apprehend him. In the years since Yun’s killing, the city of Dongducheon and the US military have constructed a ‘Friendship Plaza’ honouring the US-ROK alliance on the doorstep of her former home.

Traversing these various sites, it was evident that the battle for memory is more than a struggle for the past. What is at stake is the place of the US occupation’s martyrs in the identity of the Korean people; whether the lessons of the past will inform the future, or be silenced as part of a myopic embrace of an imperialism that can only promise further crisis for Korea and the region.

Chun Mi-Kyung, President of the Daejeon Bereaved Families’ Association, at the site of the Sannae Gollyeonggeol massacre where her father was killed. Credit: Craig Birchfield.

Building an International United Front

On 14 August, the eve of Korea’s National Liberation Day, delegates from across the world gathered to discuss war, occupation, peace, and national liberation. In his opening remarks, president of People’s Solidarity for Revision of Unequal Korea-USA SOFA, Prof. Lee Jang-Hie, stated that ‘US military bases in ROK do not protect ROK’s security’. With China emerging as the second largest economy, the US has strengthened its ‘strategic efforts to contain China by roping in trilateral military cooperation among the ROK, Japan, and the United States’.

ROK activists Koo Jung-seo – representing the city of Gunsan’s struggle against the expansion of a local US Air Force base – and Kang Hyunwook – representing the village of Soseong-ri’s struggle against the installation of US Terminal High Altitude Area Defence interceptor systems – spoke on the impact of US bases and military installations. They discussed forced displacement, rising health issues, loss of productive agricultural lands, and the irreparable damage to ecologically sensitive areas like the Saemangeum mudflats that are home to numerous flora and fauna and transit spaces for endangered migratory birds.

Speakers from Japan, the Philippines, Hawai’i, and Guam spoke on the increasing militarisation of their regions and the people’s resistances against the occupation. On the forum about national liberation, delegates spoke about the rise of Southern multilateralism, the US-Israeli war on Iran, sovereign-seeking movements in the Sahel, and struggles of people against racism and imperialism in the US.

Demonstrators at the National Liberation Day march in Seoul on 15 August. Credit: Craig Birchfield.

The concluding forum was a conjunctural analysis of global anti-imperialist movements. Presenters spoke on the reality of ‘hyper-imperialism’ – US military might and control over advanced information and communications technology that enables it to engage in ‘hybrid wars’ against countries seeking to chart a sovereign path from US hegemony. The presenters viewed the wars in Iran and Ukraine as fronts of an already existing ‘Third World War’ that is accelerating towards open conflict in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Discussions also covered people’s struggles in Latin America and the impact of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’; the New Cold War on China; and anti-imperialist struggles in regional countries like the Philippines and Japan.

Throughout the Jaju Solidarity Brigade’s journey, we witnessed mass marches and rallies against US military occupation, and engaged with an array of fronts in the people’s struggle for peace, land, and sovereignty. It was evident to us that the working-class movements in the ROK and across the world are leading the fight for a just world order.

Warmly,

Park Ju-Hyun and Pindiga Ambedkar

Park Ju-Hyun is a writer and a member of Nodutdol, who leads the US Out of Korea campaign. They are also the engagement director at BreakThrough News.

Pindiga Ambedkar is the communications coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He participated in the Jaju Solidarity Brigade.

Iri and Toshi Maruki (Japan), V Boys and Girls, 1951.

Dear friends,

The government of Japan is rapidly building a war posture against China. It began in Okinawa and Amami in the mid-2010s, and has expanded to Kyushu, western Japan, and the whole country. Since 2026, Japan has begun deploying long-range missiles capable of reaching mainland China.

Exercises by Japan’s ‘Self-Defence Force’ (SDF) and joint Japan–US drills frequently use civilian airports and ports, as well as public roads and facilities. Civilian ships and ferry routes are now transporting troops and military equipment. The Japanese government and the Ministry of Defence are moving SDF command headquarters underground. This is officially framed as ‘deterrence’. But in reality, these activities anticipate a war with China, and, in such a scenario, going underground protects the command headquarters, while the people living above ground remain exposed.

This is not Japan’s doing alone. For several years, warships and carriers from Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands have been in the waters near China for joint exercises. These are the very imperialist powers that, from the 1840s to the 1940s, invaded and occupied China. In 2024, the joint Japan–US exercise Keen Sword 25 deployed 45,000 Japanese and US troops, 40 warships, and 370 aircraft. This exercise was joined by Australian and Canadian forces, with the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and NATO as observers. Over 30 civilian airports and ports were used alongside military bases. A joint Japan–US command post was set up in Okinawa and Amami for the joint exercise. In the islands where missile units are based – Amami, Okinawa, Miyako, Ishigaki – anti-ship missile drills simulated attacks on Chinese vessels. On 6 May 2026, Japanese Defence Minister Shinjirō Koizumi observed a live-fire missile drill, simulating an attack on Chinese vessels, by SDF units in northern Luzon, the Philippines.

In March 2025, then-Defence Minister Gen Nakatani proposed a ‘One Theatre’ concept to US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth – treating the Korean Peninsula, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea as one theatre of operations. Even the South China Sea, far from Japan, is now part of the SDF’s theatre. This can only be interpreted as a proposal for the military encirclement of China.

Mai Fei (China), Cherish the common people, help the common people, 1938.

The Trajectory of Imperial Japan

The war posture against China that is now being built follows the trajectory of Imperial Japan. Since its rise 150 years ago, modern Japan repeatedly invaded and occupied its neighbours, killed and dominated vast numbers of people, and became a great power in Asia. Postwar Japan – without deeply reflecting on and taking responsibility for its colonial history – is now re-militarising. The current Sanae Takaichi administration appears determined to move even further down this imperial trajectory.

