Asia's future and Australia's missed opportunities.

• Author: Reed, Warren
• Position: Essay
• Pages: 31(7)

Understanding our region

After half a century of concerted Asian studies in this country, little that is factual is yet lodged firmly in the consciousness of the average Australian. As our level of dependence on the region increases dramatically, it is a great irony that we are now slipping back in our understanding.

Take, for example, North Korea, where an erratic regime regularly shocks us and the rest of the world with its bellicose posturing. To Australians, it's merely an aberrational legacy of an earlier Stalinist period. True, it is that; but it's also much, much more. And we should know something about it, at least from our basic education. In reality, few Australians under 60 have ever heard of the Korean War (1950-53), a war in which thousands of Australians served and many died. Even fewer Australians have any sense of the history of Northeast Asia and the powerful forces that have been at work there for the past few thousand years. In more recent centuries, in the 1590s, a newly unified Japan under warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi twice invaded Korea as a staging post for a planned attack on China. With the help of Chinese troops, the Koreans repelled the Japanese, though at a heavy cost in terms of human life, infrastructure and national resources.

The Japanese lost face in a way they would never forget and, in the late nineteenth century, with China weakened, they again looked covetously at the Korean Peninsula, eventually taking full control over it in the early 1900s. Korean resources were ruthlessly exploited and a systematic attempt was made by the Japanese to obliterate Korean culture, with Koreans forbidden to speak their own language. The end of the Pacific War in 1945 brought this colonial period to a close, though Korea found itself split in two as a result.

When the North attacked the South in 1950, with the Cold War well under way, hostilities drew in forces from a variety of allied countries on behalf of South Korea. China fought on the side of the North, losing more than a million soldiers in the process.

Of course, the history of Northeast Asia is far more complex than this, but even these bare bones are unknown to most Australians. That's why, when as a nation we get caught up in our own flighty rhetoric, Asians quietly look on in astonishment.

They rarely, if ever, tell us in public what they're thinking; and even if they did we'd tend to dismiss their observations as trivial and nitpicking. But if you've been educated in the region or have lived there for many years, they often will tell you how they react.

Careless mistakes

A good Chinese friend recently highlighted to me an example from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's quick trip to Singapore at the end of May to attend the Shangri-La Dialogue, an Asia-Pacific defence and security gathering. Rudd devoted much of his time at the podium to promoting his idea of an Asian Community. He had first broached this in 2008 without prior consultation with regional leaders, something that was seen as a naive and cocky affront. North Korea's latest antics naturally warranted a mention by our Prime Minister in Singapore, but he made the unfortunate mistake of mispronouncing the name of the capital of North Korea--Pyongyang. That's commonplace in Australia, especially on the ABC, with only a handful of key announcers on SBS bothering to get it right.

But for Rudd, that's unforgivable. The same Chinese friend had also heard our Prime Minister, a renowned Mandarin speaker, refer in other addresses to Taiwan as Taiwon. As most people know, the Won is the currency unit of South Korea. The wan in Taiwan is pronounced one--as in one, two, three.

"Trivial!" most Australians exclaim. "As though tiny mistakes like that matter at all." But they do.

My Chinese friend, who's a graduate in optical engineering from a key Japanese university, put it this way:

It's like a spy-hole in your front door. If you don't have a lens fitted to it, you can't see anything through it. It's just an insignificant...