Asia

As China’s commercial and military presence grows across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, other major powers are growing increasingly alarmed about Beijing leading partner nations into “debt traps”. In response, at the recent Commonwealth meeting, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada

Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia Philip Lowe’s speech last week highlighting the risks to the Chinese financial system from shadow banks – non-bank financial institutions often operating in more lightly regulated wholesale markets – has once again drawn attention to the

This article is based on Episode 24 of the Little Red Podcast, focused on a panel at the Association for Asian Studies featuring Louisa Lim, Christian Sorace, Maria Repnikova, Xu Bin, and Yi Kang. Throughout our podcast series, we’ve asked many of our guests to nominate what

Australia is an undisputed world leader in tobacco control. From massive wins with plain packaging to widely enforced bans on smoking in public places, it is easy to see why. Australia is successfully creating a generational shift in tobacco use, with its youngest generation growing up in a

US President Donald Trump’s decision, conveyed in a personal letter to Kim Jong-un, to cancel the Singapore summit scheduled for 12 June is not unexpected. It will prompt relief and disappointment in equal measure, but the pessimists have been proved right. The gulf of expectation and

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 picture framework that might help everybody see more clearly what is at stake. While he didn’t put it quite this way in

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 L2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. This is an imaginary point in space hovering over the far side of the Moon (not the “

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 habit. The government has enacted various anti-smoking measures, but the powerful tobacco lobby makes this effort

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 and Defence Studies Centre published my contribution to its Centre of Gravity essay series. The paper is titled&

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 forward in economic cooperation between Seoul and Pyongyang. During the summit, Kim told Moon that he preferred the

If you believe the headlines, a new era of financial openness has started in China. Certainly, the number of recent announcements is unprecedented in terms of scope. This month saw index provider MSCI announce details about the inclusion of “China A” shares in its much-followed emerging

It was an astonishing sight. Nine women dressed in batik sarongs and wearing the traditional, conical hats of Indonesian farmers sat on the edge of the road in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, their feet encased in wooden boxes filled with cement. Kendeng farmers protest, March 2017 (

After ten months of political gridlock and one dissolved parliament, Saturday’s decisive parliamentary election result represents one kind of victory for Timor-Leste’s fledgling democracy. Winning an unusual outright majority of 34 seats in the 65-seat parliament, experienced coalition Change

Over the past year, the US has been engaged in what it calls a maximum pressure campaign to push North Korea to take concrete steps towards denuclearisation. President Donald Trump has imposed a series of sanctions on North Korea, and threatened nuclear war against the country on Twitter. 

This month, I was in Australia for events hosted by the Lowy Institute and Sydney Writers’ Festival respectively. The questions were excellent, and I would like to take advantage of this space to expand on some of the topics brought up. Generally speaking, the questions at

Indonesia has again exploded in a paroxysm of terrorist violence, but with a new twist: family suicide bombers. This may be the first time in the world that parents took their children on a family outing to blow themselves up. The three families included the six killed in the bombings of

Malaysians have rejected Barisan Nasional so overwhelmingly that the electoral system designed to protect its rule has been overcome. The party received its lowest popular vote in history, around 36%, and won only 79 seats in a 222-seat federal parliament. The once multiracial coalition has

The announcement that North Korea will decommission its nuclear test site at Punggye-ri is a big step in what is hopefully a march towards peaceful times on the Korean Peninsula. But the decommissioning process leans heavily on theatre over substance. At this stage, it is not clear if

The sale of The Phnom Penh Post to Malaysian interests with clear links to the Hun Sen government in Cambodia, and the subsequent sackings and resignations of journalists, is already recognised as a sad, even bitter, end to the Post’s admired role as a newspaper that continued

There has been widespread condemnation of US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, including from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who expressed “regret”. Besides having ramifications for US relations with European powers, Russia and China, who all

The “informal summit” in Wuhan, China, between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping last month generated a wave of commentary in India, China, and further afield. The Chinese media played it up, heralding a major breakthrough in

Tears flowed freely in the offices of The Phnom Penh Post on Monday. Some of Cambodia’s most hardened reporters embraced their colleagues as their faces crumpled. Journalists want to report the news, not become it. But the editorial gutting of the last independent media outlet in Cambodia saw

Wearing the right dress can be the first step to success. Pictures of an American teenage girl sporting a red Chinese cheongsam to her prom have gone viral and sparked controversies on the internet. People in the US have called her racist, but some in China applauded her choice of

The venue and date for the Donald Trump–Kim Jong-un summit have yet to be announced, but it appears likely to take place in late May or early June. Panmunjom, on the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), has emerged as the clear frontrunner. But there is still a possibility that the