| A | B |
|---|
| Gross Domestic Product (GDP) | total value of all goods produced by a country |
| Douglas MacArthur | American General in charge of setting up post-war Japan |
| Diet | the Japanese parliament or democratic elected governing body |
| Liberal Democratic party | the main political party in Japan, actually conservative and currently weakening |
| Cold War relations | Japan and the U.S. worked closely during the Cold War |
| U.S. Occupation of Japan | ended in 1952 |
| Japan | world's largest donor nation |
| commune | a community set up to work more efficiently, such as villages with own schools and factories |
| People's Republic of China (PRC) | Communist regime set up in 1949 by Mao Zedong |
| Great Leap Forward | Mao's failed attempt in 1958 to increase farm and industrial production by setting up communes |
| Cultural Revolution | Mao's purge in 1966 to keep China communist |
| "Little Red Book" | collection of Mao's sayings, waved by the teens known as the Red Guards |
| Four Modernizations | a plan under post-Mao leader Deng Ziaoping in 1981 for improvements in agriculture, industry, science, and defense |
| Tiananmen Square | political uprising by college students in 1989 that was crushed by government troops, killing many |
| Qing Dynasty | the last Confucian Chinese government, ousted by Mao |
| Asian tigers | Four industrialized countries in Southeast Asia: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea |
| Lee Kwan Yew | Singapore's Prime Minister who made it a city-state and ruled 30 years |
| Syngman Rhee | South Korean leader during the Cold War, authoritarian but non-communist |
| Kim Jong II | North Korean "Dear Leader" who took over in 1994 upon his father's death |
| Hong Kong | Tiny Chinese island ruled by Britain until 1997, when it was returned to China, became strong economically and China's link to the world for many years |
| Ho Chi Minh | communist who led North Vietnam |
| Domino Theory | belief that a communist victory in South Vietnam would begin a series of communist takeovers of other Southeast Asian countries |
| Khmer Rouge | Cambodian communist guerrillas who took over Cambodia after the U.S. left, starting a reign of terror |
| Corazon Aquino | wido of popular rival to Marcos, defeated Marcos in the 1986 election in the Philippines |
| Aung San Sun Kyi | elected ruler of Myanmar (Burma), military placed in house arrest, won Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for nonviolent struggle for human rights |
| Ferdinand Marcos | elected president of the Philippines in 1965, promised reform but became a dictator |
| ASEAN | organization in 1967 of six Southeast Asian countries promising to work together economically and culturally: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei |
