Author: Evan A. Feigenbaum, CFR
Is there a more interesting place these days than the South China Sea? It’s the locus of a full-contact diplomatic spat between Washington and Beijing. It’s an arena for some nasty finger-pointing between Beijing and Hanoi. It’s an issue that may well destabilise relations between Beijing and Jakarta. And it’s the issue that somehow managed to make Asia’s most lethargic regional organisation—the ASEAN Regional Forum—a bit more interesting at last month’s ministerial in Hanoi.
But here’s something else that strikes me about the South China Sea: It’s going to be an arena that tests some important assumptions about China’s rise. Read more…
Author: Tobias Harris, MIT
‘I would like to face history with sincerity,’ said Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto in a statement issued on 10 August, the 100th anniversary of Japan’s annexation of Korea. ‘I would like to have courage to squarely confront the facts of history and humility to accept them, as well as to be honest to reflect upon the errors of our own.’
In what is now being referred to as the Kan Statement, the prime minister acknowledged the suffering caused by Japan’s ‘colonial rule’ and apologised to the Republic of Korea, and also pledged to return the remains of Koreans as well as cultural artefacts removed to Japan during the annexation. Read more…
Author: Pavin Chachavalpongpun, ISEAS
Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have agreed to invite the United States and Russia to participate in the region-wide forum, the East Asia Summit (EAS), which encompasses ASEAN plust six: Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India. The invitation immediately met with a favourable response from Kurt Campbell, US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, emphasising the US’s renewed interest in its relations with Southeast Asia.
It is generally believed US’s participation will minimise China’s increasing domination of the EAS. Long years of US disengagement with ASEAN, particularly during the Bush administration, allowed China to take a leading role in ASEAN-led regional platforms. This situation coincided with the rise of China, both economically and militarily. Read more…
Author: Ryokichi Hirono, Seikei University
Aurelia George Mulgan’s recent contribution here repeats much discussion in Japan about the DPJ’s failure to gain a majority in the recent House of Councillors (HOC) elections. But what are the facts and how really should they be interpreted?
First, on a combined SEP and NT basis, DPJ won the largest number of votes, followed by LDP, Mina, Komei, CPJ, SDP, Reform, TN, NNP and Kofuku. Read more…
Author: Andrew Levidis, Melbourne University and Kyoto University
In the life of nations, as of men, an apology carries within it the consciousness of the need for reconciliation with the past, and the awareness that all apologies are, in some important sense, strategic. An apology forces a state to make the painful reconciliation of its historic mission with the imperatives of the future. It is strategic because it reflects less the triumph of sentiment than cool and deliberate calculations of interest.
It seeks to transform enmity into a diplomatic asset, and alter the intellectual and philosophical contours within which states legitimate their strategic choices. Read more…
Author: Yoichi Funabashi, Asahi Shimbun
A recent entry in the popular blog of Harvard University economics professor Greg Mankiw was titled, ‘Are bonds sexy?’.
After Mankiw’s comment, ‘The Japanese government wants its citizens to think so,’ the blog links to a wire service report about an ad placed by the Finance Ministry in June to attract individual investors to buy fixed-rate, three-year bonds. The ad features five young women, with the message, ‘I want my future husband to be diligent about money.’ Read more…
Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU
The Japanese economy is frozen and faces large challenges (with an externally-led expansion from 2001 to 2006 just saving it from two lost decades of economic growth). Deflation is back due to over capacity and depressed domestic demand – a hangover from the rapid expansion and bubble period in the 1980s – and public debt is close to 200 per cent of GDP and rising.
The structure of the debt (95 per cent of which is domestically held) and the low interest rate being paid on the bonds to finance them means this problem may not be so bad as it looks. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, ANU
‘Sometimes Japan seems to be on the wrong continent’ writes Michael Schuman from Time Magazine perceptively. ‘Everywhere else in Asia, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Jakarta, there is an aura of perpetual motion, a sense that tomorrow will be better than today. The region is on a frenetic 365-day-a-year hurtle into a brighter future. Japan once shared Asia’s dynamism and mission. But not anymore. Today, Japan is an island of inertia in an Asia in constant flux. Japan’s political leadership is paralyzed, its corporate elite befuddled, its people agonized about the future. While Asia lurches forward, Japan inches backward’. And nobody seems able to do very much about it.
What drives these perceptions of Japanese stasis? Read more…
Author: Jason Young, Victoria University of Wellington
Since the early 1980s, hundreds of millions of migrants have entered urban areas without full urban status. In conjunction with local industries these migrants put increasing pressure on the state to abolish the hukou system, which requires Chinese citizens to hold a valid residency permit. The state has responded by liberalising two key areas of hukou management but failed to address the fundamental issue of civic inequality.
Today, hukou remains an important governing instrument to promote economic development, maintain social stability and manage migration and urbanisation but these blunt development tools increasingly threaten to dampen the growing dynamism of Chinese society and economy. Read more…
Author: Andy Yee, University of London
At the 12th ASEAN Summit in the Philippines three years ago, ASEAN leaders affirmed their commitment to an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2015 and to transform ASEAN into a region with free movement of goods, services, labour and capital. Earlier this year ASEAN committed to further regional integration when FTAs with Australia, New Zealand and China came into effect on January 1. While the long-term advantages of closer regional economic cooperation are immense, one cannot help questioning to what extent economic integration can develop Asia. A large part of ‘Factory Asia’ is developed at the expense of export reliance to the West and inequality within countries.
To fully realise the region’s potential, East Asian economies need to re-balance their development strategy away from exports to the West towards fostering local demand. Read more…
Author: Yiping Huang, Peking University
International anxiety over China’s currency exchange rate policy appears to be gathering momentum again, given that the yuan has risen only slightly since June 19 when the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) made it more flexible.
For my part, I think that although the recent global economic uncertainty warrants some caution, it is vital that the yuan rises more steadily over time in order to address economic imbalances and international reactions. Read more…
Author: Kelly Gerard, University of Western Australia
The issues keeping policy makers awake at night increasingly demand concerted regional responses. Ideas, funds, people and services move rapidly across porous borders, and so do security threats. Financial crises, drug smuggling, people trafficking, climate change, and terrorist networks are just a small sample of security threats currently spreading across states’ boundaries.
Faced with this newly globalised environment, states have recognised a need for international cooperation; regionalism has been on the rise since the late-1980s. Read more…
Author: Amitendu Palit, NUS
China and India are often perplexing to analysts. One of the best examples of such shared perplexity is over higher education. From the vantage point of western education service providers, China and India are typical cases of being ‘so near, yet so far’.
This need not be the case. Both China and India wish to expand their higher education sector. Both realise that government efforts alone are insufficient to match the growing demand for higher education. Read more…
Author: David Envall, ANU
‘To lose one decade may be a misfortune…’ ran a recent article in The Economist, the unstated quip being that the next one was lost due to carelessness. Another ‘lost decade’ would further justify such dark humour and would also present the Asian region with a significant security challenge.
Japan’s economic decline is well established. That country’s stock market, which was just below 40,000 points in 1989, finished 2009 at just over 10,500. Read more…
Author: Trevor Wilson, ANU
Claims that Burma is planning a nuclear weapons program have been circulating ever since Burma began a nuclear science training program with Russia in 2002, but until recently there was little hard evidence to back up these claims. A detailed report published in June from a Burmese Army defector and commissioned by the democracy advocacy broadcasting network, Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) finally provided some evidence for the claims.
The June report was scrutinised by former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspector, Robert Kelley, an American. Read more…
