Today Trends

Author: Kingsley Edney, University of Leeds When China’s infamous list of 14 grievances with Australia was leaked in 2018, commentators noted that certain complaints — including ‘unfriendly’ media coverage of China in Australia — were issues that are viewed in liberal democracies as rightfully outside the control of the government of the day. While perhaps unlikely to succeed in Australia’s case, this tactic of putting pressure on foreign governments to reign in negative local media coverage is one that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has employed all over the world, as detailed in a new report from Freedom House. The report argues that alongside ongoing efforts to ‘tell China’s story well’ through public diplomacy and propaganda, Beijing’s use of coercive and covert tactics to shape the international media environment is on the rise. The report notes that China is gaining some degree of influence or control over ‘key portions of the information infrastructure’. This desire t

Author: William Case, Nottingham University Malaysia Malaysians go to the polls on 19 November 2022. This general election is the 15th that the country has held since independence, a rare record of continuity in the Southeast Asian region. But throughout Malaysia’s electoral history, the playing field has been starkly uneven, advantaging the long-time incumbent, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition that it leads. UMNO long operated in a kind of hybrid system dominated by a single party. In this pattern, UMNO rooted its vehicle in a divided and communally ‘ranked’ society. It then drew electoral propulsion from favoured Malay voters, framed as ‘indigenous’, and economically disadvantaged. To deliver to its constituents, UMNO fused its party apparatus with the state bureaucracy and gained command over public institutions and resources, the business establishment and the imagination of its constituents. These strategies ma

Author: Tawanda Sachikonye, University of Cape Town Taiwan is widely renowned as one of the world’s most advanced and highly developed economies. But such remarkable success for a resource poor island of approximately 23 million people has often overshadowed Taiwan’s notable achievements in combatting global poverty and supporting sustainable international economic development. Taiwan’s engagement with Haiti highlights the important role it plays in the global fight against poverty and underdevelopment. For over half a century , Haiti has actively supported Taiwan’s sovereignty and advocated for its greater recognition within the global community, including in key multilateral forums. In return, Taiwan has provided Haiti with both monetary resources and technical expertise for developmental projects relating to agricultural development, human capital development and humanitarian and disaster relief assistance. As Taiwan has consolidated its democracy, development cooperation with

Author: Rainer Heufers, CIPS Indonesian lawmakers have been alarmed by the freedom of data flows and opinions in the quickly emerging digital sphere. They issued a law on electronic information and transactions in 2008. Its 2016 revision, criminalising online immorality, defamation and hate speech, was widely seen as undermining free speech. The digital boom also goes against Jakarta’s preference for key economic resources to be under the control of state-owned enterprises. While private companies dominated the digital revolution, the Indonesian government embraced domestic champions but curbed the freedom of online platforms. Jakarta’s power over the private sector is evident in policy discussions concerning the expansion of digital infrastructure , the planned cybersecurity law and digital taxation . But policy decisions affecting the freedom to engage in a borderless internet will have the biggest impact on Indonesian democracy. Indonesian authorities can either regulate the

Author: Claude Rakisits, ANU Pakistan has been urging the international community, including the United States, to comprehensively engage with the Taliban. But Islamabad’s true interests are unclear, as anti-Pakistan terrorist groups freely operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan–Taliban relations remain poor. During Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s September 2022 trip to the United States, he repeatedly argued for full engagement with the Taliban. He argued  that Afghanistan faces economic collapse without aid, which will lead to a further deterioration of women’s rights and exacerbate the humanitarian crisis. This argument was repeated by Pakistan Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif during his address to the United Nations General Assembly on 23 September 2022. He argued  that the Taliban would respond more positively to comprehensive engagement and economic support rather than isolation . Foreign Minister Zardari seems to be simply going through the motions of making

Author: Naohiro Yashiro, Showa Women’s University The decline and ageing of the Japanese population over the last 20 years have been severe. According to the Japanese National Census , the population aged between 15 to 64 years declined by 11 million, while those aged 65 and above increased by 14 million. The shrinking working-age population is discouraging private investment due to projected pessimistic domestic market growth. The declining population is a natural consequence of the smaller number of people who can become parents. Due to the declining total fertility rate (TFR), the average number of children per woman dropped from 2.1 in the early 1970s to 1.3 in 2021. This is far below the level needed to maintain a sustainable population. The government is encouraging higher birth rates by increasing benefits for families raising children. But this supporting policy alone is not enough. The Sixteenth Japanese National Fertility Survey , published by the National Institute of P

Author: Sarah Williams, UNSW On 22 September 2022, the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) delivered a summary judgment in Case 002/02. The ECCC, otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, was created in 2001 as part of an agreement between the Cambodian government and the United Nations (UN) under which local and foreign judges could hear crimes perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The Chamber dismissed the vast majority of the issues raised on appeal, confirming the life sentence of former Cambodian prime minister Khieu Samphan for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. That was the final hearing before the ECCC. After 16 years, the ECCC will cease operations and transfer its remaining tasks to the ECCC residual mechanism, a separate entity established for an initial three-year period. But if one measures success by the number of convictions, the ECCC’s record is not impressive. The ECCC tria

Author: Takeshi Tashiro, Peterson Institute for International Economics A peculiar characteristic of the Japanese economy is continued low inflation despite the current global inflationary period. Though Japan’s headline inflation rose to 3 per cent in September 2022, it is minor compared to 8 per cent in the United States and 10 per cent in the United Kingdom. The Bank of Japan views the current inflation as temporary and maintains its expansionary monetary policy. There are questions about why Japan has experienced far lower inflation than the rest of the developed world for so long. Two macroeconomic puzzles haunt Japan — very low exchange rate depreciation pass-through to inflation and weak wage growth. The first puzzle is that a weaker yen has far less impact on inflation and the economy than macroeconomic analysis predicts. The Bank of Japan kept its policy rate negative while other developed-world central banks raised interest rates to combat inflation, causing the yen to

Author: Abdul Rahman Yaacob, ANU Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles said in a July 2022 speech that Australia needed to ‘attune itself to the concerns of the Indo-Pacific region’. That includes Southeast Asia. An Australia that is unattuned to the concerns of its neighbours will be more likely to formulate foreign and defence policies that are inconsistent with promoting deeper relations with Southeast Asia — especially if strategic interests divergence. Former Singaporean diplomat, Kishore Mahbubani, points out the danger of Australia and ASEAN drifting apart on strategic issues, which could lead to Australia’s isolation from Southeast Asia. But Australia and ASEAN member states have already diverged on the rise of China. Australia’s relations with China have deteriorated since the mid-2010s because China was perceived as a threat to Australia’s external and domestic interests . Several Australian defence documents, such as the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper , argued th

Author: Hasan Alhasan, IISS When Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad circulated on social media in June 2022, they prompted all six Gulf states, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to criticise growing Islamophobia in India. Official Gulf criticism of the Modi government’s Hindu majoritarian politics, which have created a permissive environment for anti-Muslim sentiment in India, had been rare up until then. Although New Delhi’s relations with the Saudi and Emirati governments are unlikely to suffer any long-term damage, India’s image as a pluralistic and tolerant society is under threat. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has achieved a paradoxical feat in relations with the Gulf states. India’s relations with these states have reached their zenith under Modi, even as the BJP and its forefather, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, champion an exclusionary conception of India’s id