Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Fitrian Ardiansyah, ANU
This year’s World Environment Day, which sports the theme ‘Forests: Nature at your service’ is likely to be celebrated in a more colourful way in Indonesia.
This may be due to the fact that in the two weeks prior to 5 June, three influential policies were issued by the government. Read more…
Author: Aidan Foster-Carter, Leeds University
Pyongyang’s angry disclosure in early June of secret talks about a summit with Seoul, with accusations of bribes offered and threats to publish transcripts, marks a new nadir in inter-Korean ties.
North Korea has signalled unambiguously that it wants no further truck with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, increasingly a lame duck now that his term of office is two-thirds over.
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan, ADFA@UNSW
As the foremost maker and breaker of political parties in Japanese politics, Ozawa Ichiro has confounded observers with his limpet-like attachment to the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, a party he clearly despises and recently called a ‘failure’.
Doubly humiliating is that Ozawa has had to endure the provocation of Prime Minister Kan’s ‘breaking away from Ozawa’ (datsu Ozawa) line, including his exclusion from all party and government posts plus the suspension of his party membership. Read more…
Author: Carlyle A. Thayer, UNSW@ADFA
The South China Sea has re-emerged as a front-burner security issue this year as a result of aggressive Chinese assertiveness.
There have been three major reported incidents involving Chinese civilian ships accosting Vietnamese and Filipino oil exploration vessels operating in their Exclusive Economic Zones.
Author: Andrei Lankov, Kookmin University and ANU
In early June, the governments of China and North Korea declared that they would work to develop two new special economic zones (SEZs).
One is to be situated in the small port city of Raseon, on the eastern coast of North Korea, just 20 kilometres from the nearest crossing to China. Read more…
Author: Justine Zheng Ren, LSE
‘Mass incidents’, as civil unrest is officially called in China, have proved to be an inescapable social and political phenomenon.
After a long period of economic boom with little investment in institutional change, the current conflict resolution mechanisms are no longer capable of sustaining China’s changing social structure and political relationships. Read more…
Authors: Jane Golley and Ligang Song, ANU
The first three decades of the 21st century are almost certain to bring with them the completion of China’s rise on to the global economic, political and geopolitical stage.
The Chinese economy has contributed positively to world economic growth for decades, with a pivotal role during the global financial crisis (GFC). Read more…
Author: Husien Khamis, NTU
The acrimony between the United States and China is not new in the field of international relations, evident in the political, economic and strategic realms between the two countries.
Allegations are aplenty that China’s rise is a threat to the United States’ energy security, too. Read more…
Author: Joachim von Braun, University of Bonn
The food price inflation rates ranging between 10 and 15 per cent in several large Asian nations during the past 12 months are a serious issue for low income people.
Food price inflation will be difficult to reduce singlehandedly even for large nations like China and India. Read more…
Author: Arvind Subramanian, PIIE
With the United States throwing its support behind Christine Lagarde for the post of Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, the search for a new chief is all over.
Although the French magistrate’s continuing investigating of Lagarde’s role in the Bernard Tapie affair is unfortunate. Read more…
Author: Frank Jotzo, ANU
Australia is going to put in place carbon pricing at a level on par with the European Union with a design that could make it a solid foundation for long term policy.
It took five years of political struggle to get to this point, and several leaders of government and opposition lost their jobs in the process. Read more…
Author: Amitav Acharya, American University
The escalating regional tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS) have revived two crucial questions facing Asia’s strategic future: whether China is pursuing a ‘Monroe Doctrine’ over its neighbourhood, including the SCS area; and how far China’s neighbours can go in acquiescing to its rising power.
The Monroe Doctrine was first enunciated in 1823 by then-US President James Monroe as the policy of a rising US forbidding European powers to either colonise or interfere in the affairs of states in the Western Hemisphere. The essence of the Monroe Doctrine was to deny the Latin American and Caribbean region to European powers, and establish US regional hegemony. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, EAF
This year, Richard Rigby, Issue Editor of the latest East Asia Forum Quarterly, reminds us that this is the centenary of the Xinhai revolution, which in overthrowing China’s Manchu Qing dynasty was supposed to have resolved the question of how China should be governed.
As Wang Gungwu says in the same journal, the ambiguity of Sun Yat-sen’s legacy is one of the elements in China’s mixed heritage, influencing the next stage of reforms in the Chinese polity. Read more…
Author: Kerry Brown, Chatham House
One side-effect of the Dengist economic reforms which started to penetrate deeply in the 1980s was the transition from a ruling Chinese Communist Party that was focused on class struggle and revolutionary aspiration under Mao, to one in which a new technocratic elite were in control.
In the words of Wang Hui, one of contemporary China’s foremost public intellectuals, that meant that the party started fulfilling a more ‘evaluative’ function and became the sort of ‘bureaucratic machine’ that Mao had tried to prevent. Read more…
Author: Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore
China’s economic reforms since 1978 have been unprecedented.
They have followed no specific model and have proceeded very much as Deng Xiaoping said: crossing the river by feeling for the stones. Read more…