Successive Australian governments have reacted with alarm at China’s influence-building activities in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. They have passed foreign interference laws, tightened foreign investment regulations, and regulated university collaborations with institutions overseas. They have executed a Pacific Step-Up and a plan for greater trade and investment with Southeast Asia. And they have tightened […]

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Indonesia has spent a decade trying to turn its mineral wealth into something more valuable than raw commodity exports. The strategy is ambitious: restrict raw nickel exports, attract investment, build processing capacity and move downstream into electric-vehicle (EV) batteries that will power the next generation of transport and energy storage. China is central to the […]

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The most consequential changes in a democracy do not always arrive with a constitutional crisis. Rather, they come through appointments, legal amendments and seemingly ordinary political bargains, accumulating one after another until the political system begins to look different from the one that came before. That is the real value of the “boiling frog” metaphor. […]

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When Australia’s Lowy Institute think tank released the 2025 edition of its Southeast Asia Aid Map in July last year, it projected that Western aid cuts would shift the region’s development finance toward Asian partners. Specifically, the report expected the center of gravity to “drift East, notably to Beijing but also Tokyo and Seoul.” Lowy’s […]

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Last week, eight Chinese-made light attack jets sat on a half-finished runway at Ban Keun, flanked by more than two dozen military support vehicles, offering the first aerial glimpse of a new Chinese-Lao military facility north of the Lao capital, Vientiane. The speed of the buildup and the earthmoving visible around the airstrip in the […]

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Southeast Asia’s growth next year will be decided at meetings its finance ministers won’t attend. A few executives in California will soon settle next year’s spending on data centers. Their decisions will do more to shape growth in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines than any budget those governments pass. The World Bank has just […]

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It is fitting that DreamWorks’ “Forgotten Island” carries a title that evokes memory and loss. The film, released globally in September, is on the surface a coming-of-age adventure about friendship. Look a little closer and it is a poignant meditation on separation – a theme that speaks deeply to the Philippines and its diaspora, whose […]

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