Author: Fenna Egberink, Clingendael Institute

The United States’ recent Asian diplomacy has been most interesting. The US has drawn ASEAN countries into the guarded enmity between the US and China. Is this to Southeast Asia’s benefit?

Earlier this year China took a noticeably more proactive stance vis-à-vis its regional partners. After first asserting the South China Sea to be a ‘core interest’ during bilateral discussions with the US, a term generally reserved for its claims to Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang, China defied US diplomatic efforts by using its veto-powers in the UN Security Council to block actions against North Korea in the aftermath of the Cheonan incident.    Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Yiping Huang and Bijun Wang, Peking University

Despite its extraordinary growth performance during the past decades, China’s structural risks have also increased significantly.  Premier Wen and other senior leaders have repeatedly emphasised that the existing growth pattern is unstable, unbalanced and unsustainable.

One of the most widely identified imbalance problems is the rising share of investment in GDP, which increases the risk of excess capacity and low returns. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Yanrui Wu, UWA

After three decades of rapid growth, the Chinese economy is now at a crossroads, heading towards the next phase of development. While China’s economic growth has indeed been phenomenal, it has also been resource intensive and environmentally damaging.

For high growth to be sustained in the coming decades, the role of technological progress has to be boosted. This can either occur through technology transfer flows from abroad, or through indigenous innovation. While the former has been widely discussed, the latter has largely been under-documented. Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Sherry Tao Kong, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, Australia National University

The global financial crisis (GFC) reduced export orders sharply and led to a decline in China’s economic growth.  As China’s exporting industries are labour intensive and most likely to employ rural migrants, it was widely believed that the GFC has had significant negative impacts on the employment and/or wages of rural migrants.

Reflecting this, at the height of the crisis, laid-off Chinese migrant workers protested outside closed factories and millions lamented lost jobs and embarked on journeys home. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Jane Golley, ANU

In the three decades since Deng Xiaoping declared that China’s economic development would necessarily involve some people becoming rich before others, inequalities have risen steadily across (and within) China’s provinces and regions.

To some extent, this outcome has been the natural consequence of market forces in a large developing economy; the historical and geographical advantages of the east ensured industrialisation would occur there first. Deng’s Open Door Policy and Coastal Development Strategy compounded these advantages with a range of preferential policies explicitly promoting the development of the eastern region. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Carlyle A. Thayer, UNSW@ADFA

If China has made the running in Southeast Asia on the basis of soft power over the last decade, the tide now seems to be turning and the United States is re-engaging with smart power. The United States has signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation; President Obama has attended the first ASEAN-United States leadership summit (and will host the second meeting in the US this year); Secretary Clinton has not only attended two ASEAN Regional Forum meetings in a row, but offered US good offices to help settle diplomatically one of the pressing security issues in Southeast Asia, the South China Sea dispute. In sum, Secretary Clinton has turned the multilateral table on China. The United States is back and engaged in Southeast Asia working with the support of regional states.

Continued Chinese bellicosity and diplomatic pique runs the risk of isolating China diplomatically and eroding the soft power gains of recent years. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Joel Rathus, Adelaide University and Meiji University

In November of last year, President Barack Obama pledged that he would be a ‘Pacific president.’ While the audience in Suntory Hall may have wondered about what exactly that statement meant, few in attendance doubted the sincerity or conviction of the president. As relationships between the US, ASEAN and China have been re-drawn, especially since the latest series of ASEAN-hosted diplomatic meetings in Hanoi, the meaning of a Pacific president is starting to become clearer. Three sites of change in particular warrant special mention; the East Asia Summit, the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula. In all three cases, the United States and ASEAN states are becoming closer, while China is finding itself distanced from the decision-making process.

The early 21st century phenomena of China-ASEAN relations being closer than the US-ASEAN partnership appears to be reversing itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Mi Luo, Peking University

Internet usage is on the rise in China, especially amongst the younger generation. Faced with the problem of extensive online censorship, this generation has designed software packages to ‘scale the Great Firewall’ which blocks content deemed sensitive by the Ministry of Public Security.

What does this internet usage say about a burgeoning Chinese demand for democracy? A defining feature of a functioning democracy is the active involvement of ordinary people in discourse about the nation. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Georgy Toloraya, CSCAP, Russia

The Asia Pacific is a global region of primary significance. It is imperative that Russia grasps this fact, and lays out a comprehensive vision for its role in the region.  If Russia can do this, it can greatly advance the cause of developing effective arrangements in the region.

What are the key elements of the economic, political and security situation in the Asia-Pacific region? Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Wing Thye Woo, University of California at Davis

China’s economy during the past three decades can be likened to a speeding car. The CCP leadership in 2006 saw that the car could crash in the future because there were several high-probability failures that might occur and cause economic collapse. There are three classes of failures that could occur: hardware failure, software failure and power supply failure.

A hardware failure refers to the breakdown of an economic mechanism—a development that is analogous to the collapse of the chassis of a car. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Louise Merrington, ANU

When thinking about China’s role in Asia, the relationships that are most obvious are those  with its East and Southeast Asian neighbours, from Japan, Korea and Taiwan down to the ASEAN countries. But looking west across China’s hinterland we can see a new set of relationships developing in one of the most strategically important areas of the world: the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

In contemporary terms, Central Asia officially consists of the five former Soviet republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Miles Pomper, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, Stephanie Lieggi, and Lawrence Scheinman, CNS

North Korea’s nuclear weapons development is not the only nuclear crisis plaguing East Asia. There is also the less visible, but nearly as intractable problem of the region’s accumulating spent fuel from its burgeoning fleet of nuclear plants.

Growth in nuclear power generation in East Asia will increase significantly in the next few decades, as will regional stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Geng Xiao, Columbia University

China’s key macroeconomic challenge over the next two decades of reform and development is to determine how to manage its exchange, interest and inflation rates so as to facilitate sustainable, stable and efficient economic growth while the Western economies shrink in size relative to emerging market economies.

To appreciate magnitude of this challenge, one must realise that China’s high growth in the past 30 years has largely been a story of rapid productivity growth and catching up. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Drysdale

For resource exporters, like Australia, there is hardly a single question of more practical importance than the question of what is likely to happen to the growth of Chinese steel demand and the demand for iron ore and other resources that it will drive over the coming decades. It’s a question that the big Australian resource companies, that shipped 260 million tonnes of iron ore last year to Chinese steel mills, wrestle with daily as they plan their investments to service growth of the Chinese market.

And it’s a matter of primary interest to government and the general public because of the impact of the sector on the broader economy and public revenues. Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Huw McKay, Yu Sheng and Ligang Song, ANU

China’s increasing demand for resources has been a key feature of the global landscape over the last decade. Despite its now dominant position in many spheres of the resources market, China’s per capita consumption of resources is still relatively low, consistent with its low income status. The path that China takes from here will have profound implications for the global demand and supply balance.

Will China continue to follow a path similar to Korea, will it eventually look more like Japan, a resource-intensive high-income economy, or will  it transition to a resting place similar to that of Western Europe and the United States? Read the rest of this entry »