Asia and Pacific

Justin Jones is Navy Fellow at the Lowy Institute and is the maritime adviser to the MacArthur Foundation Lowy Institute Asia Security Project. New Zealand's first Defence White Paper in 13 years was launched this morning by Prime Minister John Key and Minister for Defence Wayne

Repeating his earlier opposition to expanding the list of defendants to be brought before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has now told the visiting UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, that he will not allow the projected additional indictments of alleged senior

It was mildly startling this morning to hear the Indonesian Foreign Minister talk in these terms about Burma: MARTY NATALEGAWA: We are to have the election soon in Myanmar. There is a perception of credibility deficit there. But it's not too late we think to ensure that the election does

The convening of the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Hanoi next Saturday ranks as a substantial ASEAN achievement. With the US and Russia as new members, the EAS gives Asia the venue and the membership for its concert of powers. That concert has been assembled not by the big players but by a bunch of

Gideon Rachman has an interesting piece in the FT arguing that now China is sitting on more than US$2.5 trillion of foreign exchange reserves (actually US$2.65 trillion as of end-September) and has become the world's largest exporter and second largest economy, it's time for Beijing to

If, as expected, Xi Jinping (pictured) replaces Hu Jintao as China's leader in 2012, let's hope this partisan story out of South Korea is wrong. The Lee Myung-bak Government certainly seems to think it is incorrect. The story claims that Xi sees Japan and South Korea as the 'disrupters of

Prime Minister David Cameron has announced some pretty savage cuts to the UK defence budget overnight. The Guardian has collected the documentation here, and here's the BBC's summary of the major points. Some implications for Australia and the Asia Pacific region come to mind:  

Danielle Celermajer is Director of the Masters of Human Rights program at Sydney University. It would be easy to join the throng of commentators slamming China for the human rights violations against which Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo has been protesting, for the human rights violation of

Peter Martin lives and studies in Taipei and blogs at www.sinocentric.co.uk. One of the tenets of liberal international relations theory is that contact between societies brings them closer together and thus reduces the chances of conflict. Certainly, the Chinese Communist Party believes this to

According to TDW, the episode featuring this title sequence was screened in the US just last night. Notice the sting in the tail — the sweatshop is actually in the bowels of the company that produces The Simpsons, Twentieth Century Fox.  Making fun of Fox is actually a

Two responses here to the questions about the law of the sea and China's claims on the South China Sea, posed yesterday by reader Julian. First, a brief note from Sam Bateman, who has written extensively on defence and maritime issues: There is much misunderstanding on this,

Geoff Miller is a former Director-General of the Office of National Assessments. The SMH reports striking remarks by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria on 3 October (video above). He is reported as saying: I believe I and all the Chinese

Oh, for that long gone unipolar moment when all we had to worry about was that the US might be just too powerful for its own good. Just before the US rolled into Iraq, I recall hearing one of Canberra's defence gurus opine that he wanted the US to win, but not too easily. About the same time,

So, according to Brazil's Finance Minister, we are in the midst of an international currency war. Some observers worry that trade wars will now follow. Well, I did say that exchange rate policy was going to be a major theme this year. As well as the ongoing crisis 

I'm reading Richard McGregor's The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, and based on the first half of the book, I couldn't recommend it more highly. One feature I really like is McGregor's regular use of parallels to make the unfamiliar seem familiar. This sort of thing might

I read Annmaree O'Keeffe and Alex Oliver's report (which Richard Grant has recently blogged on) with great interest. My own career has been shaped greatly by public diplomacy (I received a full scholarship to study in Japan) and I had the pleasure of watching my first ever Wallabies game in

Aaron Connelly is a Fulbright scholar and visiting fellow at CSIS, Jakarta. He visited Banda Aceh for The Interpreter; earlier posts here, here, here, here and here. Last September the Aceh Provincial Legislature, sitting in a lame duck session, shocked the world, its compatriots and its own

Andy Forrest is a Lowy Institute intern. He recently completed his PhD thesis on Chinese perceptions of Japan's security strategy. Last week's collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and a Japanese patrol boat has triggered a new round of diplomatic jousting between China and Japan.&

Cillian Nolan is the International Crisis Group's Dili-based analyst. Eight years after independence, there is still no way to legally buy, sell, or prove undisputed ownership of land in Timor-Leste. When Timor-Leste's Vice Prime Minister Mario Carrascalão quit last week, his

Australia's choices about China will obviously be shaped by the ratio of kiss-to-kick that emanates from Beijing. Canberra has had its share of bruises recently, but also plenty of bouquets. China would love to be able to treat Australia as a special or model relationship, with Beijing setting both

Justin Jones is Navy Fellow at the Lowy Institute and is the maritime adviser to the MacArthur Foundation Lowy Institute Asia Security Project. The recent flurry of commentary regarding China's rise and shifting power relativities in the Asia Pacific, led by the Lowy Institute's Power and

Previous posts in this series were on Canberra measuring China's rise, China lessons from the Rudd era and a review of Hugh White’s Quarterly Essay.  Television seeks high drama and vivid pictures, not to explain high strategy. So it was that Channel 9's 60 Minutes presented

Does art imitate life or does life imitate journalism' Two weeks ago, The Economist trumpeted a looming China-India rivalry as its cover story. One week ago, a series of fresh tensions arose in the China-India relationship. Today I have tried to make sense of some of this in an opinion piece 

Michael Wesley's two most recent posts have rearranged my mental furniture a little. It simply had never occurred to me that the US and Australia could wind up competing for influence in Indonesia, and that Australia might be on the losing side of such a competition. I agree with Malcolm