In November 2025, Prime Minister Takaichi stated that Japan would use military force if China ever moved to unify with Taiwan by force. This would amount to waging war on China without the latter directly attacking Japan. China considers Taiwan to be a territory that was colonised by Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) – a war of aggression against China and Korea. For China, ‘unification’ means recovering that colonised territory. Takaichi’s remarks amount to Taiwan’s former colonial masters preventing that recovery and reunification. Her remarks also broke the Japan–China Joint Communiqué (1972) and the Treaty of Peace and Friendship (1978) – an over fifty-year arrangement that embodied Japan’s promise to build peace and friendship between the two countries. More frightening is Japanese domestic opinion – polls at the time showed that close to seventy percent of people felt that there was no need for Takaichi to retract her remarks.

In 1937, as Japan was invading China, the Japanese government and media pushed the slogan ‘Chastise the Violent Chinese’, branding China’s entirely legitimate resistance as violent and outrageous. This narrative was used to justify Japan’s own aggression and whip up public support for the war. Many citizens supported these slogans and a national unity in support of the war was manufactured. Inside that narrative bubble, there was no room to discuss the real root of the problem – Japan’s own aggression. This same history is unfolding in Japan today. Statements stirring hostility toward China flood the government and media, with almost no attempt to understand China’s own point of view.

We cannot simply watch. We must stop this before it advances further – or Japan will once again become an aggressor against the peoples of China and Asia. In such a process, lives and livelihoods across East Asia will be lost. Japan must reckon honestly with 150 years of its modern history, stop preparation for war, and become a country on the side of peace in East Asia.

Tsubasa Kato (Japan), Untitled, n.d.

Resistance to Japan’s War Posture

This new war posture, built up since the 2010s, went almost unreported nationally. Resistance has remained isolated. As the militarisation spread from Kyushu into western Japan, we finally began, from late 2023, preparing to connect these isolated struggles into one fight. Through 2024, we held exchange and solidarity gatherings across Okinawa and western Japan: Ehime in April, Okinawa in August, Kure in September, Oita in November. In February 2025, we held a founding assembly in Kagoshima, launching the Stop the War! Okinawa–Western Japan Network. Our founding declaration closed with this pledge:

‘“Know. Connect. Stop it.” – To create peace, we take a new step into struggle. Sharing information, pooling wisdom, connecting, standing in solidarity – with the combined power of citizens, we will stop this war made by the state.’

In June 2025, we brought people from across Okinawa and western Japan to Tokyo for government negotiations, a Diet rally, and a citizens’ solidarity rally. Since then, we have held a range of actions. In October 2025, we rallied in Hōsono, Kyoto, where a huge missile depot is under construction. In November 2025, we went to Oita, where another depot is nearing completion, and to Kumamoto, the country’s first long-range missile deployment site. In December 2025, we gathered in Kure, Hiroshima, where a vast comprehensive military hub is planned. And in May 2026, we went to Maizuru, Kyoto, a major naval port slated to host Tomahawk missiles. At every one of these actions, local residents stood alongside people who had travelled from across the country. A third ‘Tokyo Action’ is planned for October 2026.

After the Takaichi administration’s landslide victory in the February 2026 elections to the House of Representatives, growing numbers of young people, especially women, joined protests against constitutional revision and militarisation. Protests in front of the Diet on 19 April 2026, plus solidarity demonstrations nationwide, drew over 50,000 people. These protests were the result of people organising their own actions. What began in Tokyo is now spreading nationwide. Back in 2015, student-led protests erupted when the government tried to enact laws that would allow Japan to directly join US-led wars. But the recent protests far exceed the scale and geographic spread of the 2015 protests. For Japan, where youth-led, anti-war activism has long been absent, this is a genuinely groundbreaking development.

Meiro Koizumi (Japan), Fog #15, 2020.

Three Challenges for Resistance

There are three main challenges to building resistance to Japan’s war posture. The first is to merge the struggle in militarised regions with the new youth struggle. This requires a convergence of the regional struggles against militarisation, the anti-constitutional-revision movement running continuously since 2015, and the new youth-led anti-war and anti-Takaichi movement. The more deeply and broadly these movements merge, the more the struggle can grow into one great wave covering all of Japan. In October 2026, we plan to hold an action in Tokyo to unite these forces, raise our voice against Japan’s growing war posture against China, and strengthen the anti-war movement.

The second challenge is to overcome and dismantle the ‘China threat’ narrative spreading through Japanese society. The government and media frame militarisation as deterrence. Most citizens accept this framing and don’t oppose the huge cost it entails. Rearmament always comes bundled with tax hikes and cuts to social security. Meanwhile, many citizens face growing hardship in daily life and are calling for social security and tax relief. If more people understood that China has no reason to attack Japan, and that it is in fact the Japan–US war posture that is risking war in East Asia, support for militarisation should fall. There are no Chinese military drills near the US, but there are Japan–US–NATO drills right next to China. Therefore, dismantling anti-China narratives is an urgent task.

The third challenge is to build an anti-war movement in solidarity with the peoples of the Global South – those once colonised by the imperialist powers, Japan included. The Western countries and Japan, dominant for centuries, are now in historic decline. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and others are gaining economic strength and political voice. These countries promote peaceful resolution of disputes and have opposed wars of aggression against Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine. It is the Global South, China included, pushing hardest to stop the Western-backed Israeli attacks on Palestinians since 2023. This stance runs unbroken from the Ten Principles of Bandung to the Non-Aligned Movement.

The reckless US actions against Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran are the death throes of a declining power. The countries building this war posture against China are the same Western core states led by the US – and it exists to weaken China, the centre of the Global South, to delay their own decline. Our struggle shares common cause with people fighting US aggression in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. Japan’s anti-war movement does not yet carry this awareness. But we must grasp our own struggle through exactly this lens, and carry it forward as a genuinely international struggle – our historic task, living here in East Asia at this turning point in human history.

The Hands Off Asia initiative carries the hope of becoming the seed of an ‘Asian People’s Anti-War Network’, linking the Japanese people’s resistance with the struggles of East Asian and Global South peoples. Eighty-one years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the work of stopping the next war has only just begun.

Warmly,

Hiroyuki Takai

Takai is the co-representative of the Stop the War! Okinawa–Western Japan Network and author of Who Invites War in East Asia? – China Containment and US-Japan War Plans in the Ryukyu Arc. This essay is adapted from his remarks at the webinar ‘Re-Narrativising Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Resisting Japan’s Remilitarisation’ on 11 August 2026, organised by the International Peoples’ Assembly Asia and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental Asia.

This summer, students marched through Delhi, India, in cockroach masks. The masks were a response to India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant calling the country’s unemployed youth ‘cockroaches’. India’s youth reclaimed the insult, naming their movement the Cockroach Janta Party. After a medical entrance examination was leaked, a wave of students committed suicide and Indian educator and activist Sonam Wangchuk went on a twenty-six-day hunger strike. These events culminated in the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on 25 July – the first cabinet resignation forced from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in twelve years.

The mainstream media has filed these events under the simplistic label of ‘Gen Z’. However, the ‘cockroaches’ are not a generation but a stratum of people whom the economic system treats as disposable – an unwanted surplus of humanity. The young people in Delhi were not protesting their age; they were protesting a socioeconomic system that had failed them. In 2022, graduate unemployment in India stood at twenty-nine per cent – nine times the rate among those who never went to school. In other words, a more educated Indian is more likely to be unemployed. We at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research call this a class struggle, rather than a struggle between generations.

Similar conditions can be found across the region – from Sri Lanka to Nepal. Genuine anger is everywhere, but the outcome is decided by which forces have the organisational capacity to capture it.

K. P. Reji (India), Mary Had a Little Lamb, 2020.

One Anger, Four Inheritances

In March 2022, Sri Lanka experienced its worst economic crisis in modern history, resulting in shortages of fuel, medicine, and food. Spontaneous protests by informal workers eventually attracted large sections of the middle class and student and trade unions. These culminated in Sri Lanka defaulting on its foreign debt for the first time and the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The interim presidency of Ranil Wickremesinghe took the country to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and imposed an austerity programme that doubled the poverty rate and gutted economic sovereignty in order to pay back the creditors. About four-fifths of the debt was owed to Western banks and bondholders, not to China. Western finance made the crisis in its own offices, and the cure strengthened those same offices. Two years later, public anger found a better outlet through the National People’s Power and its presidential candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Yet the new government administers the same IMF programme that Wickremesinghe entered into. Political power did not translate into economic power.

In July 2025, a quota reserving a third of state jobs for the descendants of the country’s freedom fighters, mass graduate unemployment, food inflation, and fifteen years of Awami League rule drove students and workers into the streets of Bangladesh. The state killed hundreds. On 5 August 2024, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India. But the revolt did not belong to those who made it. Washington’s long friction with Hasina is a matter of record, and the Indo-Pacific contest over Bangladesh is real. The fact is that power passed to a technocracy under microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus. Elections in February 2026 led to a landslide victory for the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The extremist Jamaat-e-Islami was rehabilitated as the principal opposition, while the Awami League was banned from the ballot. The women garment workers who made the victory possible, and the organised left, were pushed to the margins. Though people rose with their genuine anger and demands, reactionaries and their foreign patrons captured power.

Gigi Scaria (India), Ringa Ringa Roses, 2018

In September 2025, the government of Nepal banned twenty-six social-media platforms, leading to youth protests. Police shot dead nineteen protesters on 8 September, and the death toll rose past seventy in the following days. Angry crowds burnt down parliament, offices of governing parties (CPN-UML and the Nepali Congress) and other traditional parties. They also burnt down the residential buildings of the leaders of these parties. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned. Nepal lives on the export of its own workers – one in five people are unemployed, three thousand people leave the country every day in search of work, and remittances comprise a quarter of GDP. The ‘nepo kid’ meme, mocking the conspicuous wealth of the children of political elites, was not simply a culture war – it was a manifestation of class struggle. But anger without durable leadership and organisation led to a rightward drift. Nepal’s army chief became kingmaker and brokered the transition. The March 2026 election brought the Rastriya Swatantra Party of rapper Balendra Shah to power. The combined vote of the communists fell from about forty to twenty-one per cent. A revolt that burned parliament simply cleared the space for the right to walk in.

Ameen Khaleel (India), The Cage of poignant Evolution, n.d.

The Form Is New; the Task Is Old

Something in these revolts is genuinely new – Nepal’s protesters chose an interim prime minister on the social-media platform Discord (which was one of the platforms the government had just banned). This organisational form is horizontal, fast, and ‘leaderless’ by conviction. It can bring down a government in a week. But a movement with no organisational structure has no body to hold the line once the ruler is gone and governance begins. In Sri Lanka, foreign creditors and their domestic allies continued to hold the line. In Nepal, the army held it before power shifted to the political right. In Bangladesh, the old parties and the Islamists held the line. A victory in the streets is only Pyrrhic if it does not lead to a programmatic organisational form.

The struggle in India has not reached the maturity of its neighbours. The government that gave up a minister remains in power. It will continue to mobilise communal sentiment and scapegoat minority communities to distract from real issues. Since paper leaks and unemployment are issues that cut across identity lines, the state will work to split the working class along communal lines. Therefore, unity is a necessary strategy and the main task ahead.

