Author: Allen Choate
The new prime minister of Japan, Naoto Kan, who last week replaced Yukio Hatoyama after he abruptly resigned less than nine months into his term, certainly will have his hands full trying to reignite his country’s efforts to craft a coherent and sustained set of foreign policy goals and strategies.
Hatoyama’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) predecessor, Taro Aso, spoke about an ‘arc of freedom and prosperity’ in Asia as the core of Japanese foreign policy. Unfortunately, he was unable to articulate, much less implement, how that was to be achieved. Read more…
Author: Vu Minh Khuong, National University of Singapore
Since unprecedented economic reforms began in 1986, Vietnam has transformed itself from a country on the verge of economic collapse and isolation into one of the most open and fastest-growing economies in the world. Enabling the country’s rapid GDP growth, averaging 7.5 per cent between 1990 and 2008, is its robust integration into the world economy, with an average trade growth rate exceeding 20 per cent over the same period.
In 2008, Vietnam was more integrated than most its Asian peers in both trade and FDI measures. Vietnam’s impressive economic performance has been driven by its three major strengths.
Read more…
Author: Joel Rathus, Adelaide University
Since its inception on the sidelines of the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) summit over a decade ago, China-Japan-Korea trilateral cooperation has deepened significantly.
The trilateral cooperation is an important development in regional politics and economics. But the way in which it will affect an East Asian economic community remains uncertain. Read more…
Author: Vikas Kumar, CSSE
The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, 2010 (‘the Bill’), belatedly introduced in the Indian Parliament on May 7 2010, has generated a lot of controversy. But the international aspects of the Bill have not attracted much attention. This is surprising because the Bill indicates that the government might at some point want to sign the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage, 1997 (CSC), promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Is CSC a preferable option to other international conventions? Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale
The growth of the Chinese economy through the global financial crisis is a product of two elements: the massive injection of spending through state-owned enterprise and state projects; and also the amazing resilience of private sector growth. The private sector, especially small and medium scale enterprises, indeed, continue to grow faster than the rest of the economy.
The onset of the crisis saw a retreat from the market and a return to the levers of the command economy. In the process, policies that had begun to offer a more level playing field to private entrepreneurs were undermined. Read more…
Special Report: EAF team, ANU
On May 13, the Chinese State Council released a new set of guidelines on domestic private investment. Its 36 measures mirror a similar policy review published 5 years’ ago on the non-state economic sector which promoted equal treatment of both state and private sectors. Commentators have dubbed the recent guidelines as the ‘New 36 Articles’.
The measures are aimed at lowering the entry barriers for private investors in sectors such as infrastructure, municipal services, financial services, logistics and defense which have all traditionally been dominated by state titans or excluded from private sector participation altogether. Read more…
Author: Tetsuya Endo, AJISS
There are currently two major trends occurring with regard to nuclear power: one is efforts toward the abolition of nuclear weapons and the other the growing interest in the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
The first trend, exemplified in the nuclear disarmament movement, originated in the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Until very recently, its main advocates have been the so-called ‘have-nots,’ including Japan, the sole country to have suffered from atomic bombings, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries, Northern European countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. They have argued rather from an idealistic standpoint, emphasising the inhumanity of nuclear weapons. Read more…
Author: Christopher Snedden, Deakin
In April 2010, the body attempting to create a South Asian region—the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)—celebrated 25 years of existence. The fact that SAARC has existed since 1985 is an achievement in itself. SAARC members have few connections with each other apart from SAARC itself, some historical links with British imperialism, and geography. South Asia is a long way from becoming a unified and coherent region.
SAARC’s most recent ‘Meeting of the Heads of State or Government’ was held in Bhutan from 28-29 April. The summit’s (largely aspirational) ‘Thimphu Silver Jubilee Declaration’ was positively titled ‘Towards a Green and Happy South Asia’. Read more…
Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International
During the last week of May, in the Chinese city of Luoyang, one of the four great ancient capital cities on the central plain, Indian President Pratibha Patil dedicated an Indian-style Buddhist temple to the people of China. The first such Indian-style temple to be built in China in many centuries – and one housed, fittingly, within the precinct of the first such temple ever constructed on Chinese soil almost two millennia ago (the White Horse Monastery), the shrine constitutes a powerful symbol of independent India’s determination to revert to the syncretic world whose ideas it once shaped and within which it once participated wholly.
