Today Trends

Wading through Pakistan-US relations and keeping them on track, even at the best of the times, is a challenge. The nature of and the confusion emanating from the American withdrawal from Afghanistan has further exposed the brittleness of this relationship. The Taliban victory is seriously testing Pakistan’s long fraught bilateral relationship with America. As far back as the 1950s, the interests of the US-Pakistan relationship were only partially served when ‘each side used the other to advance its own agenda that impacted negatively on other’s interests’ writes Tauqir Hussain , a former Pakistani diplomat. Consequently, every time the United States’ immediate needs were met, Pakistan was jettisoned. This occurred most notably after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 when the United States imposed nuclear-related sanctions on Pakistan. Now, the Biden administration has noticeably turned away from Pakistan again. Washington has chosen to remain barely on talking terms wit...

Author: Evelyn Goh, ANU Fifty years on from what US president Richard Nixon called ‘the week that changed the world’, it is appropriate to recall one of the most radical policy turnarounds of all time. Nixon’s opening to Communist China reversed two decades of animosity and war, containment, isolation and non-recognition, two crises in the Taiwan Strait and threats of nuclear attack. Yet, we seem to have come full circle back to the state of affairs that rendered Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China so dramatic in the first place. Today, despite more than 40 years of diplomatic ties, China–US distrust is sufficiently high that we expect many points of contention to evolve into crises. Each side pays close attention to the capabilities and intentions of the other and the Taiwan issue remains a major source of discord. Two strategic questions underpinning Nixon’s radical shift on China policy remain. First, how to cope with China? By the end of the 1960s, after...

Author: Sourabh Gupta, Institute for China-America Studies On 28 February 1972, the United States and China issued the Shanghai Communique . The document marks a pivotal moment in the history of China’s modern international relations, comparable to its historical treaties at Nerchinsk, Nanjing and Shimonoseki. In Nerchinsk (1689), China’s Qing rulers placed relations with Russia beyond the framework of the tributary system and treated it as a sovereign equal. Nanjing (1842) inaugurated the ‘unequal treaty’ era of extraterritorial rights and merchant autonomy. In Shimonoseki (1895), sovereign Chinese territory (Taiwan) was forcibly ceded to Japan. Coming full circle, the Shanghai Communique — and the earlier October 1949 proclamation of the establishment of the People’s Republic — presaged the ‘ fourth rise ’ of China, its fuller re-engagement with international society, and the remarkable decades of ‘reform and opening up’. For the United States, the fundamental strategic...

Author: Editorial Board, ANU As missiles fall on Kyiv, you might be forgiven for forgetting that the last global crisis — the pandemic that continues to infect nearly two million people a day worldwide and is responsible for one death every eight seconds — is still not over. In much of the West, policymakers are deciding to act as if the pandemic has passed. Barriers to people movement and restrictions on daily activities are being unwound. The movement away from restrictions has been most pronounced in North America and Europe. In Japan, the rules have mostly been targeted at foreigners , with increasingly dubious rationale, though there are some signs that ‘fortress Japan’ is slowly being dismantled. Thailand is removing restrictions on foreign travel, while Malaysia will probably wait until the second quarter of the year to remove its travel bans. In China, where the virus was first detected, authorities have no intention of easing a regime of strict containment. The political ...

Author: Neil Thomas, Eurasia Group Chinese President Xi Jinping boasts that his country is a ‘ world leader ’ in COVID-19 prevention. China persists with a zero-COVID policy that uses lockdowns, mass-testing and border restrictions to curb local outbreaks and keep cases extremely low, despite the rising cost of containing the more transmissible Omicron variant. This January the International Monetary Fund cut its 2022 growth forecast for China from 5.6 per cent to 4.8 per cent, citing ‘pandemic-induced disruptions related to the zero-tolerance COVID-19 policy’ as a primary factor. Eurasia Group listed China’s zero-COVID policy as its top risk for 2022. But that zero-COVID policy is not going anywhere . Chinese leaders remain determined to prevent the spread of the virus. Chinese public health experts who advocate a removal of pandemic controls are still silent, censored, or made to walk back their arguments. In January 2022, in Shanxi Province , Xi acknowledged the challenge of ...