This is an argument for organisation. Anger can remove a ruler, but only organised workers and students can decide what comes after. Instruments such as trade unions, student unions, farmers’ organisations, and the party remain necessary to carry a revolt past the moment of rupture. The cockroaches have learned to march; they must now learn to organise and rule.

Warmly,

Atul Chandra

Atul is a co-coordinator of Tricontinental Asia.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental Asia.

Fifty years ago, in August 1976, Colombo hosted the fifth Non-Aligned Movement Summit. The summit’s declaration embodied the Bandung Spirit, and its resolve for peace, sovereignty, and development in the Third World. Among the many points of emphasis was the militarisation of the Indian Ocean during the Cold War. In 1971, Sri Lanka had succeeded in pushing for the UN Declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace. The peace zone proposal therefore loomed large in the final declaration of the fifth NAM summit:

‘The Conference expressed its concern that as a result of recent developments, the Indian Ocean area could become the main focus of great Power rivalry in Asia. Such a development would lead to tension and conflict in the Indian Ocean through growing great Power competitions for naval superiority in the area. In these circumstances, it is imperative that the Indian Ocean Peace Zone Proposal be implemented with the least possible delay as a contribution to international peace and security’.

The proposal was never implemented. The US military bases in Diego Garcia, just south of Sri Lanka, have been a launch pad for US wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, and most recently Iran. On 4 March, US submarines torpedoed the unarmed Iranian vessel IRIS Dena in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone, killing at least 80 sailors who were returning home after participating in naval exercises in India. Neither the Indian nor the Sri Lankan government had the strength to condemn this unprecedented act of aggression, which has turned what should be a zone of peace into a zone of war. What the Sri Lankan side could do was to rescue the survivors, provide safe haven for a second ship, IRIS Bushehr, and ensure safe passage for the sailors to return home.

In the backdrop of the US war on Iran, and just a month ahead of the anniversary of fifth NAM summit in Colombo, over 80 delegates representing over 40 organisations from 15 countries across Asia gathered in Colombo for ‘Hands Off Asia: A Peoples Call for Sovereignty and Solidarity’ – a conference organised by the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA) with the support of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Over three days, from 16–18 July, movement leaders, diplomats, and intellectuals deliberated and debated the issues that define the present conjuncture in Asia – from debt to militarisation.

Advancing but ‘Not Yet’ Advanced Asia

The Hands Off Asia conference was historic for a few reasons. First, it was the first meeting of IPA Asia in eight years (the last meeting was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2018). Much has changed since in the global conjuncture, especially in South Asia. In 2018, the prime minister of Pakistan was Imran Khan, the prime minister of Bangladesh was Sheikh Hasina, and the communists held a comfortable and seemingly immovable majority in Nepal’s parliament. In the time that has passed, Imran Khan was arrested and now languishes in jail, Sheikh Hasina was forced to resign and now lives in exile in India, and the Nepali communists were routed in recent elections following the so-called ‘Gen Z’ phenomenon. Only the right-wing government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has survived in South Asia, though even this has come under strain following an outburst of youth and student-led protests. Across South Asia, the air is heavy with expectation as a generation waits for their lives to begin. Politics churns but economics remains stagnant, as the case of Sri Lanka exemplifies.

Second, the western flank of Asia is in an active state of war, a direct consequence of US imperialism and Zionist aggression in the region. Since October 2023, Israel has conducted what can only be described as a genocide in Gaza, killing over 70,000 people and injuring multiple more, including children. That genocide has expanded in scope, with Israeli strikes targeting southern Lebanon, Syria, and Iran – all with the backing of the United States and Europe. The conflagration has also revealed the limits of US-led imperialism and Zionism – it can mobilise destructive power to level cities and infrastructure, but it cannot achieve its political goals and build stable political alternatives. The Palestinian, Iranian, and Yemeni people resist. The comprador monarchies in the Persian Gulf States have discovered that their hosting of US military bases has made them a target in a war they cannot control.

Third, the eastern flank of Asia has reached a critical mass of industrial development and regional integration. However, these countries continue to bleed their finances under dollar hegemony, tariff blackmail, and a web of military alliances. The centre of gravity of the global economy has shifted to Asia, with China’s full-spectrum industrial chain acting as an integrator. But trade partners like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are caught in a double bind, as the US forces them to divert more and more resources towards military build-up to encircle and isolate China. The weaponisation of access to the US dollar and the US consumer market has revealed the weakness of local elites, and the speed at which their patriotism collapses under economic pressure. The narrative of the rise of Asia is by no means guaranteed without protracted people’s struggle.

The Colombo Declaration

The innovation of the Hands Off Asia campaign is that it is not only about military bases and wars, but also about economic coercion, political intervention, and ideological control (what our institute calls brain capture). It is not only about political sovereignty, but about economic and intellectual sovereignty. It is not only about state-to-state cooperation, but solidarity between peoples.

The following is the text of the Colombo Declaration, which was read out at the closing session of the conference:

Gathered in Colombo for ‘Hands Off Asia: A People’s Call for Sovereignty and Solidarity’, a conference organized by the International Peoples’ Assembly (Asia) and supported by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we – representing movements, political parties, trade unions, and people’s organizations from 15 countries across Asia – commit ourselves to a single call that echoes across our continent:

Hands Off Asia, which means:

Militarily.
Hands off our seas. Hands off our lands. Hands off our skies.
No US or allied military bases on our sovereign territory. No AUKUS. No Quad. No war on Iran. No genocide in Palestine.
An end to the encirclement of Asia.

Economically.
Hands off our economies. Hands off our resources. Hands off our livelihoods.
No sovereign debt bondage. No IMF conditionalities. No tariff coercion. No technology blockades.
The right of Asian peoples to build economies of our own choosing.

