Richard Cullen
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Richard's recent articles
10 April 2025
The mother of all own goals?
Following the White House announcement of the “Liberation Day” tariffs, Andrew Tillett, writing in The Australian Financial Review, argued that, “Trump just gave China a free kick to tilt Asia in its favour”. (paywall) At Foreign Policy, the deputy editor, Amelia Lester, was wondering, at the same time, “Are Tariffs the End of the Australia-US Friendship”.(paywall)
9 April 2025
An arresting American Gaza challenge
Recent US commentary backing President Trump’s extraordinary American Gaza takeover project has regularly stressed how critics should come up with a better plan.
29 March 2025
AUKUS: Many chickens but no subs
John Menadue recently argued convincingly that the “AUKUS chickens were coming home to roost already”. Shortly thereafter, the Guardian helpfully reported that a “Trump pick for the Pentagon says selling submarines to Australia would be ‘crazy’ if Taiwan tensions flare”.
27 February 2025
Jerry Cohen: An inspiring scholar
The leading US journal Foreign Policy has just published an extended profile, written by Jonathan Landreth, of Professor Jerome A. Cohen, entitled: “The Last China Hand. Jerry Cohen will be 95 in July this year. The article lucidly explains how he “has spent a lifetime trying to understand the People’s Republic of China.
24 February 2025
Can Europe dare to do the smart thing and partner with China in Africa?
Europe’s relationship with Africa encompasses significant grim history. Yet the continent is more central to how Europe’s future will look than ever. Meanwhile, China’s remarkably constructive relationship with Africa today presents a potential primary mode for substantially enhancing Africa’s prospects. This geopolitical fact also represents a crucial opportunity for Europe to partner with China and confidently shape its own future. Provided, that is, Europe hasn’t, influenced by the US, crushed its capacity to act in its own best interests.
19 February 2025
US’ ‘China Initiative’ would be counterproductive
The “China Initiative” was the name of a controversial program run by the US Department of Justice, which was introduced in late 2018 during the first Trump administration.
14 February 2025
The lawless West
The low regard in which the Global West is held is intensifying. The second Trump administration is not the cause of this. It is simply accelerating this ominous process by openly embracing a lawless, imperial contempt for primary international and metropolitan governance rules, norms and conventions in response to the persistent retreat of American global dominance. Meanwhile, the Global South clearly observes how America’s traditional allies remain overwhelmingly loyal — or silent — as the US persists in asserting its role as their exceptionally unworthy leader.
31 January 2025
Is America marching in the final footsteps of the British empire?
Yu-Book Lim used to head a Singapore think tank and was Executive Chairman of IMC Plantations before that. He has just published an extended, thought-provoking essay: “Xi Jinping’s “Once-in-a-Century Upheaval” Prophecy.
29 January 2025
How Europe is degrading Europe
The European Idea is anchored by the desire to banish war from the continent forever and foster collective development by creating a quasi-federated Europe. This idea is embodied in the step-by-step creation of the European Union (EU). That idea today looks exceptionally compromised, not least due to growing European divergence about how the EU’s best interests can be secured. Moreover, despite its fundamentally destabilising impact, American power ruthlessly shaping this outcome is compliantly welcomed by European elites. Any “Euro-tiger” image once projected by the EU in its prime has now vanished.
15 January 2025
Why Ukraine is losing ground
An instructive new article entitled, “Why is Ukraine losing ground? Mobilisation crisis and command failures exposed,” has recently been published online by Euromaidan Press. Its cogency is amplified by the fact that it is, fundamentally, a pro-Ukraine essay.
8 January 2025
China and America in 2050
In early December, 2024, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) hosted a lucid dialogue entitled: “China in 2050 – Two Perspectives”. The presenters were recognised China scholars, Professor Rana Mitter of Harvard University and Professor Daniel Bell from HKU. “What might be a realistic and desirable future for China” was a primary question addressed. Although the focus was fundamentally on China, the discussion implicitly raised the question of where the US may find itself in 2050.