Author: Bingqin Li, UNSW As more countries loosen their pandemic restrictions, many want to know when China will abandon its zero-case strategy ( dongtai qingling ) and end its quarantine requirements. The International Monetary Fund claims that sticking to the zero-case strategy is economically damaging to China and the rest of the world. Others suggest that the Chinese people are suffering from ‘ too many restrictions ’. The negative impacts of the zero-case approach on the Chinese economy may have been exaggerated. Many people still think the risks of opening up are substantial. Chinese policymakers are waiting to see evidence from other countries before winding back their current policy. In the early days of the pandemic, some analysts thought that a strict lockdown was the ideal solution for a large and densely populated country. With limited ICU facilities, ventilators and health professionals, curbing the outbreak was crucial. After health codes and digital contact tracin...

Author: Ross Tapsell, ANU Australian news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic has been largely focussed on the United States and United Kingdom, not Asia and the Pacific. Between 1 December 2020 and 28 February 2021, 53 per cent of COVID-19 foreign news coverage across selected Australian media outlets studied were of the United States and the United Kingdom. Australian mainstream media coverage of its neighbours in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific is low in comparison. Only 5 per cent mentioned Southeast Asia and 1.5 per cent mentioned South Asia. The declining and reduced coverage of the Asia Pacific region is not recent, nor is it a direct consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Australian mainstream media has for the past decade reduced the number of its reporters in the Asia Pacific and has steadily dismantled programs and positions that allowed for reasonable coverage of the region . The decline in coverage of Australia’s region by the Australian Broadcasting Cor...

Author: Gennady Rudkevich, Georgia College The main result of the January 2022 Kazakhstan protests was to solidify the transfer of power from Nursultan Nazarbayev to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev that began with the latter’s assumption of the Kazakh presidency in 2019. While there are still many unknowns relating to the protests, which led to at least 225 deaths , President Tokayev responded by initiating a crackdown against top Nazarbayev supporters and promising to enact major economic reforms.  Tokayev’s ability to forestall another protest wave will depend on his ability to distance himself from the corruption associated with the Nazarbayev regime and to create a modern welfare state .  The protests began in the western city of Zhanaozen after the government lifted a cap on liquefied petroleum gas prices, aggravated by pandemic-related labour unrest and long-term grievances relating to inequality. The protests quickly spread across the country, with the most violent c...

Author: Suiwah Leung, ANU Vietnam began 2021 in a relatively strong position, having successfully kept COVID-19 at bay. The only major impact on domestic economic activity in Vietnam was a reduction in international tourism, while the rest of the global economy was suffering from the effects of rolling lockdowns. Vietnam’s economy was one of few with a positive year-on-year growth of 2.9 per cent at the end of 2020. This winning streak continued into the first half of 2021, with year-on-year growth registering 4.65 per cent in the first quarter and 6.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2021. The thirteenth Party Congress in February 2021 also saw the re-election of General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, the election of Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and the handover of the presidency to former prime minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. With Trong and Chinh in the key positions, a continuation of strong ‘collective leadership’ at the top is expected. Despite concerns regarding political ‘purg...

Author: Larissa Stünkel, ISDP As Australia gears up for national elections, tensions surrounding the nation’s foreign policy trajectory are becoming unmistakable — particularly when it comes to Taiwan and its place in China–Australia tensions. In a November 2021 parliamentary speech, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong rebuked Prime Minister Scott Morrison for his solid backing of Taiwan. She accused Morrison of using Taipei as a pawn to shore up electoral support and ‘desperately playing politics on China whenever he’s in trouble’. Now that Australia and Taiwan are seemingly edging closer — and celebrating the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Australian Office in Taipei — questions about Canberra’s willingness to deepen ties with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration remain. It took Defence Minister Peter Dutton a mere 24 hours to lash out against Wong, reprimanding her for not properly reflecting the seriousness of current geopolitical tensions bet...