Politically.
Hands off our politics. Hands off our elections. Hands off our movements.
No regime change or far-right proxies.
The right of Asia’s peoples to determine our own political future.

Ideologically and culturally.
Hands off our histories. Hands off our media. Hands off our imagination.
No colonisation of the ways we know ourselves and each other.
The right of Asia’s peoples to tell our own story and build our own peoples’ culture.

The enemy is one and indivisible. So must our answer be. We commit to peoples’ solidarity across the continent – toward the sovereignty, peace, and socialist horizon our peoples have always fought for.

The future of Asia will be decided by its peoples. Hands off Asia!

Warmly,

Atul Chandra, Tings Chak and Shiran Illanperuma

Atul and Tings are co-coordinators of Tricontinental Asia. Shiran is a researcher at Tricontinental Asia.

P.S. On behalf of Tricontinental Asia, a supporting partner of the Hands Off Asia conference, we warmly thank the Sri Lankan organisations that participated in the conference at a crucial conjuncture for the country and the continent: Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, Communist Party of Sri Lanka, Democratic Left Front, Frontline Socialist Party, and Free Palestine Movement Sri Lanka.

Nguyễn Đỗ Cung (Vietnam), Uncle Ho visiting the Gia Lam machinery factory, 1960.

Dear friends,

On 30 April 1975, Vietnamese communist forces won a great victory in the war of resistance against United States imperialism. Fifty-one years later, the celebration of the liberation of Vietnam and the reunification of our people remains one of the most important days in our calendar – not only for what it commemorates, but for what it continues to teach us.

From 1965 to 1972, the US sent nearly three million troops to Vietnam. By the end of the war, over two million Vietnamese civilians and over one million Vietnamese soldiers had died in the conflict. The brutality and inhumanity of the US against the people of Vietnam is legendary, and we still suffer the consequences. There are over four million victims of the chemical weapon Agent Orange in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – a crime for which the US has never been held accountable.

Economic Coercion

US hegemony is not only built on a sprawling network of military bases, armed conflict, and invasion. It is primarily built through soft power, economic pressure, and diplomatic manipulation. Today, Vietnam is threatened far more by the soft power of Western empire than by the threat of military invasion. This year, the Communist Party of Vietnam officially declared that foreign diplomacy is now as important as military defence to our national security. We know too well that the US, its allies, and its puppets do not need to shoot a gun or launch missiles to interfere in a sovereign nation. Tariffs, sanctions, and fomenting unrest through clandestine counter-revolutionary activity are just as effective as bullets and bombs.

Even though the war ended in 1975, the struggle against US imperialism continues to this day. Right after the war, the US imposed severe sanctions on Vietnam and we became economically isolated, especially as the Soviet Union began to weaken and eventually collapsed. Vietnam was devastated by war. Our civil infrastructure and industry had been bombed into non-existence and we could not trade with most nations. By the late 1980s, Vietnam was on the verge of nationwide famine. Millions of lives were at stake. The USSR was no longer in a position to help.

For these reasons, in 1986, Vietnam launched the policy of Đổi Mới (Renovation). In order to secure financing from the International Monetary Fund, Vietnam allowed limited privatisation and developed a market economy. It was during this time that the US stepped up economic intervention and sanctions against Vietnam. This has been the primary weapon that Western imperialism has used against my people ever since.

In order to normalise relations with the US, Vietnam was forced to pay off the huge debt accrued by the fascist puppet regime that had occupied South Vietnam until 1975. We had to pay the US more than $145 million to compensate them for the very money and weapons used to massacre Vietnamese civilians during the war. Vietnam had no choice but to accept the terms of the empire. It took us over twenty years to pay off that debt. We were paying this unjust war debt to the US until just seven years ago.

Trần Văn Thăng (Vietnam), Joining hands to build a new countryside, n.d.

Political Subversion

In addition to such economic attacks, the US has also built up its soft power to sabotage Vietnam politically. The US has spent billions, openly and covertly, to back NGOs and outlets such as USAID, Human Rights Watch, Radio Free Asia, and Voice of America to spread misinformation about Vietnam and to seed counter-revolution inside the country. Vietnam is hardly the only nation to suffer such intervention. We all know the chains of colour revolutions in Asia and Eastern Europe in the 2010s, such as the Arab Spring in West Asia and Maidan in Ukraine. These interventions completely changed the political economies of the affected nations and in many cases led to social collapse and devastation. The US would love nothing more than for the socialist government of Vietnam to collapse. From 2014 to 2019, the US backed protests and political sabotage campaigns across Vietnam. Despite the hardship and chaos, all of these colour revolutionary attempts have been defeated due to the solidarity between the people of Vietnam and our socialist government.

Ha Qiongwen (China), US imperialism, get out of South Vietnam!, 1963.

The Four No’s

Vietnam has had to be resilient and creative in responding to decades of economic warfare and constant schemes from the West. US imperialism is not just about invasions and military force. Economic and political might are also major coercive instruments, every bit as destructive as tanks and aircraft carriers. Because we are constantly under attack, both politically and economically, Vietnam cannot afford to be dragged into a conflict with any other country. In many ways, we are still recovering from the devastation of the war and the comprehensive embargoes, so it is vital that we spend our limited resources on helping our people and developing our economy.

