How can it happen that a person who probably no longer exists can keep an entire nation, North Korea, in poverty for more than twenty years, and the rest of us under prolonged nuclear threat? The story is complicated. In 2001 Tokyo sent a senior foreign ministry official to North

For eight years Ukraine’s military and ultra-nationalists militias have felt free to try to ravage the two Donbas hold-outs, beginning with the total destruction of a large modern airport of Donetsk. It is a well-known saying: In war the first casualty is the truth. Maybe that can now be changed:

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2014 disappearance of flight 370, Malaysian Airlines, we are getting the usual barrage of media speculation about the alleged mystery and its possible causes. Yet for me at the time, as a contributor to an Asian news service, there was no mystery.

Slovakia is the poor relation created when the former Czechoslovakia divided in 1993 into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Czech Republic has hewn closely to EU and NATO policies over Ukraine. But despite NATO membership the Slovak Republic has decided to go its own way. It will halt military

Between years 2000 and 2018 the North Korea and South Korea governments issued three joint declarations all promising South Korean economic aid to North Korea and North Korean moves to denuclearisation. Year 2002 saw the Japanese-inspired Pyongyang Declaration promising even more of the same. But each time subsequent conservative governments

Where fear of China is involved there is no conscience for the mistakes of the past. Nor can we expect any sensibility in the plans for the future. As we move into the new year, two foreign policy mistakes need to be corrected. First is the idea that Israel needs

Henry Kissinger’s death has brought a flow of predictable judgements: ‘He created some evils – 1973 Chile, for example. But overall he helped end the Cold War.’ And as a beneficiary – the 1971 opening to China, for example – Australians should be grateful. His non-Anglo background and his experience

The economic progress has been even more impressive than what I, for one, had been led to believe – complex four or even six lane highway systems plus bullet train systems linking major cities; endless rows of high-rise around even minor towns or cities; broad car tunnels running miles under

By chance, US president Biden’s goodwill visit to Vietnam’s communist government in Hanoi came just 50 years after the notorious 1972 Christmas bombings. These bombings saw more than 200 American B-52s flying 730 sorties and dropping over 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam over a period of 12 days

So US-sanctioned, Hong Kong Chief Executive, John Lee, will not be allowed into the US to attend the forthcoming APEC annual conference. This is US unilateralism gone mad. We have seen it before, of course, with the US unilaterally refusing admission to national leaders it dislikes who wish to attend

The Ukrainian war could be headed for a dangerous stalement, and at least some of the blame lies with Moscow and its supporters. From the beginning there was too much emphasis by Moscow supporters on the NATO question. Nothing was going to change in Ukraine by harping on broken NATO

The New York Times has in recent years tried to redeem its reputation with a mea-culpa admission over its coverage of the blatantly transparent Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction myth that enabled the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But over its key role earlier in cementing the Tiananmen Square horror story

There is only one way to stop politicians and bureaucrats from beginning stupid and immoral wars. Before his recent death Daniel Ellsberg went out of his way to deliver an important message. This was the need to stop US empire-building wars before they start. His Pentagon Papers were not released until 1971

The Western hope that Taiwan could serve as a catalyst for an attack of China seems likely to remain the fantasy it always was. I first knew Taiwan in the sixties – dirt poor and brutally oppressive. A well-known lawyer, Duan-Mu Kai, I came to know spent his time rescuing

The ugly situation developing in Kosovo, formerly a province of Serbia, has parallels with Ukraine. The result could be just as bloody. But is anyone listening? The legal status of Kosovo remains obscure. Originally it was an autonomous province within Serbia. But the Albanian majority in the province claimed Serb

As a Hong Kong based columnist for much of his writing career Nury Vittachi was known for his persistent anti-Beijing slant. But no longer. What changed his mind was the mainstream media – the BBC in particular – coverage of the 2019 Hong Kong riots. Praised as democracy seekers, these

In East West relations it has become something of a habit. First you reach an agreement promising flowers and chocolates. The other side reacts with concessions and hopes for a brighter future. Then your hawks move in. They say you should never have made those promises. The agreement is forgotten

How do we end up with an ALP government stupid enough to sign up for the ludicrous AUKUS proposal and the accompanying bogus, China threat scare? Clearly part of the answer has to be the inability to understand Asia. And this is confirmed when we look at the background of most

In 2015 a BBC documentary on You Tube showed us the remarkable scene of a Ukrainian military unit trying to enter the outskirts of Slovyansk in the Donbas. Old men, young boys, large women came out to stop them. Some climbed on the tanks and other armoured vehicles. Some seized

