Today Trends

Author: Editorial Board, ANU Japan–South Korea relations have been on a rocky road for far too long. While both countries are economically advanced democracies and US allies with common security concerns about North Korea and China, the history of Japan’s colonisation of the Korean peninsula (1910–1945) continues to haunt their relations. The recent summit meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Seok-yul in Tokyo on 16 March produced some positive steps forward, but the political sustainability of the rapprochement is still in doubt. The biggest points of contention are the issues of compensation for Korean labourers forced to work for Japanese companies and ‘comfort women’ forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. Japan’s official position is that the 1965 Basic Treaty normalising relations settled all issues between the two countries during the colonial period. South Koreans consider that the ...

Author: Daniel Sneider, Stanford University The Tokyo summit that brought together South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on 23 March 2023 successfully cleared away much of the accumulated debris of the last five years of dysfunctionality. The two-day official visit — the first by a South Korean president in a dozen years — checked off a substantial list of to-do items. It restored regular meetings between the leaders of the two countries and rolled back the tit-for-tat trade measures in place since 2019. The two leaders embraced a shared security agenda, topped by countering North Korea, and reaffirmed the operation of the General Security of Military Information Agreement intelligence-sharing pact. The stage is now set for a return to normalcy, or at least functionality, in South Korea–Japan relations. Looming over both leaders was the United States, their mutual ally. Biden administration officials have been pounding away at the need for...

Author: ZhongXiang Zhang, Tianjin University As the world’s largest carbon emitter, China has a crucial role in the reduction of global carbon emissions through its own commitment and its collective international engagement. Fortunately, in the past decade, China has shifted its stance on international climate negotiations and is making significant commitments to global governance addressing climate change. Before the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in 2009, China pledged to cut its carbon intensity — its emissions per unit of GDP — by 40–45 per cent by 2020 relative to 2005 levels. While this was consistent with China’s longstanding opposition to hard emissions caps on the grounds that limits could restrict economic growth, the pledge marked a turning point in China’s climate policy. It was followed by a commitment at the 2015 Paris UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) to peak absolute emissions and cut intensity levels by 60–65 per cent by 2030. In September 2020...

Author: Jikun Huang, Peking University China’s food imports have increased significantly since the nation joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. Annual imports and net imports of food reached US$160 and US$93 billion, respectively, between 2019–2021. But as rural incomes rise and China’s population falls the gap for trade to fill between domestic food production and consumption in the future is uncertain. Soybean for animal protein feed and soybean oil is China’s largest food import — imports exceeded 100 million tons in 2020 and averaged 95 million tons annually between 2019–2021. Maize replaced edible oils as China’s second largest import commodity in 2021. Other major food imports are meats, dairy and sugar. China is also the fifth largest food exporter, following the United States, the Netherlands, Brazil and Germany and is the largest exporter of vegetables, fruits and fish. A scarcity of arable land and water are drivers of China’s rising food imports. China’s p...

Author: Yuqun Shao, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies Pessimism surrounds the future of China–US relations and the possibility of conflict between the two nuclear powers. The Taiwan Strait has become the most likely flashpoint for conflict amid US strategic competition with China and growing disagreement over the Taiwan question. Though the United States’ One China policy is different from China’s One China principle, there is consensus between the two powers that ‘both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan belong to one China’ and that the United States does not support ‘Taiwan independence’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’. But the Chinese strategic community is losing confidence in US policy and is anxious that China–US relations will be shaken by the erosion of this political foundation. To further complicate matters, Taiwan’s position on cross-Strait political relations is unacceptable on the Chinese mainland, where Taiwan is seen as promoting a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ policy...

Author: Peter Warr, ANU In June 2022, the Thai government took the bold step of decriminalising the production, sale and personal use of cannabis. Huge consequences have followed, and other Asian countries should take notice. An extensive, largely unregulated industry has quickly emerged, surprising many observers. Specialised retail outlets selling cannabis products have proliferated in large cities. Their number seems comparable with conventional pharmacies. The 3000 new retail outlets officially registered include both small-scale Thai firms and foreign-owned firms with prior experience in the Amsterdam and California cannabis industries. Foreign firms are especially significant in cities receiving the most foreign tourists. There are websites dedicated to listing the new retail establishments. The northern city of Chiang Mai has 220 outlets listed and is gaining a reputation as one of the world’s top cannabis tourist destinations. Cannabis purchasers also openly include many ...

Author: Chen Chen, US Council on Foreign Relations In November 2022 a female undergraduate stood outside a cafeteria at Tsinghua University in Beijing with a blank sheet of paper — a symbol of protest against censorship and control. Tsinghua, which is renowned for churning out future Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders and even has an Institute for Xi Jinping Thought, is one of the last places where one would expect a zero-COVID protest. As the student stood there, classmates began to join her. In the first half hour, all were girls. Interviewed following the protests, she recalled ‘I thought it would just be me, but then everyone else showed up’. The protest, which would grow into a crowd and make global headlines, was part of a pattern — many urban zero-COVID protests around China were led by and largely made up of women. Studies on gender and social justice have found that ‘women students are far more likely to identify inequality and engage in actions to achieve social just...

Author: Lincoln Hines, USAF Air War College On 23 January 2023, Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA) Josef Ashbacher announced that Europe has no intentions of sending astronauts to China’s recently completed space station. While this decision will likely do little to slow China’s space ambitions, it suggests that Beijing’s assertive behaviour, human rights abuses and implicit support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are increasingly alienating Europe. Space stations are difficult and costly to build. The material benefits of having a space station are questionable relative to the costs, especially when considering uncrewed robotic alternatives. US lawmakers have even considered defunding the International Space Station (ISS) due to its steep costs. While it is unclear exactly how much China has spent on its space station, it has likely done so at a considerable cost and has taken three decades to achieve its goal. While China’s space station may be popular amo...

Author: Haiqing Yu, RMIT University China’s social credit system is widely viewed in the West as a digital surveillance system to categorise and guide people through reward and punishment. This perception continues despite efforts by scholars to build a morally normalised, rather than ideologically charged, framework to understand the system. The social credit system should be understood as method — a mentality of governance — not just a network of databases and policies to monitor trustworthiness. It is an ongoing social experiment to mould and govern socioeconomics, an experiment rooted in historical and biopolitical structures and systems. Understanding the social credit system as method entails seeing the history of its role in China’s drive towards economic prosperity. The concept of credit rating surfaced in the 1990s when the People’s Bank of China established China’s first bank-credit registry. In 1999, the idea was expanded upon with the release of the National Credit Mana...

Authors: Suryaputra Wijaksana, Bank Central Asia and Juan Tarigan Tetangena, Jakarta Indonesia’s digital banking or ‘neo-bank’ boom has slowed. Investors now shun once-glorified digital banks, sending their stock prices plummeting along with other capital-intensive sectors. Start-ups are reining in discounts and promotions. Global factors are partly to blame, with recessionary fears and tighter monetary policy threatening to increase the cost of funds and make investing in tech-heavy sectors undesirable. Digital banking’s business model poses several challenges to the sector’s viability in Indonesia. In the short term, digital banks incur higher costs due to higher consumer acquisition expenses and a higher cost of funds , in addition to large capital expenditures. Indonesian consumers’ preference for well-established conventional banks after the Asian Financial Crisis bank runs is partly to blame. Though mobile phone penetration is high, the average internet broadband speed in ...