Author: Charles Prestidge-King

When Kevin Rudd gave his first speech on the Asia-Pacific Community (APC) in June last year, he would have been forgiven for thinking his call for a new regionalism would have been echoed by Japan.

Rudd and his advisors should not take Japan’s relative silence on APC to heart. Unlike Singapore, Japan’s silence should surprise nobody.

Japan and Australia are typically seen as natural partners in the Asian region, and in foreign policy, Japan and Australia’s aims, particularly with regard to regional institutions and to the future shape of the world affairs, are similar. And, of course, APEC was significantly the product of Australian-Japanese cooperation.

So why is Japan keeping so quiet on this front?

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Author: Charles Prestidge-King

In 1996, Australia’s current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wrote an article for a collection entitled ‘Australia and China: Partners in Asia’, edited by Colin Mackerras of Griffith University.

In it, he outlined the case for improving Australia’s cultural and linguistic literacy of Asia in general, and China in particular.

The popular view of China was, as Rudd put it, the ‘product of 150 years of conflicting and intersecting paradigms, which carry inaccuracies’, a curious mix of racism, vestigial or otherwise, strategic paranoia, and a sense of economic opportunity.

Improving Australia’s China literacy would help clear up those inaccuracies, and would give Australians a better understanding of the cultural factors behind key Chinese institutions. With China’s increasing economic significance, it would also give Australians a tremendous advantage in business.

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Author: Charles Prestidge-King

Kevin Rudd’s focus on China began as an undergraduate and hasn’t waned.

This is worth keeping in mind as context to his comments on Australia’s approach to Asia, on his recent trip to Singapore.

Rudd considers the ‘rise of China’ as the greatest event and policy challenge for the coming century, and restated his commitment to make Australia ‘the most Asia-literate country in the West’, stressing the importance of what he called ‘functional expertise’, as well as linguistic and cultural understanding of our region. He also reiterated his idea that good policy is underpinned by good scholarship.

Rudd’s comments in Singapore, echoed sentiments expressed at the Crawford School’s China Update. In Singapore, Rudd signed a security pact with his counterpart, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and he talked about his idea of an Asia Pacific Community. Singaporean think tanks had earlier greeted that with a fair degree of skepticism. Read the rest of this entry »