The ‘your atrocity is worse than my atrocity’ argument at the core of Richard Cribb’s response to Richard Culllen over Japan needs to be handled with care (February 21.Pearls and Irritations)   Japan’s apologists can and do point to the  civilised treatment of Russian and German prisoners in the China wars

Over Ukraine, Russophobia has gone too far. Moscow deserves criticism for the crudity of its attacks on Ukraine (though I am not sure that it is a crime if a nation is not well prepared for war). But the reason for the attacks has been there, and valid, for eight

As a nation Japan would not win many Nobel peace prizes. For centuries its pirates pillaged Chinese coastal towns. In the 19th century carve-up of China, Japan gained Taiwan, the Liaodong peninsula and later Manchuria. In 1910 it colonised Korea. In 1937 it began its attack into China proper, killing close

Moscow has now warned that Japan’s ‘openly unfriendly positions’ make delayed peace treaty talks impossible. Australia has some connections with those ‘unfriendly positions.’ They include joining in sanctions against Moscow over the war in Ukraine. Sanctions are an ugly business and Moscow is right to react against them. They can

With Russian armies attacking into Ukraine, many have assumed Taiwan faces a similar threat from Mainland China. Similarities exist. Over Ukraine, Moscow mainly attacked because the Kiev government refused to honour the promise to grant autonomy to pro-Russian districts. Over Taiwan, Beijing has threatened to use force because the government

Defeated in 1949 in its civil war against China’s pro-Communist forces, the Nationalist KMT, or Kuo Min-tang, party has had a victory. But it had to wait till last Sunday’s Taiwan mayoral elections, where it won 13 of Taiwan’s 23 district electorates. Remarkably, the winner in the key election for

Sinophobia is embedded in the Australian DNA. Canberra’s Vietnam War follies were an early proof. Our Leftwing likes to believe that Canberra was dragged into the Vietnam war by the US. The reality was the exact opposite: Canberra, with its obsessive fear of China, helped drag Washington into that war.

At last count there was only one English speaker reporting the war from the Russian side. For this recent visitor to Moscow, Mr Putin’s war hardly seemed to exist. No soldiers are marching the streets. The TV featured endless food shows. Plaintive is not a word one would associate with

Mr Albanese is coming to Tokyo for the September 27 state funeral of former Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Does our PM know or care about Abe’s background? Two thirds of Japanese people oppose the state funeral. Not everyone will welcome the attention. Mr Abe’s death was at the hands

Japan has protested Moscow’s use of four Japanese claimed islands during its recent Vostok -2022 military exercises in Russia’s Far East and Japan’s northern seas. One can understand Tokyo’ s frustration. Through intensive talks it could have gained immediate ownership of two of the four islands now in dispute back

As UN high commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet has released the report of her office into human rights concerns in China’s Xinjiang province. Amongst other things it accuses officials in the province of torturing Uyghurs detained for suspected dissident crimes. Torture is a topic familiar to Ms Bachelet. Her father was

Several weeks ago Four Corners gave us a special program about Xinjiang Uyghurs sent to prison-style camps and forced to learn Chinese. I watched it recently as a rebroadcast. I was once sent to an Australian military camp to learn Chinese, at Pt. Cook near Melbourne. Conditions were fairly severe.

Begins:  We hear much today about Xinjiang Uyghurs sent to prison-style camps and forced to learn Chinese.  Four Corners devoted a special program to it. I was once sent to an Australian camp to learn Chinese, at Pt. Cook near Melbourne. Conditions were fairly severe. Eight hours a day, five

Freedom of press critics have complained how the Russian government news program, RT, has been blocked by many Western outlets during the Ukrainian fighting. But in fact the channel has always been freely available through Google as RT online. It remains as interesting, and surprisingly impartial, as ever – mainly

Is there any hope for Australia-China relations? I have spent most of a 60 year career on the periphery of those relations – in Canberra, Hong Kong, Moscow and Japan, with some time in China mainly during the crucial Cultural Revolution period. I was the first Australian official postwar to

The West seems to have forgotten there are several precedents for a solution in Ukraine. When North Ireland was torn apart by sectarian religious violence the solution eventually became obvious -. separate the two, by barbed wire if necessary. When Spain was being hit by sectarian language differences, in Basque

The Solomon Islands fiasco confirms what some of us have long known – the gradual decline in the quality of Australian foreign policy. The Bougainville copper mine and subsequent conflicts gave Australia a commercial and political interest in the islands going back to the sixties An experienced and ranking diplomatic