This need for stability and peace has led to a comprehensive package of diplomatic strategies and policies refined since the 1990s, taken together known as Vietnam’s ‘Four No’s’ policy, codified in the Defence White Paper (2019):

1. No military alliance with any country. Vietnam has had enough war. We know better than most nations how destructive war is, and we will do everything to avoid being dragged into another.
2. No alignment with one country against another. Vietnam does not want to become a puppet of any country, and we do not want to bully any country. Vietnam wants to be a friend to every nation on earth as much as possible.
3. No foreign military bases on our territory. Vietnam does not allow any country to put military bases on our territory, and does not allow any country to use part of our territory to wage war on another. As history, and especially the US aggression against Iran, clearly shows, foreign military bases turn host countries into the targets of hostile forces, or at the very least make it difficult to avoid being drawn into wars between other countries. Bases can also become headquarters for intelligence operations used to destabilise nations from within. The fact is that the United States has been pressing us to allow it to put military bases in Vietnam for years, especially naval bases along our coastline. Our answer will always be no.
4. No use or threat of force in international relations. Vietnam does not speak with violence; we use negotiation and communication to resolve conflicts of interest. This does not contradict modernising the military or the primary mission of the Vietnamese armed forces, which is to defend the country, including by force when necessary.

Nguyễn Gia Trí (Vietnam), Northern Spring festival, n.d

The Struggle Continues

Over the past century, so much conflict between our nations in Asia has been stoked by the West. War and conflict are not new to Asia, and some of our nations have had tensions long before the US was even founded. But it is undeniable that the US has leveraged existing conflicts and manufactured new ones to keep Asian nations at each other’s throats instead of working together to build a stronger, more peaceful region. Vietnam is one of the few nations in Asia that has, for the most part, managed to avoid conflict with our neighbours since the 1990s. Things are not perfect, but our ‘Four No’s’ policy has been a relative success, and it is a formula that can be adapted to any nation.

The most important thing for anti-war movements everywhere is to understand the economic base: capital, money, and natural resources. This is the core insight of Marxism-Leninism – once you understand the economic base, you can see through the curtain of lies. The US uses freedom and democracy to dress up aggression. The war on Iran is not about saving anyone; it was about oil and US control of the region.

As Hồ Chí Minh taught us, theory must always come with practice. Step one: learn the truth of capitalism and imperialism. Step two: build your action and your plan. Vietnam did it, Laos did it, Cuba did it, China did it. The struggle continues.

Wherever you are in Asia, whichever nation and culture you come from, I hope you will study Vietnam’s ‘Four No’s’ policy and consider advocating that your own country develop a similar programme. Every nation in Asia should come together to push the US military and intelligence apparatus out of our region. We must not allow ourselves to be further divided and weaponised against one another for the benefit of empire. Hands off Asia!

Warmly,

Luna Nguyễn

Luna Nguyễn (known online as Luna Oi) is a Marxist-Leninist content creator and translator based in Vietnam, where she produces educational content on Vietnamese socialism and anti-imperialism.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Chen Chieh-jen (Taiwan, China), Factory, 2003.

Dear friends,

United States military bases are everywhere in the world: the US maintains some 750 to 800 military bases in roughly eighty countries or areas. Taiwan, China, is just one of them. The US military base in Taiwan was formally closed in 1979, though arms sales have continued ever since. But what receives far less scrutiny is ideological control. In Taiwan, the US did not only build bases – it built a systematic apparatus of ideological domination, one that has proved even more durable than its military infrastructure. The withdrawal of troops does not mean the end of control.

Taiwan is a part of China. The two landmasses were connected by a land bridge during the last Ice Age; when sea levels rose approximately ten thousand years ago, the strait formed between them. The indigenous people are mostly from the mainland; Han migration from the mainland has continued for 900 years, through the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Today, Han people make up approximately 95% of Taiwan’s population. My own ancestry is from Guangdong, going back 300 years. From 1684, Taiwan was administered as part of Fujian Province; from 1885, it became a province of China in its own right.

This long connection has been broken three times by imperialist invasion and occupation of Taiwan: Dutch colonisation from 1624 to 1662 (38 years); Japanese colonisation from 1895 to 1945 (50 years); and, from 1950 to the present, through US military and ideological control, a form of colonisation that has lasted decades and seems almost unending.

Lih Shih-Chiao (Taiwan, China), Entrance of a Market, 1945.

US Intervention in the Chinese Civil War

In 1945, the World Anti-Fascist War ended and Taiwan was reconnected with the mainland – but only briefly. Between 1945 and 1950, US imperialism intervened in the Chinese Civil War and supported the Kuomintang (KMT) with military, financial, and other resources. In 1949, the KMT was defeated by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and retreated to Taiwan. Since then, the Taiwan Strait has been in troubled waters.

In 1950, the Korean War broke out. To prevent the expansion of the People’s Republic of China’s influence, the US included Taiwan in its containment strategy. Taiwan was incorporated into the US-led Far East anti-communist, anti-China Cold War frontline – along with the so-called ‘Four Asian Tigers’, including Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, located off the eastern coast of mainland China and forming a containment chain. During the Cold War, the US established a military base in Taiwan. In 1950, President Harry Truman dispatched the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait. In 1954, a Mutual Defense Treaty was signed between the US and the KMT authorities – a clear intervention in China’s internal affairs. The US used economic assistance and ideological control to dominate Taiwan.

With US support, the KMT enforced martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987 – a period known as the White Terror. Many Taiwanese people rose up to fight against the KMT’s repressive rule; many were arrested, interrogated, charged, tried, imprisoned, and even executed by intelligence agencies with US backing. There is a mass graveyard of those killed; many remain unidentified, just under the ground.

The apparatus of ideological control took many forms. The US built a systematic propaganda machine in Taiwan through the educational system, the media, and other channels, alongside policies that sent young people to study abroad, mostly in the US. Pro-US elites were ideologically indoctrinated through fellowships, foundations, and bodies like the Asia Foundation and the East-West Center in Hawaii. The Asia Foundation, it was later revealed, had been funded by the CIA as part of a broader programme of covert ideological operations across Asia – a fact publicly acknowledged by the US State Department in 1967.

