In Asian media this week: America must show it has answers to global problems. Plus: Thai government talks of gun control; Australia-China de-coupling is impossible; Myanmar military’s killing, torture and rape; Cold War returns to Korean Peninsula; China’s EV makers have edge over US. The battle between the US and China has moved to a Continue reading »
Asia
The world is told a simplistic black and white tale about Hong Kong’s troubles in 2019, with heroic “pro-democracy” activists crushed by Beijing. What really happened was very different and far more complex, says a detailed new book by top Hong Kong academic Daniel F. Vukovich. A daily hail of petrol bombs, scores of destroyed Continue reading »
God, I admire Penny Wong. I honestly do.
If you have heard her speaking before the UN General Assembly recently you know why. If you haven’t, just look at her. Listen to her.
The climate threat … Kiribati, Tuvalu and Marshall Islands are only a few metres above sea level … Many developing countries are rightly frustrated … Approaching climate tipping points … We must demand more from permanent members [of the UN’s Security Council], including constraints on the use of the veto …
Powerful words.
Strategic ambiguity is the greatest oral weapon of mass destruction that the Western world has ever invented. The Cambridge Dictionary defines “ambiguity” as “…the fact of something having more than one possible meaning and therefore possibly causing confusion…” The fact that the West’s strategic ambiguity has such a large following among its members is that, Continue reading »
In Asian media this week: Canada, India tensions have sorry history. Plus: BRI shows most countries shun ‘decoupling’; Myanmar rebels ‘will never give up’; China to dominate green car market; Putin and Kim lead ‘axis of outcasts’; China decline the fashionable chatter in Washington. By the time of this month’s G20 summit in New Delhi, Continue reading »
Growing touchiness as scandals mount. Singapore appears to be escalating its campaign to control the political narrative in the face of a growing series of scandals by invoking its “Fake News” law, known by the acronym POFMA, against the East Asia Forum, an Australia-based academic website run by the Australia National University’s Crawford School of Continue reading »
How ironic that mainstream newspapers and conservative commentators should lambast former prime minister Paul Keating for living in the past when he denounced the AUKUS agreement and the Labor government’s fulsome support of it. It was, of course, the AUKUS agreement itself, entered into by Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden in 2022, that Continue reading »
South Korea is among the nations with the highest coal power generation. South Korean government is moving ahead to launch commercial operation of the Samcheok coal power plant in Gangwon-do province in October defying opposition from civil society groups and the Catholic Church. Since October 2021, Catholic groups have been staging protests every month at Continue reading »
In Asian media this week: Hanoi, but not Jakarta, a deliberate choice. Plus: ASEAN must ease great power tensions; G20 starts with Xi’s snub of the West; global inflation to last for years; BRICS the real challenge to US-led order; Indonesia supports bloc but will not join; Manila ‘taking defence seriously’. The decision by US Continue reading »
Hong Kong can do nothing right, it seems. But it’s not the community’s fault: it lives on a fault line, trying to balance between two much larger, more powerful entities. Richard Cullen recalls a different occasion when two big powers, the US and the UK, had a difference of opinion. Often, much smaller communities end Continue reading »