In Malaysia the challenges keep piling on. The new prime minister went into a COVID-19 quarantine, even as he tries to crush rivals’ Game-of-Thrones-style attempt at his job. Hordes broke travel restrictions to celebrate Ramadan, leading to fears of a virus surge. And the economy has contracted, an outcome exacerbated by decreasing income from fallen oil prices. While COVID-19 spares few nations, Malaysia faces a combination of issues in particular. Not least of these is the unprecedented power struggle in March, which brought the party that ruled Malaysia for 50 years back in office. Muhyiddin Yassin has been prime minister less than three months, with much of that time spent fighting off power grabs as well as fighting off the pandemic.  In this photo released by Malaysia’s Department of Information, the country’s new Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin poses for pictures on his first day at the prime minister’s office in Putrajaya, Malaysia, March 2, 2020.Now he’s in a two-week quarantine because another official came down with the virus. Adding to the tense political mood, rumors swirled that he went to Singapore for medical treatment, forcing Muhyiddin to deny the rumors last week. “I wish to state that these are false claims and are not true at all,” he said, assuring the public that he continues to work from home in Kuala Lumpur. “Nevertheless, at a time when the nation is battling the COVID-19 pandemic, I will ensure that discussions are ongoing in planning the strategy to fight the disease.” The Southeast Asian nation faces a confluence of “political uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, relatively high corporate debt” and decreased oil prices, said Raphie Hayat, a senior economist at Rabo Research Global Economics & Markets. “Oil represents 14% of Malaysia’s exports and comprises almost 20% of the government’s revenue,” he said. “The latter will also hamper the government’s ability to mitigate the negative economic effects of COVID-19.” While officials want to reopen the economy, new virus cases continue to be recorded daily, including in the triple digits on some days. The number of tasks that the state must tackle is not letting up. Infections have broken out among undocumented migrants, whom officials are treating while trying to fend off xenophobic complaints. Many citizens broke curfew to be with family on Ramadan and police have arrested thousands of people for breaking the Movement Control Order. A police officer arrives to disperse Muslims praying outside the closed National Mosque to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, amid the coronavirus outbreak, in Kuala Lumpur, May 24, 2020.They have also arrested citizens who criticized the official handling of COVID-19, including journalist Wan Noor Hayati Wan Alias. She faces six years in prison after questioning why Malaysia allowed Chinese tourists to enter the island of Penang as the virus broke out.  “They dismissed early concerns and warnings about the coronavirus as ‘fake news,’” she said of officials in an interview published by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Economists note that the virus emergency has caused gross domestic product to shrink 2% in the first quarter of 2020, and things will likely get worse before they get better. The fall in GDP was driven by decreases in exports and investment as foreigners demand fewer products and travel less.  “Consumer behavior is unlikely to return quickly to anything like normal, while fear of contracting the virus remains,” Alex Holmes, a senior Asia economist at Capital Economics, a research company, said.  He doubts that the central bank, the Bank Negara Malaysia, will stop at its latest decision to cut a key interest rate to 2% in early May. That was a bid to stoke demand in the economy and was already the lowest rate since 2009, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis.  “With growth set to be much worse than the bank is expecting,” Holmes said, “further rate cuts are only a matter of time.”  