I am one example of this system: I was a fellow at the East-West Center. The main themes of this ideological control are anti-communism, liberalism, modernisation theory, ‘universal values’ framed as individual freedom, human rights, Western democracy, and an overarching anti-China, pro-US sentiment. As a consequence, Taiwan’s mainstream ideology today is pro-US, anti-communist, and anti-China.

Huang Rong-can (Taiwan, China), The Horrible Inspection, 1947.

US Intervention after Normalisation with the People’s Republic

In 1979, the People’s Republic of China and the United States established diplomatic relations. The conditions were that the US would sever diplomatic ties with the KMT authorities in Taiwan, withdraw its troops – completed by 1979 – and terminate the Mutual Defense Treaty, which ended on 1 January 1980. But the withdrawal of troops did not mean the end of control.

After 1979, US control of Taiwan did not stop. The US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act immediately after diplomatic recognition, mandating continued arms sales and maintaining unofficial relations through the American Institute in Taiwan – a de facto embassy. Even without a formal military base, steady arms sales have continued. Every single US president has sold arms to Taiwan.

Since 2019 alone, the US has approved billions of dollars in weapons, including M1A2 Abrams tanks, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and HIMARS mobile rocket systems. In October 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that US Special Operations Forces and Marines had been secretly training Taiwanese forces – a covert military presence without a formal base. The most recent arms packages have required Taiwan to fund US arms purchases, a controversy that remains alive on the island today.

Ideological control, too, has continued unbroken. The educational pipelines, the media ideology, the elite networks cultivated over decades – all of this persisted after 1979 and persists today.

Yin Xiuzhen (China), Portable City, n.d.

People’s Struggle and Internationalist Solidarity

These structures of control have shaped resistance movements across Taiwan. For half a century, I have been involved in one such struggle: the movement to protect the Diaoyutai Islands. The Diaoyutai Islands belong to Taiwan, China, but in the early 1970s, the US – seeking to consolidate the US-Japan anti-communist alliance – transferred the administrative rights of the Diaoyutai Islands, then part of US trust territories from the World Anti-Fascist War, to Japan. The movement to protect the Diaoyutai Islands began in response and has continued for five decades.

Throughout this period, Japanese imperialism – with the support of US imperialism – has constantly encroached on Chinese sovereignty over the islands, bullying and humiliating Taiwan’s fishermen. I am the founding chair of the Diaoyutai Education Association in Taiwan. Our mission is to educate and inform the Chinese people about this ongoing infringement by the US and Japan on China’s sovereignty.

A related struggle is the work of the China War of Resistance Against Japan Historical Truth Preservation Society. The Japanese government has yet to acknowledge its atrocities in China during the World Anti-Fascist War. Some twenty-four million Chinese people were killed by the Japanese invasion, but the Japanese government has not admitted what was done to the Chinese people. In March 2026, around twenty members of the society, including myself – victims of the Japanese invasion of China – travelled to Japan to hold the Japanese government accountable for its wartime atrocities.

These efforts intersect with broader solidarity networks across the region: a participant in an Okinawa-Taiwan dialogue project, for instance, serves on the board of directors of the Diaoyutai Education Association, linking the struggles against US military bases in Okinawa with the defence of Chinese sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands. Unfortunately, Japan is heading the other way. Its right-wing government, under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, is pursuing the largest remilitarisation since the end of the World Anti-Fascist War.

Sharing local struggles and local analyses across the region reveals how much we have in common – but it also demands deeper class analysis. In Iran, in Taiwan, and in China, different classes of people are impacted differently by imperialism, and the narratives of imperialist leaders often differ sharply from those of the people. When our Historical Truth Preservation Society went to Tokyo in March 2026, we spoke with both government officials and activists in Japan’s civil movements. We found nothing in common with the officials as we held them accountable for wartime atrocities. But we found strong solidarity with civil movement activists.

I had always assumed that Japanese people’s perspectives would have been shaped by their government’s ideological propaganda. Our encounter with the Japanese civil society activists demonstrates that such solidarity is not only possible but necessary – even when a right-wing prime minister tells a very different story. Solidarity between peoples of similar experiences and classes across countries cuts through these divisions. Each of us carries an enormous amount of work in our own areas, but we must connect.

Warmly,

Chen Meei-shia

Chen Meei-shia is the founding chair of the Diaoyutai Education Association and emerita professor of public health at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, China. She has been involved in movements for sovereignty and against US and Japanese imperialism for over fifty years.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Kazem Chalipa (Iran), Desert, 1984.

Dear friends,

I write from Isfahan, the third-largest city in Iran and the second-most impacted by the recent war. Since the ceasefire on 8 April 2026, we Iranians finally got a break from fighter jets flying overhead and explosions through day and night, from wondering whether our loved ones were safe.

Iran came under attack from US military and occupation bases hosted by family monarchies around the Persian Gulf. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia provided their airspace and their land to US assets and military facilities. They have spent billions of dollars on so-called defence systems from the United States, wishfully thinking these would protect them from any potential attack. The way this has worked is that the US has always tried to divide and conquer by portraying Iran – both to the world and to the Persian Gulf countries – as a threat to security. By doing so, it has convinced these monarchies to buy weapons and defence systems and to enter into security pacts with the United States.

This war is a turning point in the history of not only the region but the history of the US as a hegemon and imperialist power. The myth of US bases as shields has been challenged in a way that cannot be ignored.

Mohammad Reza Ghaderi (Iran), Every day is Ashura and every land is Karbala, n.d.

Defence or Escalation?

