Blog: Defining Asia's 'Regions'

By Malcolm Cook, Program Director of East Asia at the Lowy Institute for International Policy

The latest East Asia Forum blogpost about Prime Minister Rudd's Asia Pacific Community (oops, community) idea by Peking University's Jia Qingguo underlines two of the challenges facing Australia from China's ongoing rise to East Asian and wider Asian regional leadership.

All countries divide the world into different regions and use this mental map of regions to shape their international engagement. Major powers, of course, can shape regional institutions more than others to match their mental maps. Fortunately for Australia, post-war Japanese political leaders have consistently expressed an Asia-Pacific view of the world with Japan, Australia, the US and Southeast Asia all included; the US was also comfortable with this mental map.