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The Philippine government lifted some of its strictest coronavirus containment measures Monday in what observers called a bid to salvage an economy battered by unemployment and new signs of poverty. Most businesses were allowed to re-open and some public transportation came back to normal, per orders approved May 28 by President Rodrigo Duterte. A percentage of domestic flights started taking off again, too. Bars, dine-in restaurants and schools will remain closed while minors and the elderly are still asked to stay home. The shutdown orders that began in mid-March have put millions out of work, threatening some with poverty that had afflicted about one in five Filipinos before the disease outbreak especially if they needed medical attention. The economy is looking at a 2.2% contraction this year, market research firm IHS Markit forecasts. Nationwide unemployment topped 10% in March and April.   Food struggled to reach consumers because farmers couldn’t move produce through locked-off parts of the country, the World Economic Forum said last month. Government food aid had missed urban slum dwellers in late March, prompting them to look for meals elsewhere, domestic news outlet Rappler reported.  Monday’s reopening moves are seen as ways to ease the economic losses in spite of a coronavirus caseload that had climbed past 18,000 as of Monday with 957 deaths and little sign of a falling caseload curve.   Reopening rules will let more shops, factories, offices and transport operators try to resume where they left off in March, said Maria Ela Atienza, political science professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman. “There are groups, for instance the bus drivers, many of them of course lost a lot of income,” Atienza said. “Some people cannot continue working, so people definitely are desperate.” In a Web-broadcast speech May 28, Duterte urged mall owners to give their commercial tenants rent breaks if the shops had made no money during the shutdown.Bus workers fetch families, workers and students who were stranded at the capital when the community lockdown was implemented to give them a free ride back to their province in Baclaran, Metro Manila, Philippines, May 29, 2020.The Philippines will struggle this year especially because of the length of its shutdown orders and the halt to a normally vibrant tourism sector, said Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist at IHS Markit. Poorer people face the loss of whatever little work income they might have had before the outbreak, he said. “We don’t know how many people are dying because of the lockdown and their economic suffering,” Biswas said. “This is really an issue in poor countries, perhaps not so much in richer countries where they have some savings and the government can help them more.” Where shutdowns persist, locals expect strict enforcement. Police and military personnel patrol some spots. In others, neighborhood heads stop residents from going too far past their houses. Beaches are closed in parts of the 109.6 million-population archipelago because they’re common gathering places. Schools are looking toward online-only lessons later in the year or just calling off classes completely, said Rhona Canoy, president of an international school in the southern Philippine city Cagayan de Oro. She can’t pay her teachers.   “Private schools, we’re disturbed,” Canoy said. “I’m looking at options already but at the end of the day my most extreme option would be just to shut down the school and find some other business.”   Officials in relatively disease-free smaller provinces worry now that the reopening will bring an influx of people from cities with high infection rates, Atienza said. Most virus cases have been reported in Metro Manila and other major cities. “It will be more difficult now with more people going out,” she said.   Closures will ease up at varying paces from region to region, depending on local governments’ ability to manage COVID-19, the presidential office said in a statement. “Remember that the…entire nation is still under quarantine,” Duterte was quoted saying in the statement. “Let’s see what develops ahead.” 
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Two of the largest U.S. college campus political organizations are calling for the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the United States, saying the Beijing-funded outposts are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to control discourse on China at American universities.The open letter states that China’s actions at U.S. colleges and universities “pose an existential threat to academic freedom as we know it.”  The Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks during an interview with the Associated Press on April 26, 2018, in his office on Capitol Hill in Washington.In 2018, Undergraduate student Moe Lewis, left, shows her watercolor painting of peony leaves at a traditional Chinese painting class at the Confucius Institute at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., on May 2, 2018.The open letter condemns xenophobia and states, “The Chinese Communist Party’s actions pose an immense threat to academic freedom and to human dignity. It is imperative that we distinguish this totalitarian regime from the Chinese people, whom we must steadfastly defend from abhorrent acts of xenophobia, racism, and hatred. We must act to give voice to the long-oppressed, be they Chinese, Hong Konger, Mongolian, Taiwanese, Tibetan or Uyghur. We must condemn in the most unequivocal terms any and all anti-Asian sentiment wherever and whenever it arises.”Several of the student leaders told VOA that many American students do not understand the impact of CIs and the CCP on their campuses. They said the CCP’s practices on Hong Kong, and Xinjiang and the COVID-19 outbreak, have also made the U.S. students less likely to have any involvement with the CCP.John Metz, national council chair of the College Democrats of America, said, “I do think this reflects a growing consensus within the youth wings of both parties, and I think the events of the last few days in Hong Kong in particular, have really been moving the needle.” On Thursday, China’s National People’s Congress approved  imposing a national security law on Hong Kong, which many resident fear will mean a sweeping erosion of the city’s rule of law, rights and freedoms.    The authors of the open letter, as well as student leaders from the Democratic and Republican parties said it was only a first step, and that they would continue to push grassroots campaigns on campus, urge schools to take concrete action to implement the open letter’s appeal, and mobilize more students to contact their respective members of Congress to push for policies at the legislative level.As of May 15, 2020, there were 81 CIs in the US, according to the National Association of Scholars, and 480 CIs operating worldwide, according to the CI at the University of California Los Angeles.Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report
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