An Indo-Pacific Strategy for Australia

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Director of the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, Professor Rory Medcalf, is speaking on "Mapping our future: towards an Indo-Pacific strategy for Australia". He emphasized China's dependence on oil transported by ship through the Indian Ocean. However, China has embarked on the largest implementation of renewable energy, electrified railways and electric vehicles the world has seen. China does need oil from the middle east, for the present. But this may less important to China in the long term than it does in Australia and the USA.

Professor Medcalf suggested there is an unspoken consensus between the Australian government and opposition that Australia should participate in China's Belt and Road projects, on a case by case basis. He argues that China find the term "indo-pacific" politically loaded against it. Professor Medcalf also pointed out that France had called for an "Indo-Pacific Axis". That might be an even more unfortunate term, given the extent to which China suffered from the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis in WWII.

Professor Medcalf mentioned soft power, including. The ANU now offeres courses in both defensive and offensive cyber-operations and teach a little on the ethics of cyber-warfare over the South-China Sea. He also mentioned aid and development. I was one of a team at ANU which prepared a proposal to provide high quality, accessible education across the Indo-Pacific: "Peace Through Superior Education".

China's Influence in Developing Asia

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where two books are being launched:

• Goh, E. (Ed.). (2016). Rising China's Influence in Developing Asia. Oxford University Press.
  
  "Rising China has been reshaping world order for the last two decades, but this volume argues that we cannot accurately understand rising China's global impacts without first investigating whether and how its growing power resources are translated into actual influence over other states' choices and policies. Concentrating on the developing countries in East and South Asia, where the power asymmetry is greatest and China ought to have the biggest influence, the volume investigates China's influence in bilateral relationships, and on key political actors from these countries within key issue areas and international institutions. ..."
  
  
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  King, A. (2016). China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949–1971. Cambridge University Press.
  
  " A rich account of how and why China rebuilt its economic relationship with Japan so soon after the devastating experience of World War Two. King argues that the period between 1949 and 1971 was an important moment of non-Western modernisation stemming from the legacy of the Japanese empire, industry and war in China."

Researching the New Colombo Plan

Professor David Lowe, Director of the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, will speak on "International students as foreign relations: a research agenda in the context of Colombo Plans old and new", at the Australian National University in Canberra, 28 August, 2014. Also may be of interest is my proposal to extend the New Colombo Plan On-line.

When she launched the New Colombo Plan in December 2013, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she hoped that Australian tertiary students would come to see a period of study at an Asian university as ‘a rite of passage’ associated with their transition to adulthood.

This lecture suggests that much is being asked of the New Colombo Plan, including the constant invitation to recall the successes of the original Colombo Plan; but I also suggest that now is the right time to be setting both research and policy directions in relation to the subject of international students as a dimension of foreign relations. Much has changed for connections between Asia and Australia since the original Colombo Plan gave way to other aid programs and revised thinking on international students in the 1980s. But one of the most enduring sources of narrative about connections, and one that taps directly into memories of the original Colombo Plan, is that of shared learning and life experiences – the personal reflections that featured in AusAID, and now feature in DFAT, stories about student experiences. At a time of when international students are being considered elsewhere as an under-appreciated dimension of foreign relations, Australians should logically be extending their thinking in how best to ‘listen’ to student reflections and communicate with overseas alumni.