Our distorted perspectives, our ignorance, is now more dangerous than the situation leading to the Vietnam War in the 1960s. We have experienced a sudden end to immediate knowledge of Asia including China We are vulnerable thus to pandemics of media misinformation. (more…)
Category: China
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The End of Modi’s Global Dreams…and the Quad!
India’s prime minister advanced a muscular foreign policy, but his mishandling of the pandemic is an embarrassing step back. If India stumbles, the American dream of the Quad can never become a reality.
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War with China is not inevitable: A revolution in Australian foreign policy should be.
The Government’s warnings that war with China is inevitable are propaganda. There is no such inevitability. A decision to go to war is taken by humans. It is not determined by an iron law of history. Key questions are: why are we being softened up for this war now; has the Morrison Government already decided that we’re to go to war with China? Australian foreign policy needs profound revision. (more…)
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Mike Pompeo and “The Xinjiang Genocide Determination”
On 19 January 2021, his last day in office, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, issued a “determination” that “the PRC, under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang”. On taking office, Pompeo’s successor Antony Blinken immediately agreed with this view.
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Nothing could be Finer than to have a War with China in the Morning!
In the early sixties, in the midst of growing paranoia of the Red and Yellow Perils, portrayed by the Menzies Government as dagger-like arrows pointed at Australia’s heart, a TV variety show, perhaps Revue ’61 or In Melbourne Tonight, gave us comic relief with a parody on the Al Jolson song, ‘Carolina in the Morning’, which went, ‘Nothing could be Finer than to have a War with China in the Morning’. (more…)
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Is News Corp back onto weapons of mass destruction?
Australians born in the last century remember how the ‘war on terror’ began in 2001. The same con trick is being tried on us again, for war with China. (more…)
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Understanding Beijing’s motives regarding Taiwan, and America’s role
John Culver retired in 2020 after a distinguished 35-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency. During that time, he analyzed East Asian affairs, including security, economic, and foreign policy dimensions. As national intelligence officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2018, he drove the intelligence community’s support to top policymakers on East Asian issues. He routinely participated in meetings at the White House, with leaders throughout the United States government, and with foreign government officials. In a conversation with Brookings Senior Fellow and interim Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies Ryan Hass, the two discussed the risk of future conflict in the Taiwan Strait, how Taiwan is responding to rising pressure from China, and steps the United States could take to support Taiwan in consideration of its interests.
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Biden’s Taiwan Policy Is Truly, Deeply Reckless.Would the US allow Mexico to join a military alliance with Beijing?
In fact, polling suggests that while foreign policy elites in Washington overwhelmingly endorse going to war for Taiwan, ordinary Americans are deeply skeptical. A recent report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that while 85 percent of Republican leaders support sending U.S. troops to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack, only 43 percent of Republicans among the public agree. (more…)
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The unfinished Chinese civil war
Many frame China’s options against Taiwan as peace or invasion. This is a dangerous oversimplification.
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China’s sanctions on Western think tanks
China’s sanctions on the prominent Washington-based think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has prompted a
great wailing and wringing of hands. While I empathize with those affected, I do take issue with some of their specific concerns. (more…) -
More transparency needed around Uni’s audit into ‘foreign interference’
The University’s approach to ‘foreign interference’ puts its Chinese staff at risk. There’s a tension in the idea of the modern university, between the essentially borderless nature of knowledge production, and the rival claim that universities should serve the “national interest”. (more…)
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Time to silence the drums of war
For many familiar with the excesses of Cold War rhetoric and the hyped-up fears used to justify our ill-fated interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the current China bashing is a case of déjà-vu. But the latest bout of politically contrived anti-China hysteria is especially troubling. (more…)
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Hong Kong: British common law labelled as Chinese oppression
On 16 April 2021, a Hong Kong District Court sentenced 8 prominent “activists” to imprisonment. They had been convicted of organizing an unlawful assembly, and taking part in such assembly, under the Public Order Ordinance. This was a statute of the longstanding, dating way back to colonial times in Hong Kong. (more…)
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Taiwan: the trigger point for America’s next war
It is becoming a case of when, not if, there will be a war between the US and China. Nobody wants war and yet the public is being persuaded that it might happen, and if it does, it will be a necessary evil to counter a threat.
