Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

Ozawa Ichiro has escaped indictment by the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office again. Once again, his former secretaries were not quite so lucky, with three, including sitting Diet member Ishikawa Tomohiro, being indicted for political funds violations.

Michael Cucek rightly points to the gross misconduct of the PPO in its Ahab-like pursuit of Ozawa — and perhaps the more egregious campaign by the media to paint Ozawa as the conniving, monstrous puppet master of the Hatoyama government. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Richard Rigby, ANU

Challenge is a word that carries a heavy burden of nuance: it can convey a sense of threat, it can be an inspiration, it poses questions – often difficult ones – and it can also be double-edged, in that the challenge frequently applies as much to the alleged challenger as it does to those on the receiving end. Where China is concerned, the word is appropriate in every sense; but an important part of the challenge is precisely to decide which aspect is of the greatest importance. Only having done this can we attempt to frame policies, or at least provide the best possible advice to the policymakers, which will enable us to meet the challenge that today’s — and tomorrow’s — China poses to us, and to itself.

If there is a single word that should be applied to China, whether speaking of its international impact or its domestic situation, it should be ‘complexity’. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU

The Hollywood blockbuster Avatar is breaking box-office records in China and cinemagoers have been treated to a visual feast from the Shangrila-like moon of Pandora. At the same time, the savagery depicted in the film about the demolition of the natives’ home has also resonated with the Chinese. A young literary commentator wrote that ‘For audiences from other places, barbaric eviction is something they simply can’t imagine – it is the sort of thing that could only happen in outer space and China.’

Much like the Na’vi people from Pandora, forcibly evicted Chinese residents have fought back literally, with bows and arrows and Molotov cocktails against camouflaged hired thugs from real estate developers. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Geremie R. Barmé, ANU

As the contretemps involving Google’s conflicted presence in the People’s Republic of China unfolds, it is timely to recall one anniversary that passed by all but unnoticed in 2009: that of a covert Cold War-era clash between John Foster Dulles and Mao Zedong in 1959. This overlooked anniversary is worth recalling now, since it is of particular relevance to contextualising the remarks—and the Chinese response to those remarks—that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently made regarding Internet freedom and U.S. policy in Washington on 21 January 2010 (see here for full text of Clinton’s speech).

In the speech, Clinton reminds her audience of comments that President Barack Obama made on Internet freedom during the webcast section of his November ‘town hall meeting’ in Shanghai. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jerome A. Cohen and Yu-Jie Chen, NYU

The Chinese government’s continuing attacks on human rights lawyers rarely make foreign headlines these days. Monitoring, intimidating, disbarring and prosecuting activist lawyers have become routine in China. Even the tragic ‘disappearance’, while in police custody, of defence lawyer/political reformer Gao Zhishen, now feared to be dead, has hardly attracted attention. It is also unremarkable for even non-political Chinese defence lawyers to suffer sanctions. The recent conviction of Beijing lawyer Li Zhuang for allegedly counselling his client to lie and bribe witnesses would not have been noted abroad if the case had not involved Chongqing’s extraordinary campaign to suppress organised crime.

By contrast, the Taiwan government’s new interest in curbing vigorous defence lawyers does constitute ‘news’. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU

Early last year, the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post reported that Beijing is allegedly amassing a war chest of 45 billion yuan to fight a battle over China’s image in the international arena. This has not yet been confirmed by any official sources in China, but the signals from Beijing are lending credence to this report.

Major state-owned media giants such as China Central Television (CCTV), the People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency are all expanding their services and international presence. The People’s Daily-owned Global Times launched its English edition in December last year. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Amrita Malhi, ANU

Since Friday 8 January, arsonists and vandals have attacked ten churches around Malaysia. Four arson attempts took place on the same morning, following the conclusion of a two-year case before Malaysian courts, over whether non-Muslims can be prevented from using the term ‘Allah’ to describe God in the Malay language.

In 2007, the Home Ministry banned the term in the Catholic Herald newspaper, arguing it could confuse Muslims and cause offence, threatening national security. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: James Fallows

I have not yet been able to reach my friends in China to discuss the story of Google’s threatened withdrawal from China, so for now I am judging the Google response strictly by what the company has posted on its ‘Official Blog,’ here, and my observations from dealing with Google-China officials while overseas. Therefore this will epitomise the Web-age reaction to a breaking news story, in that it will be a first imperfect assessment, subject to revision as new facts come in.

