John Menadue

Amidst the fear of political interference of the Chinese government there is often a reference to one organ of the Chinese State, i.e., the United Front (UF). In some Australian news stories about the China, UF is sometimes dangled to the unsuspecting Australian public as an all-purpose threat in the same way the Red under the Bed was used to scare the living daylight out of a fearful child. Asa recent story in the Sydney Morning Herald shows, suggesting a whiff of connection with the UF on the part of both Chinese diasporic members and Australian politicians could justify as a legitimate angle for a news story. But what is UF, how did it come into being, and is it really a threat to Australian democracy? A better understanding of the UF (not UFO!) might be helpful.  (more…)

An introduction by Mobo Gao, Chair of Chinese Studies, Department of Asian Studies, University of Adelaide.

The article below is a response by Christian Solace, an American academic, to a speech given at an internal Australian government seminar in August 2017 by the respected Australian journalist John Garnaut who was once an advisor to a former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

It has to be pointed out that Solace does not argue, in this response to the Garnaut speech, that we the “West” should not be critical of the CCP and the Chinese governance for their repressive policies and instances of abuses of human rights.

Instead, Solace wants to highlight several points that are important in relation to the discussion of China that increasingly sounds like a new Cold War: 1) ideology is not just a Chinese thing. The West and Garnaut himself are not free from their own ideology; 2) Mao was not Stalin, and Xi is not Mao. China was and is different from Russia and Xi is different from Mao; 3) China under Mao attempted an alternative to Western capitalism but failed and China now is actually not Communist but capitalist; and 4) China should be looked at historically and it has made progress towards liberty and human rights. 

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If the past year is any indication of the year ahead, US policy in Asia will be erratic and self-serving. The beginnings of an Indo-Pacific strategy notwithstanding, the Trump administration continues to work out its issues with countries in the region bilaterally and sporadically.  (more…)

Not only were the Brexiters clueless: they didn’t give a stuff about Ireland. But this will come back to haunt the Tories (more…)

From Donald Trump’s point of view, a US-installed Syrian puppet regime that would push out Russia and Iran is neither central to US national security nor practicable. And, here, Trump is right for a change. (more…)

From the ill-conceived Brexit referendum onward, Britain’s governing class has embarrassed itself. The Remain campaign was complacent, the Leave campaign brazenly mendacious, and as soon as the result was known, most of the loudest advocates for severing ties with the European Union ran away like naughty schoolboys whose cricket ball had smashed a greenhouse window. Negotiations have revealed the pitiful intellectual limitations of a succession of blustering cabinet ministers, the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition doesn’t appear to want to oppose, and the prime minister has engineered her own humiliation by starting the countdown to Brexit without a plan that could command wide support, resulting in the heaviest parliamentary defeat in history. Despite breaches of campaign finance limits and lingering questions over the source of the Leave campaign’s financing, not to mention growing evidence tying it to the same web of influence operations that promoted Trump’s candidacy, there is no equivalent to the Mueller inquiry to bolster public confidence that the organs of state are capable of warding off corruption. (more…)

As Venezuela’s second president, Simon Bolivar, noted in the 19th century, the US government continues to “plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty.” (more…)