Eastern Asia

At the recent Australia-China Business Council meeting in Canberra, China’s ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye accused Australia of harbouring a cold war mentality, and said that “less bias and bigotry” was needed if the currently strained relationship between the two countries was to be repaired.

As the audience remembers, at a press conference after the summit with the leader of DPRK in Singapore Donald Trump told that the USA will stop the military exercises held together with South Korea. “We will stop war games,” the US President said, having called them “provocative” and “extremely expensive.”

Prominent Hong Kong opposition leader Edward Leung was sentenced to 6 years in prison for assaulting police and his role in leading riots in 2016.
The Guardian in its article “Hong Kong jails independence leader Edward Leung for six years,” would report:

Time magazine, founded almost a hundred years ago (in 1923), runs like a well-oiled machine: there are departments and sub-departments for everything; nothing is left to chance. So when, in its latest issue, it publishes a two-page spread of the US’s recent history with Korea, readers should be able to take it to the bank.

The West really hates China!

Two meetings of considerable geopolitical significance took place last weekend. They could not have been more different in tone and outcome. Each in their way were representative of the fundamental realignment that is taking place in the world order, and each points to a very different future.

Claims of North Korean human rights abuses spearheaded attempts to undermine US-North Korean negotiations in Singapore. While the talks are unlikely to change the long-laid agendas of special interests across the West who have cultivated and profit from the ongoing conflict, it is important to confront these claims and diminish the intended effect they are meant to have in buttressing the notion of American exceptionalism and justifying American interventionism.

The sudden burst in Japanese foreign policy efforts over the last few months cannot go unnoticed.  It is hard not to note Tokyo’s attempts to influence and probe the state of its relations with Washington, Beijing and Moscow. It is worth mentioning that the political landscape in the critically important North East Asia sub-region are shaped by these four capitals.