31 December 2024
Western tourists rediscover Chinese mainland, HK
Fifty years ago, I enjoyed an overnight stay in Hong Kong while on my way from Melbourne to visit the United Kingdom for the first time. Hong Kong was already established as a “tourist and shopping paradise” by then. I remember being somewhat bewildered by the crowds of people everywhere I went. But it was still a marvellous experience, and I came away with an excellent new Japanese camera and portable cassette recorder, which cost half what they did in Australia.
30 December 2024
Will America ever curb its love of warfare?
After meeting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris recently, US president-elect Donald Trump called for an immediate ceasefire in the Ukraine war, according to a report in The Guardian, adding that, “Ukraine would like to make a deal” to end its war with Russia. Newsmax reported that at about the same time, Trump wished to end “the madness” in Ukraine through negotiation.
10 December 2024
Manufacturing consent with a pivotal signifier
Most of the world believes, today, that the Western use of the term, terrorism, is wilfully warped to advance a destructive political agenda. This same manipulative usage remains indispensably effective in the West, however. It fundamentally underpins, for example, the monstrous process lately identified by Stuart Rees as the “normalisation of atrocity.”
7 December 2024
Chomsky is right says Professor Walt
The wide-ranging political views of the exceptional, international public intellectual, Noam Chomsky, have recently been searchingly assessed in the journal, Foreign Policy, by Professor Stephen M Walt, in an article entitled, “Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right”.
6 December 2024
Western democracy now finds itself in a parlous state
In 1947, former British prime minister Winston Churchill famously observed that: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
16 November 2024
Foolish anxiety in the global west
Around 18 months ago, The Economist applied uncommon energy to advance the narrative that the US economy was in outstandingly good shape. Very recently, we have been instructed by the same influential British weekly that, “America’s economy is bigger and better than ever” [paywall]: Which makes one wonder, what primary anxieties are prompting these distinctive, recurrent expressions of avid admiration?
15 November 2024
"An integral part of China": America, Taiwan and Elon Musk
The outcome in the recent US presidential election may yet push Taiwan in directions at variance with those advocated in a new article published in the America journal Foreign Affairs, which argues that: “China’s Gray-Zone Offensive Against Taiwan is Backfiring”.
4 November 2024
Remarkable Australian comparative analysis supports BDS
A very long line has been drawn between two dots: Israel and China, across what looks like a credibility chasm, by the vocal Australian Coalition MP Barnaby Joyce. But his recent interesting Israel-China comparative analysis implicitly lends robust support to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement directed against Israel, though this may not have been intended.
31 October 2024
Lessons for Hong Kong from Australia’s remarkable international education sector
One crucial policy initiative outlined by Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee Ka-chiu, in his latest annual Policy Address is the project to establish the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as an international tertiary education hub.
28 October 2024
When the White House goes to war
Michael Hirsh, a prominent columnist for Foreign Policy has just published an instructive review in that journal (partial paywall) of Bob Woodward’s forceful new book “War”. The review is entitled: “What a New Book’s Explosive Revelations Tell Us About Biden, Trump, and Putin”. Curiously, the Hirsh book review rounds out to its Biden-elevating, JFK-comparison without referring to John Mearsheimer’s directly relevant seminal article “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault”.
21 October 2024
Sanitising genocide
The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) has just published “The Most Moral Army”- an excoriating review of Israel’s continuous reliance on deceitful medical imagery to disinfect its horrific abuse of power in Gaza.
19 October 2024
America selects green reverse gear
America was once a marketplace leader in so many areas. Now the US faces a range of pivotal global markets focused on a greener future, dominated by China, that are developing rapidly without it.
15 October 2024
From Guernica to Gaza
The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, in Spain, in 1937 “heralded a terrible new age of warfare” that, almost 90 years later, remains graphically notorious as a “wanton man-made holocaust”. Over the last twelve months, Israel has made exceptional progress towards crafting a similar enduring understanding of the hellscape it has created in Gaza.
