Author: Mark Carroll, Australian-Thai Chamber of Commerce

The muddy floodwaters in Thailand having receded, one of the truths to emerge will be just how important the Thai economy is in both regional and global terms.

Thailand is a manufacturing powerhouse. Countless small and large factories churn out a broad range of finished consumer goods for export, as well as component products vital to global supply chains. Read more…

Author: Joel Rheuben, University of Tokyo

On 30 April, the Democratic Party of Japan’s ‘Reconstruction Vision Team’ delivered its preliminary report to then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano.

The report set out in general terms a range of potential mid to long-term measures to reinvigorate the local economy and improve food and energy security in Japan’s Tohoku region in the wake of the 3/11 earthquake. Read more…

Author: K Kesavapany, ISEAS

The results of Singapore’s 27 August Presidential Election were a cliff-hanger.

In the four-way contest, the government’s preferred candidate, former Deputy Prime Minister Tony Tan, won 35.2 per cent of the valid votes after a recount. Read more…

Author: Gerald Curtis, Columbia University

The Japanese Earthquake and tsunami left more than 25,000 people dead or missing. It damaged or destroyed 125,000 buildings, and spread an estimated 27 million tons of debris over a wide expanse of the northeast Pacific coast.

The media and the political opposition have been unrelenting in their criticism of Prime Minister Kan. Less than 20 per cent of the public now support the prime minister. More than 70 per cent disapprove of the way he has dealt with the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Disaster, and would like to see him resign before the end of August. But the public entertains no illusions that the political situation will improve with Kan’s resignation. With no political leader having captured the public’s imagination, support for the DPJ, LDP and other parties is in free-fall. Read more…

Author: Dennis T. Yasutomo, Smith College

Media reports indicate that after the 11 March earthquake, Japanese residents of Sendai had a 30 minute warning before the tsunami hit. In a sense, the Japanese had expected this for 30 years. The longer-term question is what will happen in the next 30 years.

In 1980, the Japanese government adopted ‘comprehensive national security’ (‘sogo anzen hosho’) as its security doctrine, and comprehensive security stepped outside US military-centric thinking for the first time. Read more…

Author: Vikas Kumar, Bangalore

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been extremely combative ever since the Nobel Peace Prize panel identified Liu Xiaobo, serving a prison sentence for inciting subversion, as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate.

He was chosen in recognition of ‘his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.’ The CCP responded with its usual attacks on free press, democracy, and the West. Read more…

Author: Jonas Parello-Plesner, European Council on Foreign Relations

There are a couple of certainties about Cancun. It will not bring a global deal. The US will try to focus the agenda on a lack of transparency in China’s emissions control efforts — to cover the fact that the US also brings nothing substantial to the table and is stuck in an anachronistic, fuel-guzzling economy and mindset. Chinese negotiators will arrive with their usual arguments, but equipped with better PR techniques for making sure they aren’t seen as the game stopper — the real lesson they took away from Copenhagen. The poorer countries will clamour for more aid for both mitigation and adaption to climate change. The EU’s credibility among other key players will be slightly dented by its current internal skirmishes on moving from 20 per cent to 30 per cent reductions by 2020. At the end of these two weeks in Mexico, those who aspire to a global deal will be directed towards 2011 and South Africa, and few will believe that it can happen there either. Finally, the summit will be a lot warmer than Copenhagen, and the general world temperature will continue to rise, as the scientists keep telling us.

The conclusion is that big global deals are off – at least for the time being. That’s the short, and somewhat depressing, summary. Read more…

Author: Jonas Parello-Plesner, European Council on Foreign Relations

It is the biggest multilateral event this side of the G20, including the leaders of India, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Australia. On Saturday the 30th of October the 16 leaders of the East Asia summit will gather in Hanoi, with special representation for both Russia and the US. Secretary Clinton is joining as the latest leg of her impressive Asia-Pacific trip. From Russia, Lavrov, is flying in. The EU, however, is conspicuously absent.

