Even as Japan and the rest of Asia look skyward — with perhaps a mix of admiration and trepidation — to the latest success to date of China's 20-year-old, multibillion dollar space program, much more needs to be done here on earth to bring business growth to some of the highest parts of Asia and the Pacific, a region which is still home to the vast majority of the world's poor.
As Afghanistan struggles to break free from a turbulent modern history that seems at times to keep that nation mired in poverty and the past, China joins the United States and the former Soviet Union as the third nation to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon. The contrasts could not be starker.
Yet, poverty remains a persistent challenge among the people who continue to make their lives in some of the world's most remote mountain regions in Asia, including in China. Limited economic opportunities still characterize sparsely populated communities on the Tibetan plateau as well as Himalayan villages that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa once passed through 60 years ago this year en route to the first successful ascent of Mount Everest.
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