More foreign policy: US Marines and tripwires
There’s been lots of discussion of what the de-facto basing of up to 2,500 US Marines at a training area in the Northern Territory means. There’s been blather about Guam, Okinawa and Chinese missile strike capability, for instance. Perhaps the [...]
Australia in the Asian century
Last Wednesday in a speech to the AsiaLink and Asia Society Lunch in Melbourne Julia Gillard (transcript here) announced that the government has commissioned a White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century. Former Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Ken [...]
A crisis of political economy
President Barack Obama recently told members of Congress and the public: If we don’t come to an agreement, we could lose our country’s triple-A credit rating, not because we didn’t have the capacity to pay our bills – we do [...]
Power shifts East?
Political and military power lags behind economic power, but the bill falls due. This could be the way the hegemon ends, not with a bang but with a Tea Party.
Robots now cheaper than Chinese labourers
It seems that the giant IT assembler Foxconn is seeking an alternative to paying its workers more – and the solution is more robots.
ASIO gets wider remit, to furious debate…only kidding
Apparently, ASIO’s role in economic espionage and counter-espionage is to be stretched so broadly that the catch-all of “national security” can no longer always be applied:
Dive! Dive! Dive!
It seems that the Very Serious People are determined to make one of my predictions for 2020 come true before 2011 is out, and bring on a full-blown public panic a mature and reasoned discussion about the strategic implications of [...]
Guest Post: Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize
Guest poster MH reflects on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, including its implications for the prospects for democracy in China. — RM. Late on Friday it was announced that Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been [...]
The beginning of the end for China’s one-child policy?
John Garnaut has a piece in the Fairfax press claiming that China’s one child policy may be on its way out: CHINA’S sometimes brutal one-child policy is expected to be loosened next year, as policy advisers come to grips with [...]
How would a real foreign policy debate happen?
If you want extended analysis of the foreign policy debate, there are a series of posts at the Lowy Interpreter trying to divine meaning from the minutiae. There was some pointscoring, of course – Smith had some good lines about [...]
Chinese organized labour?
Until recently, very few people outside the IT industry had ever heard of Foxconn, despite the ubiquity of the products they produce, and the incredible scale of their operations – they reportedly have 800,000 employees scattered across their Chinese manufacturing [...]
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