East Asia

An intelligence specialist considers the implications of the recent attacks by Chinese hackers on the website of the Melbourne International Film Festival.

The Diplomat spoke recently with Stephen Yates, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and former Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, and Christian Whiton, a former deputy special envoy to the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, about North Korea, China and US relations with Japan.

We may never know exactly what happened when an ethnically charged fight in a toy factory in southern China on June 26 left two Uighur factory workers dead and dozens more injured.

China’s growing influence on international affairs is nowhere more evident than in Latin America, a region pejoratively regarded as the ‘backyard’ of the United States.

In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama asked whether the world had reached ‘the end of history’.

Kathleen McLaughlin reports from Beijing on the strengthening economic ties between China and the US.

The 20th anniversary earlier this month of the Tiananmen tragedy has given China-watchers an opportunity to take stock of their analyses over the past two decades. And, given the recent media and policy attention lavished on China’s maritime ambitions, it is worth looking back at Western studies of the Chinese navy and its impressive advances in recent years.

However, a closer look at many of those predictions shows, at best, a patchy record of success – and, at worst, some worrying analytical shortcomings.

The Diplomat’s China correspondent Kathleen McLaughlin considers why the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is a topic for discussion everywhere but China.

With North Korea’s latest acts of defiance again grabbing the world’s attention – an underground nuclear test last week and several missile firings – all eyes have turned to China to rein in its secretive neighbour.

Last month was the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). At the naval parade held to commemorate the event, in front of delegations from 29 countries, PLAN Commander General Wu Shengli declared that Beijing intended to build aircraft carriers, spurring widespread speculation over China’s blue-water ambitions.

Two years ago, Hong Kong marked the 10th anniversary of its reunification with China with the usual fanfare and fireworks, and perhaps some relief – if not satisfaction – that 10 years had indeed passed.