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The Biden-Suga agreement shows the importance of the Western Pacific
The primary importance of the Biden-Suga summit is that Mr Suga was the first foreign leader to be received by President Biden in Washington. The second such visitor will be President Moon of South Korea – not Britain’s Boris Johnson or Germany’s Angela Merkel. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is nowhere in sight. (more…)
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Another own goal in Australia’s relations with China
The Federal Government is not providing a strategic narrative about its position towards China. Is it too cynical to suggest that is because a very large number of Australians now view China in such negative terms that “pushing back”, irrespective of the cost, is seen positively?
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The Five Eyes does not have our back.
It is risible to see the Australian Foreign Minister setting off to New Zealand to pull the Kiwis into line over their lack of support for attempts by the so-called Five Eyes of Anglo Saxon countries to pressure China. (more…)
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Chinese propaganda has come to Indonesia, big time.
Before you book a flight to Aotearoa in the travel bubble, think again. There are other places with knockout scenery, higher mountains, clear lakes and splendid grasslands. The roads are straight and free of cluttering campervans. Better still, the sunny locals are keen to share their exotic cuisine and rich culture of singing, dancing, equestrian skills and falconry. (more…)
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Anti-China threat porn: Antiquity’s antidote to its sophistry
If China is a threat to international peace and security, then the relationships outlined below approach the crime of trading with the enemy.
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Will the Five Eyes stare down China’s economic coercion? So far their self interest looks to be winning out.
For at least some products , Australia may not so much be “left alone on the playing field” as substituted off and only able to watch from the sidelines. (more…)
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Hong Kong’s housing crisis- an underlying factor in the 2019 riots.
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has a serious housing problem. There has been much discussion over the last several years about how this has amplified social discontent. This conversation intensified during the major 2019 protests that became a lengthy anti-government and anti-Beijing rebellion.
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Not sleepwalking but marching with eyes wide open to war with China
A lie told often enough can become accepted, but it can never be the truth. China has been declared a threat to all that we hold dear, but it is just not so. China, for all its faults, is not a threat and nor is it practising genocide! (more…)
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China’s Five Year Plan & Technology Leadership an interview with Prof Jane Golley
In discussion with economics professor Jane Golley, director of ANU’s Australian Centre for China in the World, ANU, about the new china five-year plan 2021-2026 on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese communist party.
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British meddling in Hong Kong’s court of appeal
The British Government still maintains significant influence in Hong Kong through the appointing of British subjects within Hong Kong’s highest court, the Court of Final Appeal, and have used this influence for geopolitical advantage.
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Not much for Australians to feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’ about in US policy towards China.
Many of the problems in our relationship with China are of our own making – the consequences of our own inept diplomacy – and we should seek to resolve them bilaterally.
Attempting to resolve them by snuggling up closer to Uncle Sam and miscellaneous US allies with different agendas and history will only make matters worse. (more…)
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21st century democracy: blurring the lines
President Biden, at his first press conference, said this:
“Look, I predict to you, your children and grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy? Because that is what is at stake, not just with China”. (more…)
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What would US-China war really mean?
Do the commentators who talk of war with China actually think about what this would mean?
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China is so often framed negatively. It compounds our ignorance.
When we speak of China we rarely, if ever, stop to consider how (or what) meaning is generated in the minds of the audience. Yet how we speak of China is no less important than the words that we use. Facts are not enough. -
In America, a cancer is eating democracy from the inside, and China has clocked the weakness
China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, got uncomfortably close to the truth when he lectured American officials about creating turmoil by invading other countries, having a “Cold War mentality” and trying to impose its democracy on the world. (more…)
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China Needs to Show More Restraint in the Region
China’s aggressiveness in the region is provoking a US-led backlash that could contain or constrain it. To achieve what it considers its rightful destiny, China needs to exercise more restraint. Slow and steady will win the race.