Asia
Xinjiang’s “transformation through education” camps
Over the last year there has been a steady stream of anecdotal and eyewitness reports of China’s construction of a system of “transformation through…
Economic diplomacy brief: China relations, debt time bomb, and new rivalries
Different to the normal pattern
Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe has put the increasingly fractious bilateral relationship with China into the kind of big…
Operation Coldstore: Singapore’s struggle to confront history
The unassuming storefront sits in an old-school complex next to Singapore’s National Library, and is easily overlooked in the building full of bookstores and stationery shops…
The Moon is still strategic
Decades after the Moon became covered in American flags and footprints, the nearest world in space is becoming strategic again.
Recently, China launched a satellite to orbit the…
Will China finally end its one-child policy?
Recent media reports indicate Beijing may lift all restrictions on family size, possibly by the end of this year.
Of course, there have been premature predictions about the…
Quitting cigarettes in Indonesia
Nearly two-thirds of Indonesian males smoke. This is said to be the highest rate in the world, and includes the notorious case of the two-year-old with a forty-a-day…
Shinzo Abe “outside the net”
What if you invited 10,000 of your closest acquaintances to a cherry blossom viewing party in Tokyo, only to find that the blossoms had peaked only days before? What if you…
Why China isn’t planning to storm Taiwan’s beaches
China’s navy has grown dramatically over the past two decades, but with one surprising exception: its amphibious forces.
On Monday, the Australian National University’s Strategic…
Broad strokes: Indonesian art and 20 years of Reformasi
This month, Indonesia commemorates 20 years since the fall of strongman Suharto and two decades of the Reformasi era. Today, the strife of 1998 serves as inspiration for the…
The prospect of North Korea’s economic reform
Amid the huge fanfare North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in generated at the third inter-Korean summit, the two leaders made a huge step…