Asia
Poor man’s cigarette: India’s unspoken epidemic
In one of India’s crowded government hospitals, Thankappan*, a middle-aged man, lies in a vegetative state. His entire body seems frail, and his lips are discoloured…
International rescue: the Thai cave response
As prime minister, Tony Abbott once called disaster response “an antidote to pessimism”. No less than eight countries – including China, the US, South Korea, and New Zealand …
Détente divergence: the US-South Korean split
Reactions in the US and South Korea have differed sharply since US President Donald Trump met North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un last month in Singapore. (The president and…
Hambantota: “the Chinese port”
In early 2011, I was in Hambantota, southern Sri Lanka, looking for the new port. After hours of driving, from the southern beaches through kilometres of wetlands featuring water…
Pyongyang’s promises
Immediately after the Singapore summit on 12 June, US President Donald Trump proclaimed that North Korea no longer posed a nuclear threat, and that the denuclearisation…
Sources of Shinzo Abe’s resilience
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is now the third longest serving prime minister of Japan since the Second World War. Thanks to amendments by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to …
Hun Sen and his personality cult
A fiercely loyal armed force is essential to cementing a dictatorship, and the sheer military might of Cambodia’s Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who has ruled the country…
The Huawei way
Recent months have seen controversy swirling around Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the national security risk it may or may not pose to Australia, and its…
Duterte’s China policy: beyond law
Many local and international observers have denounced Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s conduct towards China as “appeasement” after he took the view there was nothing…
Vietnam: a month of mass protests
June 2018 may go down as a new record for mass protests in Vietnam. Thousands of people across the three main regions of the country took to the streets, mostly in a…