Asia Watch Archive

It was a busy week on the diplomatic circuit for Mélanie Joly. Last Thursday, Joly spoke with Wang Yi, China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. In that meeting, Joly said that Canada would work towards deepening economic and people-to-people ties with China, according to a readout from Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

On January 7, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was re-elected for a fourth consecutive five-year term. Hasina’s Awami League won 222 out of 300 parliamentary seats in a vote that the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, alleged was a sham.

APF Canada has published a Dispatch on the main issues and potential outcomes of this weekend’s elections in Taiwan. 

With just over a month to go before Taiwan picks its next president, volatility in the polls has injected fresh uncertainty into the outcome of the January 13 election and is keeping the rest of the world on edge about its possible geopolitical ramifications.

India’s Union Cabinet recently approved a proposal to add 215 positions to the country’s “short-staffed” foreign service over the next five years. On paper, India’s foreign service numbers 1,011, but only 848 officers were active as of March 2023. Those officers are scattered across an estimated 193 diplomatic missions worldwide, including two consulates general and one high commission in Canada.

Hong Kong will roll out a new humanities course in primary schools that embraces “patriotic education,” according to a November 23 announcement from Hong Kong’s Education Bureau.

In a November 29 court filing, U.S. prosecutors alleged that a “senior field officer” for the Indian government ordered Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, to assassinate a Sikh separatist in New York City in May.

After a brief honeymoon, Australia and China are again at odds. The row comes mere weeks after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made his “very successful” visit to China — the first by an Australian leader since 2016.

Canada, along with Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K., has submitted a request to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to join the case accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority during the 2016-17 “clearance operations” in its western state of Rakhine.

As the Canadian federal and provincial governments, as well as Canadian companies and civil society organizations, prepare to attend the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (COP 28) in the United Arab Emirates later this month, a new UN report will invariably be flagged as essential reading.

As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the leaders of the other 20 economies that make up the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum meet in San Francisco this week for their annual summit, the biggest headline thus far was the much-anticipated meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on November 15. It was only the second face-to-face meeting between the two leaders since Biden became president in January 2021.

Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka has been engulfed in political turmoil, with supporters of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) clashing with police. On October 30, authorities arrested a top BNP leader, and the party responded by calling for a three-day nationwide strike. The protests accompanying the strikes quickly turned violent, leaving at least three civilians and one police officer dead.

On October 27, Indonesia’s flag carrier, Garuda, carried more than 100 passengers from Jakarta to Surakarta — about a 500-kilometre journey — on Indonesia’s first commercial flight fuelled, in part, by palm oil. State energy firm PT Pertamina produced the palm-oil-based jet fuel, also known as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), designed to reduce carbon emissions.

Some ultra-wealthy Chinese nationals are moving themselves — and their fortunes — abroad to avoid increasingly rigid restrictions, including oftentimes opaque charges of financial improprieties, according to a recent analysis published by The Guardian.

China has stepped into the diplomatic spotlight by offering to mediate the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Israel has rebuffed Beijing’s overtures, arguing that China’s long-standing pro-Palestinian leanings undermine its claims of neutrality.

On October 22, Philippine Coast Guard vessels collided with Chinese ships in the disputed South China Sea, resulting in a renewed diplomatic row.



The incident took place within the Philippines’s 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone. Its coast guard and supply ships were reportedly en route to BRP Sierra Madre — a deliberately grounded warship in the Second Thomas Shoal meant to buttress the country’s territorial claims against those of China.

On October 14, Australians went to the polls to vote in the country’s first referendum in 25 years. The referendum asked voters if they supported amending the country’s constitution to recognize the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as the First Peoples of Australia and creating a parliamentary advisory body known as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, or simply “the Voice.”



Sixty-one per cent of voters opposed creating the Voice, with all six states rejecting the proposal.

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping is hosting representatives from roughly 130 countries this week for a two-day Belt and Road Forum, marking a decade since Beijing launched its signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a vast infrastructure and energy network connecting Asia with Africa and Europe through overland and maritime routes.

At around 11 p.m. on October 9, the Mung Lai Hkyet camp in Myanmar’s northern Kachin State for internally displaced persons was attacked, leaving at least 29 people dead, half of them children.



The camp, set up in 2011 following the collapse of a ceasefire agreement between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the military, is home to about 850 people who fled the junta. The KIA, one of Myanmar’s most powerful insurgent groups, is the armed wing of the Kachin Independence Organisation, an ethnic political group fighting for self-rule in Kachin.