Sally Percival Wood

‘CHOU GAGS CRITICS IN BANDOENG or how the media framed Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference, 1955

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the worlds press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the Peoples Republic of China. Premier Zhous every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’. The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the Wests perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmers Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media networks role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

Timor-Leste: From INTERFET to ASEAN

At varying levels of intensity, Timor-Leste has repeatedly been a focus of the Indonesia-Australia relationship since the early 1970s. While other Western governments were supportive of Indonesia’s forced annexation of Portuguese Timor during the Cold War, Australia was the only country to offer de jure recognition of Indonesia’s occupation. Yet by 1999, bilateral tensions were at an historic peak as Australian-led peacekeeping forces entered Timor-Leste in the wake of a UN-backed referendum, which saw 78.5 percent vote for independence. Fifteen years later, relations with its two giant neighbors remain the focus of Timor-Leste’s foreign policy orientation: Indonesia is its largest trading partner, and Australia remains its largest bilateral aid donor.

Australia and ASEAN: A Marriage of Convenience?

There is no doubt that Australia and ASEAN have developed a productive working relationship over their 40 years of Dialogue Partnership. Their many intersections of engagement—through formal ASEAN processes, free trade agreements (FTAs), memoranda of understanding, and across a range of sectors including education, tourism, cultural heritage, and the arts—have been documented over the last decade.1 After the Asian Financial Crisis (1997–98), and the formalization of processes such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF, 1994), the East Asia Summit (EAS, 2004), and the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meetings-Plus (ADMM+, 2011), Australia has been keen to maximize future economic opportunities—through bilateral and multilateral FTAs, for example—and to play its part in securing peace and stability in the region—through leadership of initiatives such as the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in 1992 and (though controversially) INTERFET (International Force East Timor) in 1999, plus a multitude of arrangements such as those in place with the Australian Federal Police. This expanding network of formal engagement is valuable on both a functional basis and in terms of guaranteeing Australia’s ongoing goodwill and cooperation with its region. Over 40 years these reliable and steady ties have become, a Malaysian economist observed, like “a long dependable marriage.”2 It is an image that can conjure a picture of either close mutual understanding or of a fairly dull union bound by routine and duty.