Asia Unbound

Ashlyn Anderson, Lauren Dickey, Darcie Draudt, William Piekos, and Ariella Rotenberg look at the top stories in Asia today. 1. Thailand lifts martial law and puts in place a “new security order.” Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej approved a request from the country’s junta to lift martial law on Wednesday and trade it for a so-called new security order. Most experts agree this choice was a cosmetic one, not substantive, that was an attempt to improve the appearance of Thailand to the outside world while maintaining absolute power for the junta. In the place of martial law, the new security order invokes Article Forty-Four of the military-imposed interim constitution, which grants General Prayuth Chan-ocha, head of the junta, expansive powers in over the Thai government. Human Rights Watch described the change as an indication of “Thailand’s deepening descent into dictatorship.” The article effectively grants General Prayuth the power of all three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. 2. South Korea issues settlement to Sewol Ferry students’ families. The South Korean government on Wednesday announced it would pay about US$380,000 to each family of students who died when the local tour ferry Sewol capsized nearly a year ago, on April 16, 2014. The official death toll was 295. In November, the Sewol’s captain was sentenced to thirty-six years in prison for gross negligence, after a judge acquitted him for homicide (for which prosecutors sought the death penalty). Victims’ relatives have sought an independent inquiry into the cause of and response to the sinking; several of them have shaved their heads in protest (a symbolic act common in protests in Korea) over the decision to forgo investigation for the monetary compensation. The incident has called into question not only national safety standards and practices, but also the government’s ability and choices made during the rescue operations. Civil society groups continue to lead protests throughout the country, including in Seoul’s central Gwanghwamun Square near the president’s house. 3. Cyberattack targets anti-censorship forum. Github, a coding site that also hosts tools to bypass China’s Great Firewall, experienced a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that started last Thursday. DDoS attacks flood a site with traffic in an attempt to take it offline. A number of security researchers have alleged that international web traffic to sites that use analytics tools from Baidu, China’s largest search engine, was hijacked and redirected toward Github’s site; some analysts have suggested that the Chinese government was behind the attack. A Baidu spokesman said the firm found no security breaches and was working find the source of the issue; meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated that “it is quite odd” that whenever a website is attacked elsewhere in the world, Chinese hackers are to blame. Github provides access within China to a mirror of GreatFire.org, a website that monitors blocked websites and keywords, and the Chinese-language version of the New York Times, both of which are censored in China. 4. Vietnamese factory workers on strike over new pension law. Thousands of workers occupied the factory compound of Taiwanese-owned Pou Yuen, a supplier for Nike and Adidas, in Ho Chi Minh City this week. New pension rules slated to come into effect next year will stop many workers from being eligible for lump-sum social insurance payments when they leave a company, delaying payouts until retirement. The strikes—a rare challenge in a country where large, unsanctioned gatherings are prohibited—ended peacefully after the Vietnamese government agreed to amend the law, allowing laborers to choose when they receive retirement payouts. 5. Deadline to join AIIB passes, with forty-six founding members, including some surprises. Beijing had set March 31 as the deadline to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a founding member; committed countries include Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Norway also applied to join, considered a surprise since in 2010 it awarded a Nobel Peace prize to a dissident Chinese writer, causing a rift in Sino-Norwegian relations. Taiwan’s announcement that it would seek to join also comes as a surprise; Beijing responded it would include Taiwan should they join “under an appropriate name.” Protests over the prospect of submitting to the name change have ignited protests in Taipei. Noticeably absent was regional economic powerhouse and U.S. ally Japan, which—along with the United States—dominates international financial institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. Other strong U.S. allies in the region, including Australia and South Korea, have pledged to join. The United States has viewed the AIIB with wariness, raising questions about its transparency and governance. Bonus: Australia triumphs over New Zealand in the cricket World Cup final. In what was considered a one-sided and anticlimactic match, Australia dominated to bring home their fifth World Cup title. New Zealand came into the match on a wave of eight successive wins, but couldn’t pull off a first World Cup victory. Despite their win, the Australian team was met with some disapproving eyes for its poor sportsmanship and how it chose to celebrate the victory.

