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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
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 more…
Author: Tejaswini Patil, University of South Australia and South Asia Masala
The recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne that left at least two students seriously injured caused widespread outrage among various sections of the Indian community. The media frenzy that ensued, with headlines such as ‘Australia, land of racism‘ and ‘Down under and Down right racist‘, further inflamed the outrage. The Indian Government’s reaction was equally strong, with Indian Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna describing the attacks as ‘appalling’ and ordering the Indian High Commissioner to Australia, Sujatha Singh, to visit Melbourne and assess the situation. Even Bollywood actor Amir Khan weighed in, arguing, ‘It was most disturbing to hear about racist attacks on Indians living in Australia.’ The Australian Federal Government and the Victorian Police were quick to condemn the attacks and dispel the notion that they were racially motivated. The reaction to these attacks by state and non-state actors, in terms of managing, controlling and sustaining the post-production discourses raises two important issues:
- Does setting up the discursive context of the debate in the language of ‘race attacks’ and ‘racism’ contribute to the understanding of these attacks?
- How does the debate reflect on the troublesome aspects of identity and nationalism within the Indian and the Australian contexts?
Read more…
Author: Peter Yuan Cai
After the failure to consummate the marriage of Rio Tinto and Chinalco, the mood in Australia is one of celebration. The public is generally relieved that part of the jewel in the crown of Australia’s mining assets would not be pawned to Red China after all and the Rudd government was also spared the agony of making a politically difficult decision that had the potential to damage the increasingly important Sino-Australian relationship.
Opposition Senator Barnaby Joyce triumphantly told reporters that ‘it is great for the Australian people that this deal falls over and we do not have the complications of the Communist People’s Republic of China’s government owning the wealth of Australia.’
Apart from the tacit acknowledgement of Chinalco’s expression of ‘deep disappointment’ in the Australian press, Chinese voices have been conspicuously absent from this moment. Read more…
Author: Ryan Manuel
The reactions of Thailand’s commanding northern neighbour have been heavy on the minds of Western media during the events of recent weeks.
As the BBC noted in the aftermath of the protests that postponed the ASEAN Summit:
Mr Abhisit had to make a grovelling phone call to apologise to Premier Wen, who, despite diplomatically saying he understood the prime minister’s actions, must have been thinking: ‘This could never happen in China.’
Yet an attempt to calculate exactly what Grandpa Wen thought of the events in Thailand is difficult. Coverage of the Thai situation in the Chinese media has been fairly limited. The august China Daily, and Xinhua have shared the same daily stories (usually a brief 300 word coverage of the respective event) for the past week with stories on 13 April (‘Water Festival not so happy’); 14 April (‘Protesters go home’); 16 April (‘ASEAN summit must be held – Abhisit’); 17 April (‘Yellow-Shirt leader shot; Thai gov’t says additional loan needed to boost post-political-crisis economy’) and 19 April (‘Thai PM: time for solving political crisis, not for cabinet reshuffle’).
Read more…
Author: Aurelia George Mulgan
In January 2009, Japan’s former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982-87) reflected on the global strategic implications of the international financial crisis in an article published in the Yomiuri newspaper. In it, he observed that ‘the ongoing financial crisis has prompted the world to shift from a structure that relies heavily on the United States to a multipolar system that does not.’
The structural shift in the world order to multipolarity offers Japan a clear choice. Will it expand and strengthen its security contributions to the US alliance in order to buttress American primacy in East Asia, or will it seek to carve out a more independent regional and global role for itself, which takes account of declining American power? Professor Terumasa Nakanishi of Kyoto University has argued that the only option for Japan in the transition from a US-dominated world order to multipolarisation is to ‘stand as a pole’.
Read more…
Author: Robert Cribb, President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia
If ‘the Asian century’ means a global century in which Asia is a full participant, commensurate with its size and energy, then – within the constraints of resource depletion and environmental change – we can certainly expect an Asian century. In other words, the rise of Asia does not need to mean the fall of the West.
But the bigger question is whether Asia’s enhanced presence on the global stage will change the world’s ways of thinking. The rise of the West generated the new modes of thought about the nature of things and the character of humanity that we call modernity. Western societies themselves were transformed before their expansion transformed the rest of the world. Asian societies responded creatively to the Western challenge, but the most important and creative ideas coming out of Asia – from Gandhism to Maoism to the Grameen Bank – were responses to the global agenda set originally by the West; they were not independent attempts to set new agendas for the future.
A century in which Asia takes charge of the world’s thinking agendas? Now that would be an exciting change.
To read more by Dr. Cribb on this, click here.
