Asia
Australia-China relations: More hurdles ahead
A recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald found that Australian media outlets quote the Global Times more often than they quote either China’s President Xi Jinping or members…
Duterte the defier
On 20 March, the Philippine government’s National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea reported that more than 200 Chinese fishing vessels, with suspected members of China…
Economic diplomacy: Budgeting for China and the price that matters
New chapter
It may not have been intended, but a map deep inside last week’s federal budget papers seems to sum up the Australian government’s economic diplomacy strategy:…
Lessons from the recent cyclone in Timor-Leste
The cyclone which hit Timor-Leste on 4 April was traumatising. We were awakened at 3 am by heavy rain and winds gusting at more than 125km/hour. Water began to flood into our…
A rare test of China diplomacy
The term “political science,” as many have observed, is somewhat of an oxymoron. Of all fields of scholarly pursuit, politics is comparatively ill-suited to the processes of the…
London and Hong Kong: Financial centres in parallel peril
There is a curious parallel between Hong Kong and London as financial centres in potential decline due to the recent loss of a unique position.
Historically both cities were…
Russia–China: An Unholy Alliance?
Russia and China’s verbal sparring with the US over competing visions of multilateralism last week in the UN Security Council exemplified the closer ties forged over recent years…
Indonesia responds to the cyber dark side
The “DarkSide” ransomware cyber-attack on the US-based gasoline facility Colonial Pipeline, which has disrupted East Coast fuel supplies and invoked emergency legislation,…
Myanmar and a new kind of civil war
In early 1989, I was passing through Bangkok when a friend from a Western embassy invited me to what she called “a secret meeting”. She knew that I was a Myanmar-watcher, but what…
India’s Covid-19 wave is spreading south
Images of the pandemic in Delhi that currently saturate the international media depict ailing patients struggling to find beds, oxygen and medical attention. Amid a highly…