Andrew Hastie and Tony Abbott are trying to install a candidate in WA who has written a fictional book to scare people about a Chinese invasion of Australia. (more…)
Tag: China
-
BYD says plug-in electrics will exceed 50 pct of new car sales in China in next 3 months
The CEO of BYD, the Chinese giant challenging Tesla as the world’s biggest electric vehicle maker, says sales of New Energy Vehicles (NEVs), including battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), will make up more than half of all new cars sold in China within the next three months. (more…)
-
Que sera sera: “Australia will be Australia; China will be China.”
Penny Wong has a new mantra for Australia China relations. (more…)
-
Chinese universities want more Australian students: we should send them
Australia is trailing its neighbours in the race to acquire China knowledge and capability, which can only come from in-country experience, writes Louise Edwards. (more…)
-
If TikTok is banned in the US or Australia, how might the company – or China – respond?
TikTok’s owner is once again navigating troubled waters in the United States, where the US House of Representatives has issued an ultimatum: divest or face shutdown within six months. (more…)
-
Do China’s leaders fully grasp foreigners’ concerns about the country?
Beijing has been slow to address the visa and e-payment woes of foreign travellers, and some officials remain complacent about the exodus of foreign investment. (more…)
-
Tea for two: Preparing for talks with China’s Foreign Minister
We shall never get anywhere with the Australia-China relationship if we are not pragmatic, as Bismarck famously said. While we must avoid over-ambitious goals, forthcoming official talks with China’s top foreign affairs official Wang Yi will present a unique opportunity to test the government’s relationship reset. (more…)
-
Six peculiar ‘Peak China’ myths we all should question
In recent years, there has been a notable shift among certain Western politicians, media outlets and think tanks regarding their perspective on China’s developmental trajectory. The once popular theory of an imminent collapse of China, famously asserted by Gordon G. Chang over two decades ago, has finally begun to lose traction. (more…)
-
Scholar or ideologue?
The Economist, a leading British weekly, enjoys wide global readership. It recently covered the thoughts and written work of two scholars, both Chinese, one now government-based, in Beijing and the other based in an academic institution in the US. Only the former, was branded as an “ideologue” however. Paraphrasing Professor Julius Sumner Miller: Why is this so? (more…)
-
Why does the West abound with misreaders of China’s economy?
As 2024 marks the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, whether this mythical creature should be named “Dragon” or “Loong” in English has puzzled many and stirred heated discussions. (more…)
-
The CPC is brainwashing its members to not attack other countries says AI
Recently there was an interesting piece in the South China Morning Post on “Communist Party orders cells to study Xi Jinping Thought and learn speeches” See China’s Communist Party orders cells to make Xi Jinping Thought a priority, cadres must study president’s speeches, South China Morning Post. (more…)
-
Is ASIO’s paranoia hypocritical?
Some of my best friends are Chinese. This is entirely unsurprising given my frequent visits to the PRC, the Chinese students I have supervised and the colleagues I have collaborated with over the years. I used to think such relationships were unambiguously a good thing and the possible basis for a better understanding between our two countries. (more…)
-
Lessons on genocide from Xinjiang and Gaza
Days before the International Court of Justice’s initial ruling late last month that found there was a plausible risk of genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, the United Nations Human Rights Council conducted its “universal periodic review” of China’s human rights record.
(more…) -
Is China repeating Australia’s mistake on Indigenous Affairs?
The South China Morning Post recently published an illuminating article on China’s policy towards ethnic minorities, with a particular focus on Inner Mongolia that has strived hardest to assimilate its Mongols with the rest of the Chinese population to promote a single national identity. But does China’s policy reflect the assimilation policies towards First Nations that Australia adopted in the 1930s and has now come to regret?
(more…) -
Europe, U.S. are losing charm for Chinese tourists
Mr. Liu Dafeng has been a fan of overseas travel. He lives in China’s Shenzhen city, southeastern Guangdong province. After weeks of preparation and paperwork, his plan of a long-awaited trip to Britain was shattered after his visa application was denied. (more…)
-
The odds of China using nuclear war to resolve the Taiwan issue
Recently the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a thinktank in Washington, DC, did a survey asking U.S. and Taiwan Experts if China might use nuclear weapons in a conflict with or over Taiwan. The results were astonishing to most who read the study. Almost half of U.S. experts reported they thought China would. Only one quarter that number of Taiwan experts, 11 percent, so opined. (more…)
-
Does China want Trump to win in 2024?
Agathe Demarais is a senior policy fellow on geoeconomics at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a Foreign Policy columnist. She recently argued in that journal (with a clear anti-Trump tilt)-that “China is Rooting for Trump” (more…)
-
Being back home in China for Lunar New Year feels different
An undutiful daughter’s atonement trip after four years. (more…)
-
Why do Chinese EVs meet so much resistance?
There was a time when the world looked to China to reduce its emissions. China was, they quite rightly pointed out, one of the globe’s worst polluters. (more…)
-
When celebrated dissidents find the grass isn’t greener on the other side
Ai Weiwei joins a long line of dissenters such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Liu Xiaobo who became disenchanted by the West. (more…)
-
Welcome the year of the Dragon!
The Year of the Dragon is bound to be big. Among the twelve zodiac animals that mark the traditional cycle of calendar years, the dragon is the only mythical beast and the most powerful. It stands in marked contrast to the rabbit that will hand over its psychic reign on 10 February. Soothsayers may well emphasise prosperity and good fortune in their forecasts, but most people will not believe them. Those of a scientific cast of mind may discount astrological beliefs as mumbo jumbo, but they certainly affect the expectations of a large proportion of the peoples of East Asia. (more…)
-
The materialisation of Chinese Christianity
As the Lunar New Year approaches, many Chinese families clean the front door of their home and hang poetry around it. This is a rich and age-old Chinese tradition, both cultural and religious. (more…)
-
China extends full diplomatic recognition to Taliban in blow to US
The diplomatic recognition of the Taliban government in Afghanistan on January 31, 2024 by China must be bracketed with two other far-reaching regional policy moves by Beijing in the post-cold war era —the Shanghai Five in 1996 — later renamed as Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2001— and the Belt and Road Initiative announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013. (more…)
-
China’s worrying economic policy drift
The Rhodium Group, an independent research organisation with a focus on China, says the nation’s economic policymaking process has stalled with it refusing to announce meaningful actions to overcome its pressing property and share market crashes let alone forge a clear path for the future. The full paper can be accessed here. (more…)
-
Why Yang Hengjun should be released – he’s Walter Mitty not James Bond!
The standard media news bite is that Yang Hengjun is a Chinese born Australian pro-democracy writer who was unlawfully detained and now jailed for life in China. But the full story is murkier than that.
-
Is there a problem with Australia’s approach to human rights in the PRC?
Human rights in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are under increased threat. The PRC government ignores international representations. This begs the question: should Australia even attempt to intervene? What do we risk by doing so? The easy course would be to do the minimum and restrict our representations to cases where Australian citizens and interests are directly involved. This author argues that Australia’s approach to human rights should be recalibrated.
-
Hold the outrage
We need to be careful with the outrage over the sentencing of Yang Hengjun in China.
-
The BRI gets it right
China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI) operates on a huge scale and is the focus of rarely halted negative coverage across many prominent outlets in the Global West. A new extended article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy, however, provides a measured, informed exception to this general rule.
(more…)
