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