By Geoff Miller At the time of the Vietnam War Gregory Clark, an Australian diplomat who resigned from government service because he disagreed with Australian policy in regard to the war, wrote a well-received book titled “In Fear of China”. The recent outcry over the Solomons’ agreement with China shows

While Western news agencies and media have been falling over each other in the rush to cover the Ukrainian side of the story the Russian side of the story has been ignored. When two cluster bombs recently killed some fifty people at the Kramatorsk railway station in the Donetsk region

For eight years Ukraine’s military and ultra-nationalists militias have felt free to try to ravage the two Donbas hold-outs. It is a well-known saying: In war the first casualty is the truth. Maybe that can now be changed: In war the first casualty is the claimed reasons for the war.

The threat of an increasingly aggressive NATO moving into Ukraine -Russia’s backyard – was real and had to be stopped. Most impartial observers agree. Strong personal and historical links were an even larger reason. Many Ukrainian families have connections with the other side of the border with Russia. They speak

So the inevitable has happened. Did the Kiev authorities in Ukraine really believe they could continue forever to ignore the Minsk autonomy agreements they had signed in 2015 while maintaining a constant bombardment on civilians in the two pro-Russian holdouts of Donetsk and Lugansk? It was inevitable Moscow would eventually

In Australia we like to believe that the US Pacific Fleet saved us from Japanese attack in 1942-1944, but that is only partly true. According to Japanese war history expert, Moteki Hiromichi, it is also true that but for a mistake in Japan’s wartime strategy the US Pacific Fleet would

As France works to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine, the anti-Russian media will need to find another bone to chew on. Vive la France. During the Cold War Charles de Gaulle’s France did much to restrain the Anglo-American ingrained hostility to Russia by refusing to go along with the creation of

The use by China critics of a tennis player’s broken relationship with a senior party official to paint the regime in Beijing as evil is absurd. China bashing has just got a lot easier. Now you do not have to go all the way to Xinjiang or Tibet to find

The complex state of Beijing-Taipei relations that the anti-China hawks do not understand or probably worse don’t want to understand. It’s a sad day when Paul Keating is virtually the only eloquent voice from Australia to mock Canberra’s dangerously amateurish anti-China rhetoric. And those remarks are especially welcome coming from

Japan does not have to speak forever with only one voice. For a remarkable moment in 2002 Tokyo’s moderates were poised to have Japan move to policies that would have ended the years of hostility to North Korea and Pyongyang’s push to acquire nuclear weapons. The move was only killed

The US and China established full diplomatic relations in 1979, but that year the US Congress wrote its own script for Taiwan. Today, what the Chinese side interprets as word games by the US may wreak deadly consequences.   As the pressure heats up over Taiwan there seems to be some

Since the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal our mainstream media experts have doubled down on the claim Beijing is expansionist. Since few of them can read or speak Chinese maybe I can help them. First of all there are two entities claiming to represent China. One is the communist government in

When the ANZUS Treaty was signed 70 years ago, Japan was considered a dangerous aggressor, and China was a friend. Scott Morrison, speaking in the House of Representatives on the 70th anniversary of the ANZUS Treaty, said the treaty dealt with the world “honestly as it is, in the hope

Elections to select a new leader for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) could finally see some clarity over Tokyo’s policy towards China. To date that policy has been muddled. The hawks under former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, are dominant in the party. And while their policy to China seems

Who rules eastern Europe commands the Heartland  Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the world. — Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 1904 Mackinder’s thinking, still not completely outdated,  has had more influence than is often realised. It inspired Hitler’s attack on the Soviet

ASPI – Australian Strategic Policy Institute – claims to have some of Australia’s foremost strategic thinkers working for it. Number-two ASPI staffer, Mr Michael Shoebridge, appeared on a YouTube video some time back warning about Russian plans to attack Ukraine by moving troops to the Ukrainian border, and the measures

If you thought we knew everything about the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 3-4, 1989, think again.  Mysteries remain. Some are so significant we need to review our ideas about what was going on in China at that time. Until very recently if you typed the words Tiananmen Massacre into

Working on Canberra’s China desk, some time after the 1958 Taiwan Straits crisis, we knew already from various sources what Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg has now formally disclosed – that at the height of the crisis the US was prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy, a Taiwan-held

Tokyo’s security apparatus must have followed with amazement that excellent series by Max Suich in the AFR of 16-18 May, revealing the anti-China antics of their Australian opposite numbers. A elected member of Australia’s parliament driven out in disgrace for maintaining a relationship with suspected Chinese government agents?  In Japan