This development is significant for Google, and while it is only marginally significant for developments inside China, it is potentially very significant for China’s relations with the rest of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Michael Cucek

A viewer of television news in Japan has long enjoyed a wide variety of news programs, with six large terrestrial networks competing with one another for viewers. Competition encouraged a mild but sincere form of specialisation, with particular news organisations framing the facts in a manner pleasing to a particular constituency.

Since formation in September of a Democratic Party of Japan-dominated government, a strange phenomenon has made itself manifest. On any given night one can flip back and forth between the Fuji TV and Nippon TV networks and find the two newscasts nearly identical. The clothing and the sets change but the editorial stance, the rumors, even the vocabulary, are nearly indistinguishable. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU

The departure of Hu Shuli and her editorial and journalist teams at Caijing magazine finally ended months of speculation on the future of her tenure at this influential business publication. What was once the most innovative and vibrant newsroom manned by a staff of 300 and led by the charismatic Hu has become only a ghost of its former self. The magazine barely managed to put out the latest issue with the assistance of a constellation of specially invited writers, while the editor-in-chief confessed publicly that this issue will fall short of readers’ high expectation of the magazine.

The obvious question to ponder is what will become of this great publication, which enjoys an unrivalled reputation for its investigative journalism and outspokenness on various sensitive issues in China. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Tobias Harris, MIT

It has been just over a year since General Tamogami Toshio (ASDF-ret.), then the chief of staff of Japan’s Air Self Defence Forces, was drummed out of the service after he was awarded the top prize in an essay contest sponsored by the APA Group for his essay “Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?”

In the year since he became a household name, Tamogami has become a leading figure of the Japanese right, as I expected following his appearance before the House of Councillors foreign and defence affairs committee. According to his website, by year’s end he will have given more than seventy lectures across Japan. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Drysdale

This week’s lead is from Ambassador Richard Woolcott, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s special envoy on developing the Asia Pacific Community concept. Woolcott’s piece is also featured in the second issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ) [pdf]. In the first issue of EAFQ, I noted that there was no effective and collective Asian response to the global financial crisis. Its regional structures were still not up to the task of effective global participation. Much in the last six months has changed the drivers of regional initiative on the global stage, as the essays by Young, Soesastro and Dobson in this issue of EAFQ make clear. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Yuan Cai, ANU and Adelaide

It was the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post that first dropped the bomb that tectonic change had just occurred in the upper echelons of the influential Chinese business magazine, Caijing. The general business manager, Daphne Wu, tendered her resignation along with eight of her nine senior colleagues. This was only the first crack in the dyke, with a mass exodus of editors and investigative journalists occurring shortly thereafter. The inevitable Götterdämmerung will be when the charismatic and influential managing editor Hu Shuli leaves the magazine that she founded more than a decade ago.

This story would be unremarkable had it not been for the semi-deified status of Hu Shuli as the most influential financial journalist in China and Caijing’s reputation as one of the very few trusted media sources in a country dominated by party mouthpieces. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Yoichi Funabashi

All summer long, the nation was abuzz with excitement. And at the end, just about everybody was overwhelmed at the result.

But I don’t think it was frenzy that moved them. In 2005, with a Lower House election that focused on the single issue of postal privatization, voters cheered for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, yelling his nickname ‘Jun-chan!’ But nothing of the sort happened this time around. Behind the seemingly feverish excitement was the public’s deep frustration at, and yearning to break, the nation’s status quo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Author: David Kelly, UTS

Furious criticism in both the Australian and Chinese press has been at an all-time high this past week. ‘Australia must bear the cost of the deteriorating Sino-Australian relations’, proclaimed the Huanqiu shibao. This level of acrimony surprises. Having scanned a wide range of Beijing media, I recall few headlines like this one—even from the Global Times, a broadsheet whose nationalism sometimes borders on jingoism. The Australian press has acted little better than its Chinese counterpart. Greg Sheridan told the Uighurs they have to fight it out in China—which is possibly the least diplomatic piece of advice ever offered by a Foreign Editor of The Australian in the history of the journal. While this past week set a record for arrogant bluster, by Friday the tensions were eased by placatory statements from both sides, most noticeably the Chinese.

It’s not over, not by a long shot. While blown out of all proportion this skirmish highlights some troublesome issues of information asymmetry and cognitive dissonance in the Australian-Chinese relationship. Information asymmetry is mainly an Australian problem, and I have recently discussed it in an editorial elsewhere. The problem of cognitive dissonance needs some explaining, and a parallel with the United States is useful in doing this.

Read the rest of this entry »