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. Hands Off Asia means socialism today’.
The conference grappled with the interconnected systems of imperial control; military, economic, political, and ideological. Taimur Rahman of Pakistan put a number to the drain: between 1960 and now, an estimated US$ 152 trillion has been extracted from the Global South. Jeff Xiong of China offered hope, explaining how the US blockade on semiconductors has failed, with Chinese companies developing AI models at only 1 percent of Silicon Valley’s cost. He made a plea for democratizing AI through millions of ‘barefoot AI developers‘, opening up doors and cultivating new productive and intellectual capabilities that were once reserved for the imperial core.
A View from Pakistan: IMF, Military Rule and the Left
Since partition, Pakistan has experienced military dictatorships every other decade on average. From 1970 to 2024, forcefully breaking democratically elected governments has become a rule rather than an exception in the country’s political landscape. Military rulers are notoriously associated with service of US imperialist interests in the region, ranging from the Afghanistan War under Zia-Ul-Haq to the War on Terror under Pervez Musharraf. However, the role of the left in leading mass struggles of workers, peasants, students and oppressed nationalities, remains little known. It was this historical perspective and analysis of the current situation which was presented at the conference by Progressive Students Federation (PrSF) and Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP).
After a mere 8 years after formation, the Communist Party of Pakistan was banned by the state. Three years later, in 1958, Pakistan entered its first IMF program under General Ayub Khan’s regime. To this day, this number has gone to 25 IMF Structural Adjustment Programs. Debt-servicing takes up the second biggest chunk of annual government budget allocations. Despite harsh crackdowns, the Left remained a force to be reckoned with until the 1980s, building people’s power and shaping the country’s politics.
Workers in urban cities were organized in unions, taking over factories forcing the government to carry out significant nationalisation of the industrial sector. Peasants rose up in the countryside from Hashtnagar to Tandojam, in some cases successfully defeating landlords and redistributing the land. Left student organizations swept union elections throughout the campuses of Pakistan, demanding free education and championing anti-war politics. These were the movements feared by the ruling class, and were crushed through brutal military operations, imprisonment and bans to pave the way for imperialist wars and privatization.
The banning of student unions in 1984 dealt a deadly blow to not just the student movements but to Left organizing as a whole. The current generation has grown up without the memory of a democratic campus and without the concept of public education. Systemic depoliticization through the misalignment of student politics altogether and erasure of peoples’ history from our curriculums has robbed young minds from critical thinking and even hope. Much like other countries in South Asia, youth in Pakistan are living through the worst unemployment crisis and the rise of far-right nationalism.
Though movements around questions of militarization, democracy and political rights have emerged and are also facing criminalisation presently, they have not been able to successfully overcome fragmentation and unite various oppressed segments in the masses. It is in these conditions that the Left continues to fight not just to rebuild our organizations, but also win the battle of ideas to reclaim our history rooted in the anti-colonial and revolutionary tradition that seeks to break the chains of neocolonialism and develop socialism.
The View from Thailand: at the Crossroads of Empire
Thailand was represented at Colombo by the journal DinDeng, the Southern Peasants Federation of Thailand (SPFT) and the Assembly of the Poor. The kingdom has historically sat at the heart of the US military architecture in Southeast Asia, hosting some of the most significant economic, military and political infrastructure in the region. The ‘Hands Off Asia’ campaign makes clear that US military installations built to encircle China do not defend the communities that live alongside them, rather they put those communities in danger. Thailand knows this intimately. Our soil has long been used as a staging ground for US imperialism, from its atrocities in Vietnam to the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia. Today, US officers still are placed in the country’s command centres, while our people bear the costs: environmental destruction, displacement, and the theft of hope for our future generations.
Thailand’s left movement has repeatedly been crushed by this military with 13 coups since 1932, the most recent two being waged against the populist-left government of the Pheu Thai Party. Younger Thais, once seen as a vibrant pro-democracy force, are increasingly shifting toward right-leaning nationalism, not because they reject politics, but rather because they have been offered precisely what the Colombo conference identified as the problem: a liberal politics that refuses to challenge the entrenched reactionary status quo, refuses to confront military domination, and refuses to articulate a genuinely socialist alternative.
The Pheu Thai/Red Shirt mass movement represents something entirely different —an approach that has ended political innocence and embraced a cynical materialist understanding of twenty-first century struggle. It recognizes that reform without contest is merely temporary. The struggle for sovereignty cannot and must not be separated from the struggle against poverty, exploitation, and the twin arms of military and economic domination.
Thailand and Pakistan face the same choice as the rest of Asia: submit to this domination both externally and internally or build genuine people’s power. As the conference declared, sovereignty in the twenty-first century is an integrated condition spanning finance, technology, data, and defence. Asia, where the world’s economic centre of gravity is shifting, is where this battle will be decided. The generation that inherits Asia’s history of resistance must demonstrate that another path is possible. Socialism today is not merely for a better world, it is a socialist world, built from the red soil of struggles.