8 October 2024
The extraordinary warring states history of the global West
History confirms how the present, destructive militaristic culture of the US-led Atlantic alliance stands on the shoulders of well over a thousand years of Western immersion in extraordinary levels of horrific warfare.
3 October 2024
The impact of China's rising soft power
A recent article in the US journal Foreign Affairs, written by Daniel Mattingly of Yale University argues persuasively that: “China’s Soft Sell of Autocracy is Working”.
29 September 2024
Suppose Australia was more independent and less dumb
Look at how favourably situated Australia is in the world. As the foundations were put in place for the Asian Century, most profoundly by China, Australia was in the right place at the right time and it benefitted inordinately. Looking forward, as the rise of China continues and a range of Asian countries, including India, Indonesia and Vietnam, look set to follow suit, further marvellous opportunities beckon. And our response: Australia is now turning itself into a massively militarised American satellite state. How did we let this happen?
13 September 2024
Look at who is running Israel
In a recent significant article in the US journal, Foreign Policy, David E Rosenberg, the economics editor of Haaretz, clarifies how a minority of religious extremists have come to wield so much power in Israel today. It is a chilling, informative read.
5 September 2024
Tucker Carlson and Jeffrey Sachs confirm mainstream Western media mostly a shabby cabaret
A recent, comprehensive social-media interview has provided an acute reminder of how hard it now is to imagine certain flagship, Western current affairs programs drowning their cherished war-drums in a lead weighted bag and applying themselves to investigating pivotal geopolitical challenges with intelligent thoroughness (as Four Corners can still manage (see:Inside Iran: The proxy war on the brink of erupting | Four Corners).
29 August 2024
American reflections on global hegemony
Some US commentators are advocating a recalibration of America’s full-spectrum global posture, while others, including Condoleezza Rice, energetically beg to differ – naturally for the good of the world.
25 August 2024
Israel's perilous decay
Stephen M Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, recently published an article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy, entitled: “The Dangerous Decline in Israeli Strategy”. He argues that Israel, the US and their supporters are wedded to long-honed, conspicuously bad policies, which “is a prescription for unending trouble, if not disaster”.
14 August 2024
Shocking news: China is kicking more global goals
Is China mired in economic misery while bogged down by old habits- or very successfully developing its exceptional manufacturing prowess as it expands and consolidates its influence across the Global South (and well beyond)? Never mind any apparent contradiction, one leading global weekly answers yes and yes to these two questions.
5 August 2024
The ill-starred consequences of America's Chinese chip war
An interesting new article in the prominent American journal, “Foreign Affairs”, by three academics from Georgetown University, argues that “Washington should place less emphasis on slowing down China and more on improving its own innovative prowess.”
2 August 2024
The great reversal: Britain and China
Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He recently spoke about his important new book, “The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400 Year Contest for Power” (Yale University Press, 2024) with Richard Cullen. A fundamental reality, which this stimulating book stresses, is how significant British interaction with China pre-dates the British takeover of Hong Kong Island, in 1842, by around 250 years. The British colonisation of Hong Kong was an important turning-point during the 400-year contest captured in the title – but not more than that.
19 July 2024
AUKUS submarine deal will damage Australia’s interests
The now-notorious AUKUS agreement was secretly conceived between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States prior to being publicly announced in September 2021 by the Morrison government in Canberra. It was aimed at eventually allowing Australia to acquire at least eight nuclear-powered submarines at an exceptionally high, initial estimated cost of up to A$368 billion ($249.1 billion), with the joint assistance of the US and the UK.
1 July 2024
What China could teach America
Some years ago, the internationally respected, American academic, Professor Joseph Weiler, argued that there are three types of governance legitimacy: process or input (democratic) legitimacy, performance or output legitimacy, and vision legitimacy. Now a prominent Harvard academic has employed a related analytical framework to compare the contemporary operational performance of the US and China, especially with respect to foreign policy.
