The leading US journal Foreign Policy has just published an extended profile, written by Jonathan Landreth, of Professor Jerome A. Cohen, entitled: “The Last China Hand. Jerry Cohen will be 95 in July this year. The article lucidly explains how he “has spent a lifetime trying to understand the People’s Republic of China”. I first Continue reading »
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So, US Secretary of Defence Hesgeth has made it clear that what most of us knew three years ago will come to pass. Ukraine is getting no more support, Trump has declared he wants their mineral rights and Putin has declared he’s not giving up territory, Ukraine will not become a NATO country and half Continue reading »
Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist and public policy analyst who is also a professor at Columbia University, gave an unconventional address to the EU Parliament last week. Below is a short version of his comments; the full version is here. Text: The NATO enlargement, as you know, started in 1999 with Hungary, Poland and the Continue reading »
New Zealand’s leading newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, screamed out this headline on 10 February: “Should New Zealand invade the Cook Islands?” The government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing. It is Continue reading »
The “China Initiative” was the name of a controversial program run by the US Department of Justice, which was introduced in late 2018 during the first Trump administration. It operated under a typically broad mandate to counter alleged China-related national security threats to the United States. Might messages in Chinese fortune cookies represent, as the Continue reading »
"The public deserves to know if there are any debt obligations, resource access clauses, or strategic commitments involved."
The ABC’s Andrew Greene has found an Australian link to Chinese AI platform DeepSeek, a Chinese national who holds post-graduate degrees from Monash University and the University of Adelaide. No surprise, ASPI is lurking in the background of the sinister allegations against an Australian educated PhD, while that researcher, Dr. Zizheng Pan, is hiding in Continue reading »
On the third day after Donald Trump announced the imposition of 25% and 10% tariffs on imported Canadian and Chinese goods respectively, Canada yielded and co-operated with Trump’s demands, in exchange for a one-month suspension of the agreement by the US. But China quickly introduced four countermeasures: first, imposing a 15% tariff on US coal Continue reading »
Australia’s former top diplomat says Donald Trump may achieve what 75 years of post-war anti-Americanism could not: concede the case for moral equivalence. Donald Trump may achieve what 75 years of post-war Americanism could not: concede the case for moral equivalence. Moral equivalence was the accusation that for all America’s claims to the ethical high Continue reading »
China today is not the China of the pre-COVID age, but many commentators think it is still an economy based on cheap manufacturing. Several weeks ago, Thomas Friedman, diplomatic editor of The New York Times, travelled to China and published his impressions in a syndicated article on the country’s “staggering manufacturing muscle”. He concluded that Continue reading »