Tag: China

Australia’s Nuclear Future?

…if Australia can’t renew itself within terms appropriate to its own region—that is, renew our relations with Indigenous Australians, as well as the peoples of the Pacific and of Indonesia and Asia generally—it will remain an outpost supported only by imperialist powers…

Forever Partnership, Forever War

…if the next war is against China, over Taiwan, the South or East China Sea, or some contrived event, Australia will become involved, will be a principal target, and will lose the war. China is not the Taliban.

Editorial, Arena no. 8: Battening Down the Hatches

Despite all our problems—all our terrible forebodings—it seems we remain wedded, yet, to a form of life that is, simply, unsustainable, and to a form of human organisation that is ethically bankrupt.

Trade routes or War Games?: Subs and the geopolitics behind the China threat

Australian strategic planners are well aware that it would be absurd to protect trade with China from China… In the real world, the military build-up is about whether foreign military and intelligence activities can be conducted in another country’s exclusive economic zone.

Cybernetic Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

China’s Social Credit System is a compelling manifestation of cybernetic capitalism—of how financial mechanisms interlock with other systems of social control, by combining mass surveillance, gamified corporate loyalty programs, and debt peonage.

China Games

China responded to the US presence in the Bashi Channel by sending Su-30 and J-16 fighter aircraft and Xian H-6 bombers into the area, where they simulated missile attacks on the US vessels.

We Can Hear the Drums of War, But Who Is Beating Them?

China has now advanced to the point that it is a serious rival to the United States as both military hegemon in Asia and central pivot of the global economy. This is what the brewing war…is all about.

Protests in the city of fear: Hong Kong’s anti-government movement under the COVID-19 pandemic

a girl’s voice called out from within the crowd. In Cantonese, she cried ‘Liberate Hong Kong’. Her chant echoed from the building walls and amplified her voice. The crowd responded swiftly, chanting in unison: ‘Revolution of Our Time’.

The Limits of Control

Compelled towards impossible dreams of infinite growth within finite nature, the cybernetic capitalist system is decidedly expansionist and colonial...

The China Divide: Industry, technology and military relations are all tied up in strategies now unfolding

The United States is determined to stop China narrowing the gap in technological prowess. The new ‘digital iron curtain’ dividing the world into US and Chinese technological zones runs through Australia…

Fuelling ‘The China Threat’

The new moral panic about ‘the China threat’, and the comparative indifference in Australia about significantly more intrusive forms of foreign interference by the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, is orientalist and often racist: China is not a member of the Western club, so it is suspect.

Editorial, Arena no. 3: Defence After the Rise of China

Rather than addressing the realities of our place in the region, the Morrison government’s emerging defence strategy is an attempt to hold the old assumptions in place. It is utopian conservatism at its worst.