China has deployed its newest and most advanced warship in the South China Sea

Time to accept our place in Asian region

The Australian Financial Review - 13 hours ago By Kishore Mahbubani

‘By the logic of geography, the continent of Australia should have been populated with Asians. Instead, by an accident of history, Australia has been predominantly populated with Westerners.”
This is how I began a paper for the Australian National University in August, which concluded that as Australia’s Western destiny was coming to an end, it had to start preparing for its Asian destiny.
Sadly, no major Australian newspaper or pundit commented. This made me aware that Australian’s intelligentsia is still reluctant to face head on Australia’s painful new geopolitical realities.
Against this backdrop, the release of the Asian Century white paper is timely. It should provide a sharp wake-up call to the Australian population that Australia’s destiny is now firmly tied to Asia. Julia Gillard is absolutely right in saying: “The transformation of the Asian region into the economic powerhouse of the world is not only unstoppable, it is gathering pace.”
One truly impressive part of the paper is the data it provides on Asia’s rise. It notes, for example, that “in the past 20 years, China and India have almost tripled their share of the global economy and increased their absolute economic size almost six times over. By 2025, the region as a whole will account for almost half the world’s output.”
The paper could have helpfully added that from the year 1 to 1820, China and India always had the world’s two largest economies. Hence, the past 200 years of Western economic domination was a major historical aberration.
This would have been an important point to make because for the past 200 years, Western power has essentially provided Australia a valuable buffer from Asian geopolitical realities. In this Asian century, as Western power recedes steadily, Australia will be left “beached” alone as the solitary Western country (together with New Zealand) in Asia. Twenty-two million Australians will have to learn to deal with 3.5 billion Asians with great care and sensitivity.
Ignorance about Asia could prove to be fatal for Australia’s long-term future. This is why the report is right in highlighting Australian misperceptions about Asia. “For example, a Lowy Institute poll in 2011 found that many believe that ‘Indonesia is essentially controlled by the military, despite Indonesia’s democratic system of government’.”
Sadly, this kind of abysmal ignorance may be a result of deeply rooted flaws in Australian education. This is one alarming revelation of the report: “Only a small proportion of Year 12 students study anything about Asia in the subjects of history, literature, geography, economics, politics and the arts under existing state-based curriculums.” Worse, only 5 per cent of each Australian cohort studies any kind of Asian language.
Hence, when I addressed the annual convention of the Australian Primary Principals Association in Melbourne in September, I said that the kindest thing Australian society could do to its five-year-old children was to teach them an Asian language, be it Mandarin or Hindi, Bahasa Indonesia or Japanese.
Learning Asian languages would also open windows to Asian cultural and political sensitivities.
An early test of Australian political sensitivities will come when Australia joins the UN Security Council. Its Asian neighbours will be watching to see if it votes more in line with its fellow Western or fellow Asian members in the council. The painful geopolitical choices that Australia will have to make as Western power recedes and Asian power rises are clearly something that no official white paper can address. The paper delicately touches on “China, the United States and Australia” without pointing out some of the painful choices Australia will have to make from time to time.
The one surprising omission in the paper is ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations). The paper fails to acknowledge that ASEAN has provided Australia with a valuable geopolitical buffer in recent decades. The failure to understand this has led to some of Australia’s most unwise foreign policy decisions, including efforts to bypass ASEAN sometimes.
Despite this, all Asians should welcome the bold decision of the Australian government to release this white paper. The time for Australians to think deeply about their Asian destiny has arrived. The sooner Australia adjusts to its new Asian destiny, the less painful the adjustment will prove to be.
Kishore Mahbubani is the dean and professor in the practice of public policy at Lee Kuan Yew school of public policy, Singapore.
The Australian Financial Review

let's all see who has best advantage in terms of power and battleships!

US and China are merely duking it out for supremacy in this century. The reality is that military supremacy doesn't hold much power anymore. Everyone knows that, in the event of a global nuclear war, the world's gonna end. Hence, nobody wins.
The real power lies in energy as shown when oil prices quadrupled in '74 after OPEC block shipments to USA in retaliation for US re-supplying Israeli military during war with its Arab neighbours.
While fossil fuels will continue to supply the world with energy for years to come, most prescient energy commentators are forecasting the gradual demise and the replacement of these fossil fuels, ideally, by renewable energy.
USA is lagging behind China, India, Brazil and Germany in the race for a renewable future. The question is, will USA spend $4 trillion on a war to secure a supply of minerals to build solar panels or wind farms?

even the prime minister said, " if you don't like it, then u are welcome to go"! those protests ignited some groups to disarray!

GEORGE MEGALOGENIS  The Australian  September 15, 2012 12:00AM

THE national navel-gazing about whether the mining boom has ended or just peaked misses the point about what will determine Australia's place in the Asian Century.

