Asia and Pacific

John Daley from the Grattan Institute responds to Sam's post about China overtaking the US in economic weight: I think we have more than one example of a great power surpassing another: I don't know whether you have had a chance to read Why the West Rules – For Now, but it is a

The way the world found out about China's stealth fighter test flight yesterday is a fascinating lesson in the agility and impact of social media, and the disadvantages faced by traditional news organisations and governments in handling fast-moving stories. It took hours for mainstream media,

I hope US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was braced for disappointment ahead of his visit to China this week, because that is precisely what he is being served up. The flight test yesterday afternoon of China's prototype J-20 stealth fighter looks to have been a calculated signal of defiance

Here's the FT on a Chinese plan to consolidate the country's two big railway equipment producers into a single entity: Yet the idea faces opposition from the companies themselves and from other ministries, including the powerful central planning agency, which wants to maintain competition

Aaron Connelly produces the CogitAsia blog for CSIS Washington and has written for The Interpreter on Indonesian politics. Graeme Dobell's post of yesterday offers up another argument by the Australian diplomatic corps that their then Prime Minister's ill-fated Asia Pacific

For Asia Pacific governments and other observers of the Chinese military, the Christmas season was anything but quiet. CFR's Asia Unbound blog sums up the news from late December: Chinese officials suggested that they would launch their first aircraft carrier next year; Admiral Robert Willard

Other Interpreter regulars have offered you serious and worthy tomes for your end-of-year best books consideration. This column goes the other way, with cop shop potboiler Xmas reads, maintaining the Interpreter mantle by picking Asian sleuths. First up, some rattling good

Annmaree O'Keeffe is a Lowy Institute research fellow. She has served as Australian Ambassador for HIV/AIDS and Deputy Director General of AusAID. It's been 20 years since the first Human Development Report was published by the UN. The core message of that first report was that while economic

Dr Andrew Butcher is Director of Policy and Research at the Asia New Zealand Foundation. A recent Department of Labour report on international students in New Zealand shows two trends that might be eerily familiar to Australian readers of this blog: there is a rapid increase in students

As Chinese premier Wen Jiabao prepares to accompany over 100 senior business leaders on an official trip to India, it is timely to reflect on the state of relations between Asia's two greatest powers. Relatively unharmed by the GFC, rapidly growing India and China continue to forge an ever-

On Wednesday we hosted two distinguished Indonesia experts, Cate Sumner and Tim Lindsey, to launch their new Lowy Institute paper, Courting Reform: Indonesia's Islamic Courts and Justice for the Poor. Click on the link to download a copy for free or order a hard copy, or listen to their

Justin Jones is Navy Fellow at the Lowy Institute and is the maritime adviser to the MacArthur Foundation Lowy Institute Asia Security Project. Yesterday, the Jakarta Post reported an increase in funding for Indonesia's Maritime Security Coordinating Agency. It's an impressive boost,

Catherine Chan is an environmental lawyer and journalist in Beijing. China's consumer price index rose 4.4% year-on-year from October – a 25-month high. Food prices are the main driver for the fastest increase in two years. Water rates have doubled, from 11RMB to 22RMB per cubic tonne

It's been an eventful few weeks in Pacific politics. In a month usually devoted to presentations of annual appropriations bills to parliament, the region has engaged in a few changes of personnel. Vanuatu's Prime Minister Edward Natapei has paid an especially high price for trying to attend

SMH columnist Gerard Henderson today accuses former US president Jimmy Carter of favouring 'appeasement' of North Korea. In the lexicon of international relations, there's hardly a more serious charge to throw at anyone. As Paul Kennedy wrote: ...talk of someone being an Appeaser brings us

Scott Smith from the US State Department has written in with this response to the e-diplomacy paper I launched last week, pointing out that other areas of the Australian Government (with whom he worked three years ago) are advanced users of digital technology.  ...I

As the chances of a reflexive escalation of this week's hostilities on the Korean peninsula gradually subside, the most probable and consequential risk of this latest conflagration, as Rory Medcalf has noted, is that it will further aggravate US-China relations, which have already deteriorated to

I came to Seoul this week to discuss nuclear deterrence and North-South relations with local experts. Little did I expect that scholarly consultations would turn into all-too-lively field research. Here are a few very initial thoughts on what is happening. First, the good news: escalation

After a decade of effort, Fiji's New Order regime is settling in place, with the colonels, cronies and carpetbaggers thriving. The reality of the way Bainimarama's regime is evolving tracks key elements of Indonesia's New Order under Suharto, even if Suva doesn't use the term. The rhetoric of Fiji

Catherine Chan is an environmental lawyer and journalist in Beijing. For all the talk on how the Australian resources sector relies on China's insatiable appetite for Australia's rocks, little has been written about where these commodities end up. Much of this economic growth has been attributed

Greta Nabbs-Keller is writing a PhD on the impact of democratisation on Indonesia’s foreign policy at Griffith Asia Institute. It seems ironic given recent trends that the relatively few macro studies ever written about Indonesia's foreign policy interpreted it principally in terms of '

Yesterday's Australia-US Ministerial Consultations, or AUSMIN, was one of the most consequential Australia-US security discussions in years. It is an answer to this year's unsettling Chinese assertiveness. And, as one newspaper has long trumpeted, it marks a shift towards a greater US military

While Australia's media keeps its eyes on the prize — Hillary Clinton's pending visit to Australia — there are those, albeit a small few, who are more interested in Hilary's fly-by into the Pacific Islands, and what this means for US engagement, or lack thereof, in the region

In a Lowy Institute Policy Brief calling for a 'step change' in Australia's relationship with Indonesia, published in March this year, Fergus Hanson said the two countries should 'negotiate a multi-decade vision for the economic relationship' which goes beyond a free trade agreement: