Lowy Institute

Max Grömping and Jessica Teets discuss lobbying by civil society organizations in authoritarian regimes, exploring case studies from China, Russia, Belarus, Cambodia, Malaysia, Montenegro, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. They highlight the challenges faced by non-elite groups and the potential influence of citizens in oppressive regimes. Topics covered include the dynamics of co-option, NGO policy advocacy in China, navigating advocacy in Turkey, and the interaction between economic conditions and policy advocacy in autocracies.

China’s remarkable economic rise has long been a key factor in global geopolitical discussions. But how soon and at what height will China’s economy peak? What are the implications for China’s ambitions in the world?  For years, predictions suggested that China’s economic power would surpass that of the United States by the end of this decade. However, recent developments, backed by Lowy analysis, have challenged this assumption.  In this event we unpacked the findings of original Lowy Institute research and explored the concept of ‘Peak China’ with the Lowy Institute’s Lead Economist Roland Rajah, Senior Fellow for East Asia Richard McGregor and Nonresident Fellow Dr Jenny Gordon.  The event was moderated by Director of Research Hervé Lemahieu. Our panellists discussed the implications of this potential turning point and what it means for China's future prospects, as well as the repercussions it may have for the rest of the world.  Roland Rajah is Lead Economist at the Lowy Institute and the Director of the Indo-Pacific Development Centre. A development economist by background, Roland has extensive experience working across both emerging Asia and the small island developing states of the Pacific. He has previously worked for the Asian Development Bank, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), and the Reserve Bank of Australia. Roland is the co-author with Alyssa Leng of the influential Lowy Institute Analysis paper Revising down the rise of China.  Richard McGregor is Senior Fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute. He is a former Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and the author of numerous books on East Asia including Xi Jinping: The Backlash (2019) and Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century (2017). His 2010 book, The Party, on the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party, was translated into seven languages and chosen by the Asia Society and Mainichi Shimbun in Japan as their book of the year.   Jenny Gordon is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute and former Chief Economist at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Dr Gordon is a member of the Australian International Agricultural Research Centre’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisory Panel, and the Asian Development Bank Institute’s Advisory Committee. She is also an Honorary Professor at ANU's Centre for Social Research and Methods.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Conversations, Susannah Patton, Director of the Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia Program, talks with Dr Nguyen Hung Son, Vice President of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam. They discuss Vietnam’s foreign policy outlook, relations with external partners, including Australia, and how Vietnam sees key regional issues such as the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the conflict in Myanmar. Dr Son highlights Vietnam’s continued focus on diplomacy within ASEAN, as well as its interest in a regional balance of power that could lower the risk of conflict.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The World Bank recently released its “Evolution Roadmap”, aimed at responding more efficiently to growing poverty reduction needs and better addressing climate change challenges. While the roadmap provides a good starting point — outlining the evolution of the bank's mission, operations and financing model — it falls short in providing concrete and detailed strategies to achieve an ambitious reform. To discuss the roadmap and the future of the World Bank, Deputy Director of the Lowy Institute’s Indo-Pacific Development Centre Alexandre Dayant sat with Manuela V. Ferro, the World Bank Vice President for East Asia and Pacific. An economist and engineer by training, Ms Ferro has more than 25 years of hands-on and leadership experience in Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. She has shaped creative development solutions for multiple and diverse countries, from post-conflict low-income nations to upper middle-income states.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Australia is home to 1.4 million people with Chinese ancestry. At a time of heightened concern about national security and foreign interference, how do Chinese-Australians see Australia and their place in it? How do Chinese-Australians consume news and information? And how do they view the wider world, including the growing geopolitical tensions in the region? On 2 May the panel unpacked the findings of the 2023 Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities survey report with author and Lowy Institute Research Fellow Dr Jennifer Hsu, Jieh-Yung Lo and Yun Jiang. The event was chaired by Pablo Viñales. Jennifer Hsu is a Research Fellow and the Project Director of the Multiculturalism, Identity and Influence Project at the Lowy Institute. Jennifer is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Social Policy and Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her research expertise broadly covers state-society relations, state-NGO relations, the internationalisation of Chinese NGOs, civil society and the Chinese diaspora. Jieh-Yung Lo is Founding Director of the Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership (CAAL) at the Australian National University. Jieh-Yung has worked in various public policy and project management roles and served in leadership positions across not-for-profit, entrepreneurship and government. He served two terms as a Councillor with the City of Monash including two years as Deputy Mayor. Yun Jiang is the Australian Institute of International Affairs China Matters Fellow. She is formerly the co-founder and editor of China Neican, as well as a managing editor of the China Story blog at the Australian National University. She has published widely on China-related topics. She was previously a policy adviser in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and the Department of Defence.  Pablo Viñales is the Political Correspondent at SBS World News. Aside from federal politics, much of his work focuses on the changing geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific and the China–Australia relationship. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Australia’s strategic outlook on the Indo-Pacific is changing rapidly, as reflected by the recent AUKUS announcement, forthcoming Defence Strategic Review and membership of new regional minilateral groupings such as the Quad. These changes will have important implications for Australia’s relations with neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia, and especially Indonesia, highlighted by Jakarta’s mixed response to the AUKUS announcement in 2021. How widespread are concerns about AUKUS and Australian strategic policy more generally within Indonesia? Are the two countries experiencing a divergence in their strategic outlooks? And how should the two sides manage the risk of such a divergence in the years ahead?  On Wednesday 26 April 2023, the Lowy Institute hosted an event at Old Parliament House, Canberra featuring Dr Evan A. Laksmana, Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, in conversation with Richard Maude of the Asia Society Policy Institute. The event was moderated by Susannah Patton, Southeast Asia Program Director at the Lowy Institute.  Dr Evan A. Laksmana is a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Lowy Institute Nonresident Fellow. Richard Maude is Executive Director, Policy, and Senior Fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute. He is a former Director-General of the Office of National Assessments and head of the whole-of-government taskforce which prepared the Australian Government’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Monday 24 April 2023, Australia’s government published the public version of its Defence Strategic Review, a report it commissioned on coming to office to set the agenda for reforms to the posture and structure of the Australian Defence Force. Positioned alongside the government’s commitment to the AUKUS security agreement, the Review and the government’s response to it have signalled major changes to how Australia intends to invest in military technology, hardware and personnel over the next two decades. In this new episode of Lowy Institute Conversations, military strategist Mick Ryan discusses the Review with the Institute’s International Security Program Director Sam Roggeveen. They discuss what the report reveals about Australia’s plans for its military, but also what is missing. They also talk about defence bureaucracy, the role of the Ukraine war in Australia’s strategic thinking, and challenges for the future leadership of Australia’s armed forces. Major General (Ret’d) Mick Ryan is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute. He spent 35 years in the Australian Army. His operational service includes deployments to East Timor, Iraq and southern Afghanistan. His book, War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict, was published in 2022.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Pacific Change Makers, Dr Meg Keen speaks with Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls in Suva, Fiji about social activism in the Pacific. Sharon is the Regional Representative of the Shifting the Power Coalition, a Pacific Island feminist coalition working on challenges affecting the region's future including climate change, social justice, and gender and community equality. She speaks with Meg about how her family and faith have motivated her to make a difference. They discuss how women and marginalised groups can be more prominent voices in society - in political settings but also in media, community and key social groups. Sharon works in professional and community networks to hold power accountable, deliver local solutions, and promote appropriate technology to build resilience. Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls is a Pacific Island feminist working on the intersection of gender, media, climate change and peace. From Fiji, she serves as the regional representative of the Shifting the Power Coalition, a team of women leaders and networks across Pacific Island Forum countries: Australia, Bougainville, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu – with a network of close to 100,000 grassroots members. In 2000, she co-founded FemLINKpacific and developed it into a leading community organisation supporting women's networking, media and research.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On 19 April, the Lowy Institute hosted the launch of the 2023 Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities survey report with author and Lowy Institute Research Fellow Dr Jennifer Hsu, along with guests Samuel Yang and Lucy Du. The event was chaired by the Director of the Institute's Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program, Ryan Neelam. Dr Jennifer Hsu is a Research Fellow and the Project Director of the Multiculturalism, Identity and Influence Project at the Lowy Institute. After completing her PhD in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, she researched and taught development studies, political science and sociology in universities in North America and the United Kingdom. Jennifer is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Social Policy and Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her research expertise covers state-society relations, state-NGO relations, the internationalisation of Chinese NGOs, civil society and the Chinese diaspora and she has published widely in these areas. Samuel Yang is a Chinese-Australian bilingual journalist and presenter. He is currently a co-host of China Tonight on ABC TV. He joined the ABC in 2018 and has previously worked as a business reporter and presenter in Sydney, and a bilingual reporter and producer in Melbourne. He has lived across the Asia-Pacific including in China, Singapore and New Zealand. His work has won the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Public Interest Award and he was nominated for Young Journalist of the Year in 2020. Lucy Du is the CEO of the Australia-China Young Professionals Initiative (ACYPI), the single largest young professionals organisation in the Australia-China space. She began her career in Canberra and then went on to work in China for one of Australia’s big four banks and later for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Shanghai. She is currently Head of Community at Belz Family & Associates, a global private assets investment platform for Asian and Australian investors. Lucy is bilingual in English and Chinese and has completed studies at the University of Melbourne, Australian National University and Tsinghua University. Ryan Neelam is Director of the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program and is Project Lead on the annual flagship publication, the Lowy Institute Poll. Before joining the Institute, Ryan spent 14 years as an Australian diplomat including as Deputy Consul-General in Hong Kong, and at the Australian Mission to the UN. Ryan has contributed to policy development and international agreements on economic, climate change, human rights and security issues.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With the announcement of Australia’s pathway towards nuclear-powered submarines, and the forthcoming release of the Government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review, this event offered the rare opportunity to hear from Australia’s most senior military officer about the international security environment and how Australia is responding to it. After his remarks, General Angus Campbell AO DSC spoke in conversation with the Lowy Institute's Executive Director Dr Michael Fullilove AM. General Campbell joined the Australian Army in 1981, graduating from the Royal Military College, Duntroon in 1984. In 2005, he joined the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet as a First Assistant Secretary to head the Office of National Security and was subsequently promoted to Deputy Secretary and appointed to the position of Deputy National Security Adviser. Upon his return to the Australian Defence Force in early 2010, he was appointed to the rank of Major General. In 2015, he was appointed Chief of the Australian Army, and in 2018 appointed to command of the Australian Defence Force.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.