Asia Rising

China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress is presented by Beijing as a policy of development and equality. For Tibetans, it represents something very different. In this episode, , joins host Dr Ruth Gamble to discuss what the law means in practice for Tibetan language, culture, and religious life — and why those things matter so much to understanding the Tibetan situation. Dr Densal a...

The waters of the South China Sea - including areas the Philippines refers to as the West Philippine Sea - are at the centre of some of the Indo-Pacific’s most important maritime disputes. These waters bring together competing territorial and maritime claims, strategic interests, and the rights and interests of coastal states. They are also vital to fishing communities and populations whose liveli...

Few diplomatic careers span Moscow during the invasion of Ukraine, the remote islands of the Pacific, and Canberra. Germany's Ambassador to Australia, Beate Grzeski, has lived all three - and the thread connecting them says something about how the world is changing. In this episode, Ambassador Grzeski reflects on her journey from Deputy Head of Mission in Moscow to Germany's inaugural Special Envo...

Few events in recent history have generated as much confusion, controversy, and misinformation as the COVID-19 pandemic. Five years on, the origins of COVID remain contested, and the lessons of how that debate played out carry hard implications for global health security for years to come. Guest: Elizabeth Finkel. (Science journalist, Co-founder of Cosmos Magazine, and Adjunct Senior Research Fell...

The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is fast becoming one of the world's most contested global commons. Home to critical sea lanes, energy and trade corridors, and a growing contest for influence among major and middle powers, traditional security challenges are growing and competing. The region is especially vulnerable to cascading effects of a changing climate, warming oceans and increasing frequency o...

Security policy has traditionally been built around the state: its borders, its military capability, its ability to deter external threats. Gender-based violence rarely features, despite being one of the most persistent and predictable forms of harm in the world, in peacetime and exacerbated during conflict. Treating gender-based violence solely as a private, social, health or humanitarian issue w...

China is ageing faster than almost any other country in history. Decades of the one-child policy, rising life expectancy, and rapid urbanisation have produced a demographic shift of enormous scale — and with it, a growing burden of age-related conditions that health systems were not designed to manage. Among the most significant is dementia, and its precursor, Mild Cognitive Impairment. Guest: Pro...

For Pacific Island communities, climate change is not a future threat, but a present reality. Intensifying El Niño events, displacement, and compounding security challenges are reshaping the region, even as global attention has been diverted by energy crises and fossil fuel disruption. Climate mobility - the movement of people in response to climate impacts - is emerging as both a critical challen...

Southeast Asia is one of the fastest-growing digital regions in the world, with an economy projected to exceed $300 billion in gross merchandise value and over 200 million internet users. But that digital growth is outpacing the legal frameworks, institutional capacity, and cybersecurity architecture needed to govern it. And with the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence accelerating both the...

"The seabed is becoming a battlefield," Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles warned at the Shangri-La Dialogue in May, and "we have been slow – collectively slow – to recognise [submarine cables] as the strategic targets they have become." Some 16 privately operated submarine cables carry around 99 per cent of Australia's international data – the financial transactions, govern...

South Asian cinema shapes how millions of people around the world encounter the region’s cultures, languages, and identities. For many, film provides a gateway to South Asian languages and literature, and to cultural conversations that cross national, regional, and diasporic borders. But what does South Asian cinema say about the societies it represents? Beneath the spectacle, song, and romance, f...

From digital regulation and political pressure to economic influence and self-censorship, media freedom in Asia is being shaped by a range of subtle and evolving constraints. Rather than outright bans on reporting, many observers point to a process of "creeping censorship"—the gradual narrowing of space for independent journalism and public debate. How are these pressures playing out across Asia?...

Almost every email you send, every video you stream, and every financial transaction you make travels not through satellites, but through a vast network of cables lying on the ocean floor. Submarine cables are the invisible capillaries of the global internet — and increasingly, they are at the centre of great power competition in the Indo-Pacific. Guest: Dr Samuel Bashfield (Research Fellow at the...

The AUKUS agreement between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom is set to reshape Australia's military and strategic future through the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. But the implications of AUKUS extend far beyond defence, with significant consequences for Australia's economy, diplomacy, industry, and foreign relations. As the project moves from ambition to implementa...

The United States has, over recent years, significantly deepened its engagement with Pacific Island nations — reopening embassies, renewing funding compacts, and positioning itself as a committed partner in a region of growing strategic importance. Since the return of the Trump administration in January 2025, questions have been raised about the continuity of that commitment, and what a changed US...

An escalating crisis faces the Uyghur in China. The newly enacted Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress legalises forced assimilation, erases linguistic rights, and expands state surveillance. It provides a permanent legal framework for the ongoing campaign of mass re-education camps, long-term imprisonment, and cultural erasure of China's minorities. Guest: Yalkun Uluyol (China Researcher, H...

Over the past decade, China has launched a remarkable number of multilateral initiatives — from the Belt and Road to BRICS to a suite of so-called Global Initiatives covering development, security, and civilisation. Western analysts have tended to read these as evidence of a Chinese project to displace the existing international order. Guest: Dr Joel Ng (Senior Fellow and Head of the Centre for Mu...

In an increasingly contested global environment, the international community faces growing pressure to respond to current and emerging wars and instability across the full conflict spectrum: from prevention, to managing active conflict, to post-conflict reconstruction. Effective conflict prevention requires states to draw on a broad toolkit of policy levers, including security and defence initiati...

Over the past two decades, China and India have undergone one of the most dramatic expansions of engineering education in human history. In 2020 alone, India awarded 1.5 million science and engineering degrees, and China awarded 2 million. In China, engineering now makes up a third of all university degrees, and this rate far outpaces the United States. China and India are producing engineers at a...

Tibet's story is one of the most profound of the modern era — a civilisation forced into exile, carrying its language, philosophy, and sacred texts across the Himalayas in an act of collective survival. Preserving that heritage, while also engaging the modern world, has become one of the defining challenges for Tibetans in diaspora. Few people embody that challenge more personally than Geshe Lhakd...

China's new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress mandates Mandarin as the language of education, encourages the breakup of minority-majority neighbourhoods, and criminalises expressions of ethnic separatism — including by Chinese citizens living abroad. Critics say it formalises a decades-long push toward assimilation that has already reshaped the lives of Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian and othe...

China’s rise is often framed as a challenge to the Western-led international order, with attention focused on how Beijing works within — and pushes back against — liberal institutions. Yet a more consequential shift is underway. China is increasingly shaping global politics through new, Sino-centric forms of multilateralism, building parallel forums that operate alongside, and sometimes beyond, ex...

Across the Asia-Pacific, people are living longer than ever before. From rapidly ageing societies in Northeast Asia to younger but fast-transitioning populations in South and Southeast Asia, countries across the region are confronting the social and economic implications of longer lives. These shifts are generating diverse challenges — and innovative responses — as governments, communities and fam...

Traditional security debates focus on maps, borders, naval deployments, and treaties. But increasingly, territory in Asia is also constructed through narratives, media coverage, digital platforms, and public emotion. Journalists are not just observers — they help shape how territory, sovereignty, and security are understood by the public and policymakers. Guest: Dr Lupita Wijaya (Research Fellow a...

Asia’s modern resurgence has transformed the global economy, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty through globalization, supply chains and market integration. Yet this success has also generated new geopolitical rivalries and nationalist tensions, placing the region at a critical crossroads between continued prosperity and growing risk. What powered Asia’s economic transformation — and are...