China

April 2013

Our Old China Plate

By Mungo MacCallum

Julia Gillard’s visit to China seems to have gone smoothly enough and her top-level talks at the forum at Boao are even producing concrete results. The ability to convert Australian dollars directly to Chinese Yuan will be a useful short cut for both importers and exporters, while some of the uncertainties over investment policy are also being laid to rest. And most importantly it is

August 2012

Why America Should Share Power with China

By Monthly Wire

This is the complete text of Paul Keating’s speech to the Lowy Institute at the launch of The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power by Hugh White. * Hugh White does me an honour in asking me to launch his book The China Choice. I believe the reason he asked me was not that he wanted a former Prime Minister to launch his book, but at least one who regarded his subject as central to A

Hugh White’s 'The China Choice'

Power Shift

By Malcolm Turnbull

Hugh White has helped shape strategic thinking in Canberra and Washington by confronting the world as it is, not as we would like it to be, and outlining the choices that need to be made, even if we don’t agree with his conclusions. The thesis of White’s timely and provocative book, The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power (Black Inc.; $29.99), briefly stated, goes like this. China and the whole region, including Australia,

Roger Scruton’s 'Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet'

Philosophic Emissions

By Peter Singer

Climate change is a threat to us all but it poses a particular difficulty for those who, like English philosopher Roger Scruton, are on the political right. Conservatives tend to favour market solutions and oppose expanding the reach of government. If the emission of greenhouse gases as a result of human activity is causing potentially catastrophic global wa

Akira Isogawa

The Bride Wore Black

By Peter Robb

Think ‘dress designer’ and what comes to mind? Not a whole lot of fun. Think of the last picture you saw of Karl Lagerfeld or John Galliano. I approached Akira Isogawa with great caution and serious questions. How was it that a designer so absorbed in the

Burma

In the Picture

By Sebastian Strangio

The woman they call the Lady is all over town, staring down from the walls of teashops, hanging on sun-dappled street corners, perched on the dashboards of Rangoon’s ramshackle taxis. It would have been hard to imagine a year ago: in Burma, displaying a port

Australia–India Relations

The Elephant in the Room

By Michael Wesley

Great expectations attend the Australia–India relationship. The Labor Party’s agreement to sell uranium to India has removed a major impediment to closer relations. Planning is underway for mutual prime ministerial visits. Free trade agreement negotiations are ongoi

Wim Delvoye at MONA

The Art of Ideas

By Amanda Lohrey

The phenomenon that is Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is a Plato’s cave of multi-layered subterranean space where shadows of the real in the form of artworks are installed within vaults of Triassic sandstone. Since the museum’s opening in Janu

Norfolk Island’s chickens

The Baskerville Case

By Ashley Hay

There are several things an astute observer will notice on arriving to Norfolk Island. First, the island’s eponymous pine trees, which rise up like oversized pins marking important spots on a map. Second, a world-heritage listed collection of Georgian buildings, some

What We Learned in Copenhagen

By Andrew Charlton

At 10.45 p.m. my phone rang. “The Danes are switching to the back-up plan,” a voice said. “Room 20. 11.30 tonight.” I pulled on my suit jacket, took up my warm coat and ventured downstairs into the night. I followed the now familiar route through Copen

A Journey through North-western NSW with Filmmaker Ivan Sen

By Peter Robb

Ivan Sen was heading for the place that gives its name to his new film Toomelah, the place where he made the film. We drove through Boggabilla, pop. 750, more or less. The two-storey verandahed Wobbly Boot Hotel looked enormous, and Sen talked about the big an

Julia Gillard, Foreign Policy and the Summit Season

Comment

By Hugh White

It’s summit season. Prime Minister Julia Gillard will lift her head above the toxic miasma of domestic politics and breathe the purer, finer air of foreign affairs. On 21 October she’ll be in Bali for the East Asia Summit (EAS); a week later she will host the Common

The State Library of Victoria’s Card Catalogue

Order is Everything

By Robyn Annear

In a lumber-room off a catacumbal corridor slumbers the State Library of Victoria’s old card catalogue (‘catalogue’ not ‘catalogues’: though it fills many cabinets, its keepers arranged the parts under a majestic singular). To anyone who remembers it as the centrepiece of the library’s main reference hall, it comes as a shock to find it relegated

'Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future' By Paul Cleary

By Saul Eslake

For commodity-exporting nations such as Australia, the urbanisation and industrialisation of China and India present a once-in-human-history opportunity. There will be no more Chinas or Indias to come. Not only are there no other nations with as many people, but other nations that may pass through the same ‘commodity-intensive’ stage of economic development seem likely to be exporters rather t

Satyajit Das’s 'Extreme Money'

Air Traffic Out of Control

By Lindsay Tanner

Did you know that the Japanese Ministry of Finance advertises Japanese government bonds by claiming that men who own them are more popular with women? Or that Black Sea waterfront properties in Bulgaria were the hottest real estate in the world before the glob

The Coal Industry’s Coal-fed Algae Plan

Coal’s Next Alibi

By Guy Pearse

Imagine a supermarket called Coal’s where everything in your trolley was made with algae fed with carbon dioxide from a large industrial facility, such as a coal-fired power station. On your way in, the smiling coalmining union boss Tony Maher might greet yo

'The Hall of Uselessness' By Simon Leys

By Linda Jaivin

The Hall of Uselessness, a compendium of Simon Leys’s cultural and political commentary, is an elegant mansion of many rooms, connected by ingenious pathways, carpeted with wit and perfumed with what the Chinese call shuxiang – the scent of learning. From the antech

Comment

By Lindsay Tanner

Many books have been written about the political drama of the Whitlam years, particularly the government’s ultimate dismissal by Governor-General Sir John Kerr on 11 November 1975. Yet the actual content of the government’s initiatives also warrants serious analysis. There has been a great deal of subsequent commentary about specific issues, but few serious studies of the government itself hav