John Menadue

A regular connection of links to writings and broadcasts covered in other media. (more…)

(On Tuesday, June 26, 2018, Asia Society Policy Institute President Kevin Rudd delivered an address to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore for The Significance of China’s 2018 Central Foreign Policy Work Conference. Below is the transcript of the speech. )

On 22-23 June 2018, the Chinese Communist Party concluded its Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs, the second since Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission in November 2012. The last one was held in November 2014. These are not everyday affairs in the party’s deliberations on the great questions of China’s unfolding global engagement. (more…)

There has been a torrent of whining about the Trump–Kim summit. Critics are calling it little more than a photo opportunity for a dictator, and claim that nothing was agreed while North Korea’s horrific human rights abuses were overlooked. Sceptics claim that the agreement is the same as previous agreements between the United States and North Korea, that Kim will never change and North Korea will never denuclearise, and that stopping US–ROK war games will reduce US military readiness in the event of conflict. (more…)

Fans cleaning the stadium after matches they attend is an example of how one must be conscious of the convenience of those around. (more…)

Australia has benefitted greatly from its relations with China, but has since begun to censor almost all the factors that have contributed to the benefits, and has interpreted its relations with China in the most negative way.

Such actions by Australia are beyond the Chinese public’s imagination of a country they once respected, and will bitterly disappoint them.
Now that the laws have been approved, Australia should reduce their negative impact on the Chinese diaspora and on relations with China. (more…)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ ejection from the Red Hen restaurant might ordinarily be dubious. But these are no ordinary times.  (more…)

We are all frogs in President Trump’s slow-boiling pot. (more…)

On a baking hot afternoon in 2010, Jess Melvin, a young scholar from Australia, walked out of a government archive in Banda Aceh carrying a cardboard box. It was brimming with three thousand photocopied documents from the Indonesian army, and Melvin could barely believe her luck. These documents prove what has always been officially denied: the Indonesian army deliberately planned the 1965–1966 massacre in which up to a million suspected Communists died, one of the worst but least-known mass killings of the twentieth century.  

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On Tuesday last week, Tony Abbott, Australia’s ex-prime minister, was photographed in parliament clutching a document entitled, the “Coal era is not over.” (more…)