In this post, I look at recent events in Japan-China relations, and explain how they relate to my argument in my book, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China. This post originally appeared on the Columbia University Press blog and can be found here. Adjusting to the rise of China is not simply a task for diplomats or strategists. Rather, the adjustment to new centers of global economic and political influence involves a broad array of social actors. Today, many in Japan worry about how to manage this complex task. Fishermen, scientists, oil and gas interests, and coast guards all converge on the East China Sea, and today, for the first time since World War II, their interactions could prompt an escalation of tensions to include the Japanese and Chinese militaries. But there are also interests across Japanese society that feel the impact of this transforming China, and Intimate Rivals introduces the variety of advocacies that now shape Japan’s China policy. Today more than ever, popular perceptions are shaping Japan’s interactions with a transforming China. In polling conducted over the past decades by Genron NPO and the China Daily, Japanese respondents reveal a gradually deteriorating view of China. In the 2014 poll, 93 percent of respondents had a negative view of China. Even more striking is the more recent evidence in the poll of a growing concern of the possibility of military conflict with China. Of course, Japanese and Chinese political leaders hold the key to crafting a positive relationship. Last November, after yet another extended period of diplomatic standoff, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and President Xi Jinping met at the Asia Pacific Economic Community meeting in Beijing, opening the way for a resumption of a host of other government meetings that manage this relationship between Asia’s two largest nations. The two governments must address the growing interactions between their societies, solving problems from criminal prosecution to fisheries management and facilitating the travel of millions of citizens that travel back and forth between the two countries. The photo taken of President Xi and Prime Minister Abe last fall did not suggest that this most recent round of reconciliation will be easy, but it did bring to a close an extended diplomatic estrangement that compounded the danger of maritime conflict. In the months since, Japanese and Chinese officials have begun to address the risk of unintentional incidents in the East China Sea escalating into a much more difficult crisis, and the hope is that the two nations can build a sustainable mechanism for crisis management for the maritime space between them. While this effort to build cooperation between Tokyo and Beijing resumes, however, the legacy of this new era of contention in their relationship is most conspicuous at home. New generations of political leaders in both countries now see greater opportunity in exploiting the tensions between them. Chinese nationalism has often been seen as a function of the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to legitimize its continued leadership of an increasingly diverse and contentious society. But in Japan too the domestic balance of interests in support of a cooperative approach to problem solving with China has shifted as Beijing and Tokyo have increasingly failed to come to agreement over their differences. This is particularly important for those issues that highlight perceived vulnerabilities. My book looks at four policy issues where this matters most for Japan’s relations with China over the past decade or so: war memory, maritime boundary management, food security, and island defense. Contention has become more frequent in Japan’s relations with China, but upon closer inspection of these policy challenges, I find a number of reasons for the declining confidence in Japan that their government can succeed in solving problems with China. On the surface, it would seem that many Japanese see China’s rise as eclipsing Japan’s role as Asia’s leading power, and thus anxiety about Japan’s future is part of the answer. But the more important impact has been the growing belief in Japan that China is not interested in a peaceful negotiation of their differences, not only with Japan but with others as well. The intense confrontation over their island dispute seemed to bring Japan and China close to conflict, and has revealed that the longstanding political channels of communication and confidence that had grounded the relationship in the past no longer existed. The growing worry in Tokyo is that China’s leaders are more interested in undermining the global order upon which Japan has based its postwar foreign and economic strategy. Demonstrating that Chinese and Japanese leaders are capable of building a different kind of partnership will be crucial in the years ahead. Intimate Rivals suggests that the most important task for policymakers will be to build a track record of success in finding common ground. While there is no national consensus in Japan that organizes around the strategy of confronting China, it is clear that confidence in a cooperative relationship has suffered. Rebuilding popular confidence in the governments’ ability to protect their citizens’ interests will be a challenge. Designing new approaches to building trust between the two governments is one crucial first step. Just a few weeks ago, the head of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner, the Komeito, visited Beijing with the express interest of building party-to-party ties. In fact, these two Japanese political parties have had longstanding ties, but today they must forge new institutional arrangements with the current generation of China’s political leaders. Earlier generations of Japanese and Chinese political leaders negotiated the terms of their countries’ postwar peace, but today, a new generation of leaders must renew their commitment to finding common ground. Beyond their bilateral ties, however, Japanese and Chinese leaders will also need to consider how they can work together to build regional institutions that will embed their relationship in a more stable and reliable pattern of cooperation. For all of the other Asian nations that have watched the growing tensions between Tokyo and Beijing, the past several years of contention have been alarming. Instead of investing in a future of competition, Chinese and Japanese leaders should begin to articulate and invest in pathways for cooperation that will create and sustain confidence in the region’s future.

Earlier this week, a young blogger, Washiqur Rahman, was hacked to death outside his Dhaka home. This is the third such attack— gruesome butcherings by machete—in the past two years, and all three have targeted “atheist bloggers.” With a third murder, we can no longer see these as purely isolated incidents; rather, they now form a chilling pattern. This development stuns us because Bangladesh has not suffered from the acute terrorism problem tearing Pakistan apart. Until 1971, they were the same country; following Bangladesh’s independence, the two have taken notably divergent trajectories. Dhaka has done well in recent years cracking down on terrorist groups, and has been able to focus its attentions on economic growth and human development needs. In a society that has long been noted for its tolerance—the country is routinely described as “moderate”—the idea that radicals would murder writers because of their ideas comes as a shock. In Huffington Post India, I explain why these murders—effectively ideological assassinations—go against the idea of Bangladesh. For more, read the article: Murdering the Idea of Bangladesh. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa