CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Debt, Dependency, and the Modern Colonial Chokehold on Asia

Photograph Source: U.S. Army photo by Timothy Hale – Public Domain

Over 70 delegates from 43 organizations across 17 countries gathered in Colombo from 16-18 July for the ‘Hands Off Asia’ conference, organized by the International Peoples’ Assembly and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The choice of venue was no accident. Four years ago, Colombo was the world’s cautionary tale; sovereign default, fuel queues, a presidential palace occupied by its citizens. But Sri Lanka’s crisis was never uniquely Sri Lankan, it was the compressed experience of what much of Asia lives in slow motion: production structures designed under colonialism to serve the core, debt that disciplines every budget—from the national to the household—and an international order that punishes any attempt to escape it.

Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda,’ the former Prime Minister of Nepal, described this moment as a ‘degenerating unipolar monopoly giving way to a multipolar opening that Global South countries have long desired’, but he remained cautious, adding that ‘direct political domination may have receded; but the mechanisms of domination have not.’ He described a techno-imperialism proper to the era of the fourth industrial revolution: control exercised through financial and structural dependence, military alliances, and increasingly through data, digital ecosystems, and algorithmic appropriation. Sovereignty, he insisted, must be ‘equally integrated’, meaning not merely a government of one’s own, but independence in finance, freedom from debt, and control over national resources, won through the active democratic participation of the peoples.

Dr. Dammika Patabendi, Sri Lanka’s environment minister, grounded the frame in his country’s rupture. The lesson Asia keeps teaching is that political independence does not deliver independence. Structural dependence survives the transfer of flags. A sovereign path means the freedom to formulate independent economic policy, to direct national resources toward national development, and to provide people with decent work. Vijay Prashad laid out the agenda plainly: ‘Hands off Asia is more than closing bases; it means allowing the people of Asia to determine their destiny.........

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