How Local Leaders in China and India Shape Global Politics
All politics is local, even in the countries that are home to one-third of the world’s population. Antholis and his family traveled to China and India to explore how different regions operated, and how they each impact global politics:
The questions we asked fell into three categories: How do Chinese provinces and Indian states work? How do their leaders seek to balance local and national priorities and value systems? How do their citizens as well as their leaders view various global issues?
In Beijing and New Delhi, as in Shanghai and Mumbai, Chennai and Chengdu, Ahmadabad and Hangzhou, we often heard the same response: “Why do you care?”
The answer, in brief, is because local leaders are increasingly running much of India and China, which are home to a third of all humanity, from the bottom up. That is affecting how both countries act in the world, which means that these countries need to be understood from the inside out.
The Promise: The Families of Sandy Hook and the Long Road to Gun Safety
What it will take for the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to get sensible gun laws passed in the United States? A brief history of gun laws, and what’s next:
“I stood before the Sandy Hook families on that day in January to brief them on the basics of gun policy and politics. These are smart, educated people. They assumed that, in the wake of this horror, Congress would pass some long-overdue gun safety measures. By then, however, this much was already clear to the political classes: there wasn’t going to be a renewed ban on assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition magazines, no matter how wrenching the scene in Newtown. Congress just didn’t have the courage to take such a step. The Senate wouldn’t pass it, and the House wouldn’t even consider it.
“When I broke this news to the families, one of the mothers let me know, gently but firmly, that I had screwed up. ‘Don’t tell us what can’t be done, because we just aren’t prepared to hear that,’ she said. ‘Tell us that it could take time, which we can accept, because we’re in this for the long haul. And tell us what we can do now to honor the memory of our children.'”