Regardless of whether the Buddhist scriptures arrived in Luoyang via Central Asia on the back of a white horse, as legend has it, or were in fact carried by itinerant preachers (early missionaries being associated with horses in the Chinese Buddhist tradition), the land bridge that such spiritual contact erected ushered in a brilliant early age of Asian cosmopolitanism. Read more…
Author: Edward Kus
China is obviously a nation grappling with the contradictions embodied by its desire for development and its recent (and more ancient) past. The recent school stabbings highlight some acute social issues in China, but reactions among my acquaintances demonstrate how China increasingly seems to be looking in on itself for answers rather than to the rest of the world.
Two historically important aspects of Chinese thought are finding new footing in contemporary Chinese society. The first concept is Sino-centralism and the second is known as the Sino-‘barbarian’ dichotomy. Read more…
Author: Purnendra Jain, University of Adelaide
Last week, Kan Naoto became Japan’s prime minister following the resignation of Hatoyama Yukio as prime minister and President of the Democratic Party of Japan. Kan has a very different political trajectory from most of his colleagues across political parties in Japan. He is not a hereditary politician; his rise in politics cannot be ascribed to working as a staffer with an eminent politician; and he never stood in any local elections. He is a ‘self-made’ politician. He got elected to the House of Representatives in 1980 after three unsuccessful attempts at a parliamentary seat, in 1976, 1977 and 1979. It took him roughly ten years of hard work and political skill to win at a national election in 1980 through unconventional support organisations.
After graduating in applied physics from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1970, Kan began his political activities organising citizen’s movements focusing on the problems of housing, medical facilities, pollution and environmental protection. Read more…
Author: Michael Cucek
Prime Minister Kan Naoto has over a weekend revamped the line up of main executives of Democratic Party of Japan and the ministers of the Cabinet.
From the look of the new administration and speculation printed in the nation’s newspapers, it is seems the DPJ is undertaking a massive shift away from the course it has been following since 2005. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
The Kan government has formed, having retained eleven ministers from the Hatoyama government (as expected). Among the new faces in Kan’s cabinet of ‘irregular forces’ are Noda Yoshihko (finance), Yamada Masahiko (agriculture), Arai Satoshi (national strategy), Genba Kōichirō (administrative reform), and, perhaps most prominently, Renhō (government revitalisation).
Looking at the transition from the Hatoyama-Ozawa regime to the new DPJ cabinet, Michael Cucek reviews the history of the DPJ’s coming to power and the nature of the Ozawa’s strategy and concludes that under Kan, ‘the DPJ, the classical DPJ, is back.’ Read more…
Author: Deepak Nair
Australia’s recent proposal for an Asia-Pacific Community (APC) is fostering some positive debate. By generating some ‘big picture’ thinking about Asia’s future, it also helps to reaffirm the importance of international institutions in solving security dilemmas.
The proposal also stresses to ASEAN elites that their current centrality to the process of ‘architecture-building’ is not beyond challenge. In many ways, the APC concept embodies regional cooperation with a new urgency. Read more…
Author: Motoshige Itoh, University of Tokyo
The Japanese economy is struggling with structural reform. The turning point for structural change dates back to 1990 when the country’s asset-price bubble began to burst. For nearly two decades since 1992, the Japanese economy has been in a deflationary gap, that is, demand has remained far below potential supply capacity. The gap was somewhat narrowed for a few years before and after 2005, but this was due to the overheated global economy at the time – a special factor beyond the scope of Japanese domestic reform. If the Japanese economy is to recover, the most pressing issues that Japan needs to address are the structural problems that underlie this deep-seated deflationary gap.
Behind the deflationary gap is a rapidly aging society. Read more…