19 June 2024
America’s anti-China psyop programs a 24/7 menace to the Philippines
Major Western news outlets are currently reporting how the Pentagon ran a secret anti-vaccination campaign in order to undermine China’s life-saving COVID vaccination programme in the Philippines – and beyond – from the spring of 2020 to mid-2021.
9 June 2024
Could the rise of China eclipse the enlightenment
According to the dominant Western narrative, the history of the entire modern world has been prodigiously shaped by Western historical turning points beginning with the Renaissance and running through the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the science-driven, first Industrial Revolution. A recent, US-published book, “China’s Age of Abundance: Origins Ascendence and Aftermath” by Professor Wang Feng, from the University of California, argues that the Rise of China needs to be added to this revered Western turning-point list.
3 June 2024
Israel's Gaza hallucination
One reason Israel is constantly criticised, even from within its obedient posse of Global West backers, is that it has failed to articulate what it has planned for the “day after” the completion of its Gaza-cleansing, genocide project. The respected historian, Adam Tooze, recently revealed that future planning for “Gaza 2035” has, however, been a focus of intense, surreal Israeli attention.
27 May 2024
Washington's hope: will rabid penguins eat the BRI?
China keeps building infrastructure in other countries that is needed by those other countries. Surely this is sinister. But all is not lost. As Joe Biden wonders if cannibals may have eaten his uncle Ambrose during World War II, Washington discovers remarkable new instruments in its geopolitical tool kit.
26 May 2024
The New York Times explains how gangsters now govern Israel
The rather timid headline for a recent aggressive story in the New York Times (NYT) introduced a detailed investigation by that newspaper of how the governance of Israel has been captured by brutalised backers of apartheid.
19 May 2024
War is Peace
“War is Peace” was an anchoring concept within the astonishing dystopia portrayed in George Orwell’s “1984”. This extraordinary, ground-breaking novel was a warning to the world, which drew on Orwell’s deep understanding of Stalin’s USSR. But even Orwell, in 1984, did not conceive of a Nobel Peace Prize recommendation pivoting on active preparations for a new war. For that instructive breakthrough, we are, in 2024, in debt to America.
7 May 2024
Washington's new man in Manila eases the burden on Canberra
In an essay entitled “Australia’s Choice” published in Australian Foreign Affairs in 2022, the leading Singaporean commentator on international relations, Kishore Mahbubani, highlighted how Australia needed to choose whether to be “a bridge between East and West in the Asian Century – or the tip of a spear projecting Western power into Asia” It transpires that certain events may have eased this pressure to choose.
5 May 2024
China: Beyond socialism and capitalism - LSE Economist Keyu Jin explains the Middle Kingdom
The Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis in the US recently hosted the leading economist, Professor Keyu Jin, from the London School of Economics, where she spoke insightfully on where China has come from – and why – and where it is headed – and why.
16 April 2024
Shielding the dollar by bashing China
Ian Bremner argues convincingly that the American Dollar remains embedded as the global reserve currency since: “you can’t replace something with nothing”. Nevertheless, intensifying US misuse and abuse of the dollar’s standing has expanded the worldwide search for one or more “alternative somethings”. Now an intriguing argument has been advanced that a central reason Western scolding of China remains so incessant is to help protect the vulnerable dollar.
6 April 2024
Morally damaged America still wagging its righteous finger
Very recently, the leading British daily, The Guardian, ran remarkably informing side-by-side stories covering official United States perspectives on the Gaza genocide.
23 March 2024
Geopolitical grand larceny and its risks
One of the Ten Commandments says, with awkward bluntness: Thou Shalt Not Steal. Predictably, some are inclined to read certain qualifications in to this prohibition. As it happens, this sort of adaptive-thinking underpins arguments made in a recent article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy.
11 March 2024
Scholar or ideologue?
The Economist, a leading British weekly, enjoys wide global readership. It recently covered the thoughts and written work of two scholars, both Chinese, one now government-based, in Beijing and the other based in an academic institution in the US. Only the former, was branded as an ideologue however. Paraphrasing Professor Julius Sumner Miller: Why is this so?