Asia and Pacific

This passage in Hugh\'s latest post sparked two questions in my mind: There are three key asymmetries in the US-China relationship which all break China\'s way. China\'s objectives are focused in Asia, while America\'s are globally dispersed. Isn\'t it the case that one asymmetry

As Michael Beckley acknowledges in his reply to Mark Thirlwell, it is hard to say definitively whether America is declining economically relative to China, because it depends what you measure. On some measures it is, and on others it\'s not. So the next question is: which measures

Never trust what you read in the papers: that was one of my first lessons as a trainee journalist on an Australian bush newspaper many years ago. It held true yesterday when I discovered an article in The Global Times, China\'s Communist Party tabloid. It appeared to be an opinion piece under my

Papua New Guinea has just paid an economic price for its political instability, with Standard and Poor\'s downgrading its credit rating from B- to B-. The short-lived military mutiny created headlines around the world. It was enough to convince the ratings agency that there was now increased

Yesterday\'s military mutiny in Papua New Guinea ended peacefully, with no civil unrest or loss of life. The mutiny, carried out by retired Colonel Yaura Sasa, was instigated by Sir Michael Somare\'s camp in an attempt to have Somare re-installed as Prime Minister. The

Even a short visit to Cambodia earlier this month is sufficient to underline why Prime Minister Hun Sen has been so ready over many years to describe China as his country\'s best friend. Discussion of China\'s aid to the country is a constant in almost every conversation. In December 2011 Hun Sen

Armed with your questions, Peter Martin and Nathan Beauchamp speak to Jia Xijin (pictured), an expert on Chinese civil society and citizen participation. Previous instalments in this series here and here. Lei Gong: What is the current state of development of Chinese civil society? How is

Rawdon Dalrymple is a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, the US and Japan. Stephen Grenville has had more than forty years of engagement with Asia starting with his embassy posting in Jakarta in 1968. He has also been a Deputy Governor of the RBA and has more recently advised

Andrew Shearer represents a long tradition in Australian diplomacy, of viewing Asia through the prism of our relationship with the US. No serious commentator is suggesting that Australia should focus on Asia to the exclusion (or even downgrading) of our US relationship; everyone agrees that keeping

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd\'s recent speech to the Asia Society is a lucid and bracingly matter-of-fact treatment of the challenges presented by the rise of China. Plain English is not the Foreign Minister\'s strong suit, so when he does deliver a speech that is direct, easily

Kevin Rudd in an interview with CNN (my emphasis): JOURNALIST: A man familiar to most of our viewers — Kevin Rudd, the former Australian Prime Minister and current Foreign Minister, joins us from New York. Great to have you with us, because you have such a background in Taiwanese

Saturday marks the first of many crucial elections in 2012. Taiwan\'s presidential race is viewed as extremely tight between President Ma Ying-jeou (pictured; Kuomintang Party) and Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party. Presumably, the majority of swing voters will opt for the incumbent

Earlier this week Dan Drezner ran a very entertaining series of YouTube videos purporting to explain US grand strategy. As an addition to that series, I offer \'Sofia the Lion Tamer at Wellington Zoo, New Zealand\', which nicely captures the frustration America (the lion) feels in trying to

\'Chicken feast\' (2005), by Wang Yan. Oil on canvas. (Image courtesy of the NMA.) While visiting Canberra during the Christmas-New Year break, I got an all-too-brief look at the National Museum of Australia\'s contemporary Chinese art exhibition, A New Horizon. Featuring works dating from 1949

Dr Khalid Koser is Head of the New Issues in Security Program at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and a non-resident Fellow at the Lowy Institute. While I\'m pleased that the lunchtime talk I delivered last week at the Lowy Institute has been cited in the past few days, I deeply

John Ballard, a Visiting Fellow at ANU, writes: Andrew Farran isn\'t aware of the fact that PNG, unlike almost all other post-colonial regimes, produced a home-grown constitution. The Constitutional Planning Committee and first Somare Government worked on this over a period of two-and-

Wilson Chau is a Lowy Institute intern. His Security Challenges essay on this topic recently won the Australian Defence Business Review Young Strategic Writers prize. The deepening of the Australia-US alliance during President Obama\'s visit last month was widely seen as directed at China,

Today marks day five of Papua New Guinea\'s constitutional crisis. The country has two prime ministers, two cabinets, two governors-general and two police commissioners. Both Michael Somare and Peter O\'Neill have fair claims to the prime ministership. PNG\'s Supreme Court

Australian faces (though not always our accents) are prominent in American film and television. But when they show up in our own region, it\'s worth noting, particularly if the face in question belongs to the Third Secretary of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. Here\'s Adelle Neary performing on

This trailer was posted online some 11 months ago, but I see via Twitter that the film is being screened at the PNG Human Rights Film Festival this week, so it\'s worth highlighting now. Regular readers may recognise Emmanuel Narokobi as one of the interview subjects in the

Above, a gorgeous time-lapse video of Ho Chi Minh City (h/t TDW), which didn\'t look much like this when we were still calling it Saigon (the name change happened in 1976, although \'Saigon\' is still commonly used). The video is an indicator of how much is changing in Vietnam, and a reminder

Fiji\'s government delivered its 2012 budget last week. In his budget address, Commodore Frank Bainimarama promised that his government would start work on a new constitution no later than September 2012. He also announced $5.9 million in the budget for electronic voter registration— \'as a

Armed with your questions, Peter Martin and David Cohen from Sinocentric speak to the Director of African Studies at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, He Wenping. Part 1 here; part 3 here. Junni: Whilst the scale and nature of Chinese and Indian involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa remain quite