During the Bush-administration there was no American interest in joining the East Asia Summit, perceived as another talk shop with concrete results. The Obama administration reversed all that. It both signed up for Asian multilateralism – the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with ASEAN – and made sure it brought something to the negotiation table. Read more…

Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU

As the G20 Summit in Seoul and the APEC Summit in Yokohama fast approach, how can Asia, a force for stability and dynamism in the fragile global economy, connect regional initiative to global governance? With China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Australia and India in the G20, Asia has new responsibilities and opportunities to influence global economic governance and contribute positively to the international economic system in the region’s, as well as the world’s, best interest.

In this week’s feature essay, based on his keynote speech to the 12th East Asian Economic Association conference in Seoul last week, Peter Drysdale argues that Asia can no longer expect a free ride on global public goods in trade or finance and that the time is past due to deliver on its global responsibilities. Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale, ANU

In East Asia, as elsewhere in the world, the risks that we continue to face in recovery from the global financial crisis, not only economically but also politically, are a consequence of past failure in the architecture of international governance, including regional architecture, that frustrated a coherent East Asian and international response to the big problems of the day in their global context.

The global financial crisis and the emergence of the G20 has changed all this dramatically and gives the region as a whole, and the G20’s Asian members in particular, the opportunity to assume a new role and their proper responsibilities in managing the world economic order.  Korea has peculiar responsibility in the exploitation of this opportunity as host of the first G20 Summit in Asia in November 2010. Read more…

Author: Michito Tsuruoka, NIDS

Does ASEM remain relevant in today’s world? On October 4 and 5, nearly 50 heads of state and government from Europe and the Asia-Pacific will assemble for the 8th biennial summit meeting of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Brussels. But the meeting is receiving little coverage from the international press, and is likely to experience low participation rates to ASEM ministerial meetings, to which many mere deputies are sent.

Launched in 1996, ASEM’s aim was to provide a bridge between Europe and Asia. Europeans eagerly sought to catch up to the US and Japan in negotiating with emerging Asia. Whilst major European countries had previous relationships with ASEAN and some regional countries before ASEM, these relationships were outdated and not suited for a new era of dynamic, equitable partnerships. In turn, Asians wanted a new relationship with Europe to expand foreign relations and diversify export markets.

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: Hyung-A Kim, ANU

More than 100 days after the sinking in March of the South Korean navy corvette, the Cheonan, with the loss of 46 lives, the UN Security Council presidential statement of 9 July epitomises the impasse that the global response to this incident has now reached.

The statement did not directly condemn or blame North Korea but simply stated that it ‘condemns the attack which led to the sinking of the Cheonan’, and called for ‘appropriate and peaceful measures to be taken against those responsible for the incident’. Yet, while the UN Security Council took more than a month to adopt this statement, the sinking has become the catalyst for some significant developments in Northeast Asia, reminiscent of the Cold War posturing of the past. Read more…

Author: Shiro Armstrong, ANU

The Asian region is diverse, dynamic and it faces immense challenges. Domestically most countries are experiencing rapid economic, social and political change and in the region there is a huge change taking place in the structure of power and influence.

The latest issue of the East Asia Forum Quarterly brings together essays from rising stars in the new region to address the changes taking place in the region and showcases the best from the new generation on Asia. Read more…

Author: Peter Warr, ANU

On the afternoon of May 19, following weeks of protests and mayhem, most of the core Red Shirt leaders barricaded in the centre of Bangkok surrendered meekly to the Thai government forces. One leader who evaded capture was the volatile Arisman Pongruangrong. Just before vanishing later that afternoon, Arisman was wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of Mahatma Gandhi. The symbolism was deeply ironic.

Almost a century before, Gandhi had expounded a political principle that the Red Shirt leadership, including Arisman, had still not absorbed. To dislodge an entrenched government like Thailand’s, a popular uprising had to do two things: attract public support in very large numbers and be non-violent. The Red Shirts failed on both counts. Read more…