Princeton's G. John Ikenberry has a long guest post at the Washington Note addressing Kishore Mahbubani's arguments in The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Not having read Mr. Mahbubani's book yet, I can't speak directly to his argument, but I do want to address the points raised by …
Tag: Rise of China
Japan passing, Australian style
Tom Conley and Michael Heazle, writing in The Australian, look back to the 1990s to criticize Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's travel itinerary.In addition to haranguing Japan on whaling, they argueRudd has added insult to injury by snubbing Japan on his coming world tour. The Prime Minister seemingly can find the time to traverse the entire …
Essential reading on China’s ASAT plans
Continuing with its thread of providing a more realistic assessment of China's military capabilities, Wired's Danger Room blog has published a three-part article by MIT researcher Geoffrey Forden that attempts to provide a realistic picture of the role that China's ASAT capabilities could play in a Sino-US war.Forden outlines the difficulties China would face in …
Deflating the China threat
The Danger Room's Noah Shactman points to a report by the Federation of American Scientists that notes that China's submarine fleet — a favorite bugbear of China hawks (see this report, for example) — was little more active in 2007 than it was in previous years.Without dismissing China's military modernization, reports like this are important …
The bankruptcy of the China hawks
Sankei's Komori Yoshihisa, arch-conservative and China hawk, has published at his blog a list of complaints about Prime Minister Fukuda's visit to China last week, criticizing the prime minister for failing to criticize China for every perceived and actual failing of the Chinese Communist Party.Sounding much like his American peers, including the Washington Times's Bill …
A dangerous word
AEI's Michael Auslin, weighing in on the feud over China's denying US Navy ships access to Hong Kong at Contentions, argues that US credibility has suffered from a failure to respond to China's behavior other than by sending the USS Kitty Hawk back to Japan via the Taiwan Straits.He says, "A number of my Asia-wonk …
Ozawa to China
Despite the extension of the Diet session, Ozawa Ichiro, DPJ president, will still be going to China with nearly fifty DPJ members of the Diet from 6 to 8 December. Mr. Ozawa will meet with Hu Jintao and mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations.Mr. Ozawa's visit comes just as turbulence in …
Recommended book: Will The Boat Sink The Water?, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
Speaking of rural troubles, I have just finished reading Chen Guidi's and Wu Chuntao's Will The Boat Sink The Water?, which documents the poverty of rural China and the hardships imposed on peasants by a bloated bureaucracy. (This book was briefly available in China, but has since been blacklisted.)The first half of the book is …
Continue reading Recommended book: Will The Boat Sink The Water?, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
The three stooges
At the tail end of the APEC summit, Messrs. Abe, Bush, and Howard met for a much-vaunted security summit that came in the wake of the US-India-Australia-Japan-Singapore exercises in the Indian Ocean (the "quad" + one?).Commentator Richard Halloran believes that the quad is shaping up to be a "informal defensive pact based on shared national …
Asia’s future seen in Sydney
At the OPEC APEC summit in Sydney, the leaders of APEC's twenty-one member states have been holding bilateral talks in the run-up to the final summit this weekend. I don't put much stock in APEC as an organization that will be able to deliver concrete results — it's simply too big and too diverse — …
Tobias S. Harris 