The business of digging up rocks happens to be the easier part of the engagement. Our open economy is better able to handle income shocks either up or down than it did behind the tariff wall. Compare the first couple of phases of the mining boom since 2003 with the terms of trade boom in 1973, which unglued the Whitlam government. Or the bust of 1982-83, which brought down the Fraser government, with the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, or indeed the global financial crisis in 2008-09. If China suffers a serious growth pause, our own recent history tells us we'll be OK.
Where the Australian model is vulnerable is on immigration, the big area of public policy we got right decades before we deregulated the economy.
The customers of our quarry, China and India, are also our recruits - the people we have decided are best suited to keep our economy growing and to make our nation more interesting.
They are skilled, cashed-up and replacing the British-born as the top immigrant groups in our two largest cities. What could possibly go wrong with this transaction?
An early warning is contained in a special Mind and Mood report from Ipsos Mackay into the attitudes of new Australians. It found immigrants from China, India, Vietnam and Somalia more optimistic than the general population about our future, with one sharp caveat: in the area of education, we risk damaging our reputation for openness and fairness.
The problem is not the usual mistaken culprit of racism, but complacency. Both sides of politics and the bureaucracy make the false assumption that because our Chinese and Indian immigrants have high levels of education and very low levels of crime compared with the national average, we don't need to worry about how they are getting along. And if they don't like it here, well, they could always leave. Therein lies the rub.
To retain a steady flow of quality immigrants, we have to lift our own expectations about what sort of nation we should be.
Egalitarianism is always in the eye of the beholder. As established Australians get richer, we express our desire for fairness in silly ways by insisting on government handouts for those who don't need them, and refusing to tell the cashed-up but less-educated part of the nation to lift their standards.
New Australians have a different take. They are prepared to pay whatever entry price we place; they just don't understand why they don't get excellence in return.
The Mind and Mood report contains strong criticism from international students.
"Apart from the Somali groups, the participants who seemed most vulnerable in the labour market were international students," the report says. "They talked about being 'doubly exploited'. They were paying copious amounts of money for an Australian education and spoke at length about the high cost of everything related to living and learning in this country."
Here is an exchange between three Indian men in their 30s.
Indian man 1: If we are international student, we have to pay the triple of the normal person who lives in Australia. He has to pay maybe $2500 or $3500 a year, we have to pay $25,000 to $30,000.
Indian man 2: And we are allowed to work only for 20 hours, that's our problem.
Indian man 3: [At the seminars promoting Australian courses in India] ... they tell us that everything is there [in Australia], easily we can get job. Accommodation, everything will be arranged. Everything will be easy. But when we come here and see the reality, that isn't it. It's very different.
If a focus group discussion of third- or fourth-generation Australians yielded this sort of complaint, politics would have addressed it long ago.
But even our most successful immigrant groups never reach critical mass to be able to bend the parliament to their will. This is a good thing in many respects, but it carries the risk of institutional bias in favour of the parts of the electoral map that are whiter than the national average.
Take a look at the distribution of our Chinese and Indian waves in the attached table. They have followed the southern European pattern, with the largest numbers concentrating in Sydney and Melbourne. The tables have been adjusted from the initial census release to better compare like with like - the British are lumped together, as are the Chinese from the mainland and Hong Kong. Note how the Chinese are already No 1 in Sydney - our initial crunching of the numbers had the mainland Chinese just behind the English-born. But the broader definition of Chinese still doesn't get them into the top five in Perth. The mining capitals of Perth and Brisbane, and the wannabe mining capital of Adelaide, are the only cities where the Poms are more than 5 per cent of total population.
Some of our finest Australians are born in Britain - Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, to name but two. But the Poms brought us whingeing and the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader are champions in the sport of finding fault. [Poms also brought into Australia the dreaded White Policy.]
Gillard is the Adelaide Pom, wanting to freeze-frame the nation. The focus groups tell her to slow population growth, which is code for talking down the immigration intake. She has yet to confront voters with Australia's need for more people.
Abbott is more like the Perth Pom, loud and almost consciously offensive to the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Sydney and Melbourne.
It is funny, almost endearing, but their collective carping - sourced as it is to an imagined middle Australia somewhere west of where the ethnic minorities live in Sydney - is damaging the national interest.
We are used to the rest of the world liking us. We know it each time we travel overseas. When the question "Are you American?" is answered correctly in the negative, the follow-up tends to be along the lines of "I have cousins in Richmond and Fremantle, do you know them?"
Australia never had to worry about the loyalties of the Poms, the Greeks, the Italians, or the Vietnamese because their homelands stalled while we blossomed. There were always more relatives who wanted to join us than were going the other way.
The Chinese and Indians who come here are leaving nations that are rising. The message they send back home - even if they settle in Australia - affects our standing in the region whether we realise it or not.
If the Chinese and Indians think less of us because we are ripping them off, or because we don't trust them to run companies or to represent us in parliament [So far, only a handful of ethnic Asians, e.g. finance minister Penny Wong, are parliament members.] , that is our problem, not theirs, because they will look somewhere else - either back home, or the US, which can never be counted out in the long run.

Our future in Asia is as the world's best immigration nation, that is, as Australians. But we need more, not fewer, Chinese and Indians [and Filipinos?] to want to live across the country to prove it.

This begs the question, "Is Australia really impartial or simply feigning impartiality?