Hosting US military facilities has been sold as protection. In practice, it transforms Persian Gulf states from ‘protected partners’ into exposed forward positions – high-value targets in any confrontation. This war has been about Iran, but the logic applies to any country the US desires to attack, whose retaliation then strikes those bases. Protection has turned into exposure. US bases do not simply deter conflict; they import conflict. By embedding Persian Gulf states in Washington’s military architecture, these facilities narrow diplomatic manoeuvre, invite retaliation, and make civilian infrastructure vulnerable to spillover. The promised shield – security guarantees, rapid response, deterrence – becomes a bullseye.

These fixed military facilities become visible targets, especially given Iran’s military doctrine, which relies on missiles and drones rather than fighter jets. Iran has produced and can continue to produce thousands of drones – affordable, easy to deploy, and capable of bypassing security and defence systems. The host states have lost their autonomy. They have lost their sovereignty. By hosting US bases, they became tied to US escalation choices. They did not have a choice about whether to take part in this war; by hosting those bases, they had already taken a side.

The Persian Gulf states host a dense network of US occupation facilities: Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the United States Fifth Fleet headquarters at the Naval Support Activity Bahrain, and installations in Kuwait, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. These bases and assets are framed as deterrents against Iran, yet their geography places host societies right beside command centres, runways, ports, radar systems, and fuel depots – precisely the assets that become initial targets when retaliation comes. These so-called allies, who are complicit in the killing of Iranian civilians, become legitimate targets. The host country does not merely host the shield; it hosts the target set.

US occupation facilities have endured more than 170 attacks since October 2023. The full damage sustained by the United States is far greater than initially acknowledged – US officials have privately estimated the true cost at closer to $50 billion, roughly double the Pentagon’s public figure. Censorship has been heavy. People – including Western citizens – have been arrested in the UAE, Kuwait, and elsewhere for filming the aftermath of Iran’s responses. The pattern is not accidental: foreign bases operate as tripwires. Specific targets have included Al Udeid in Qatar, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Many of the radar systems the US had boasted about as invincible have become sources of vulnerability for these family monarchies.

A Chatham House analysis identifies the flawed bargain: Persian Gulf regimes trade sovereignty and flexibility for a security umbrella that asymmetric threats can easily bypass. When Iranian drones and missiles started hitting US targets, the US could barely defend itself, let alone protect the hosting countries. That has been one of the complaints these regimes have voiced – that the US has, in effect, abandoned them. Because of these security pacts, they have neither the sovereignty nor the capability to defend themselves. The structure of the base bargain produces a strategic inversion: what appears as insurance functions as a liability when the country targeted by the US strikes the infrastructure that enables US operations. The slogan ‘a pact with the US will save you’ has been shattered. These bases have become massive bullseyes, and they have created a problem for the region in which host governments cannot de-escalate independently while hosting and facilitating escalation against other suffering nations.

Habib Sadeghi (Iran), A Funeral for Hearts, n.d.

Orientalism and Hyperreal Enemies

The foundation of all of this is ideological. In an article I wrote with Christopher Weaver, ‘Hyperreal Warriors and Orientalist Foes’, published in Middle East Critique just after the 12-day war of June 2025, we observed how the orientalist depiction of Iran portrays it as an irrational actor who is a permanent threat to the US, the Zionist entity, and the Persian Gulf states. In fact, these orientalist tropes serve the imperialist depiction of Iran in order to convince countries in the same region to enter into pacts and become complicit partners in US crimes. On the other side of this orientalist depiction is a ‘hyperreal enemy’ who cannot be defeated, who is invincible, and from whom only a pact with Washington can save you. Both sides of that spectrum serve the same narrative war.

The imperial playbook is repetitive and predictable. They keep saying that ‘Iranians chant death to America’, or that the US wants to liberate women. In fact, US animosity towards Iran did not start with the 1979 revolution. It started well before, when in 1953 the CIA orchestrated a coup d’état against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh – not because he was an ayatollah or chanted against the US (he was secular) but because he wanted to nationalise Iran’s oil. That is the true source of US hostility to other nations.

Kazem Chalipa (Iran), Untitled, n.d.

From Dependency to Sovereignty

There is no single response to capitalism and imperialism. Iran is an example of incorporating indigenous cultural values and ideology into a strong response. To understand the resistance coming from Iran, it is necessary to learn about Shia theology, with its tenets of social justice and dignity. Iran has made it clear: we will not negotiate at gunpoint, and we will fight to the last Iranian, but we will never surrender to imperial power. Our slogan is no to humiliation. The reason Imam Ruhollah Khomeini called the US regime the ‘Great Satan’ is not only rhetorical. It comes from lived experience: Satan is deceptive, evil, and breaks promises. We have seen how the US attacks Iran during negotiations and breaches international deals. The world is waking up. We must educate people about different models of resistance and find indigenous responses rooted in our own values. Iran has been under brutal sanctions for four decades, and still it is bringing the imperialist power to its knees.

US bases import war. They make host territories militarily relevant in confrontations that the host may not control. Deterrence myths obscure vulnerability. Missiles, drones, and asymmetric tactics bypass the supposed shield. Neutrality is the real strategic asset. Persian Gulf security requires de-escalation, sovereignty, and regional diplomacy – not deeper dependence on forward basing. Security requires distance from the imperialist power, not dependency on it. Who benefits from this base architecture, and who absorbs the consequences? Once we answer that, it becomes clear who actually benefits from any pact with the US. These bases must be removed from the region, and the peoples of the Persian Gulf and Asia should join hands with the Iranian people to ensure their removal.

Warmly,

Dr. Setareh Sadeqi

Dr. Setareh Sadeqi is an assistant professor at the Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran. She writes on orientalism, US imperialism, and the geopolitics of West Asia.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.