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
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?
10 March 2024
China and America in the Middle East
An interesting essay that takes a critical but well-informed look at the development of Chinas Middle East policy-settings recently appeared in the journal Foreign Policy. You can read the article - written by Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Washington-based Stimson Centre.
9 March 2024
Thinking intensely about the holocaust, Israel and Gaza
The vengeful, scheming, genocidal response unleashed since October last year in Gaza, by Israel, has prompted a profoundly intensified global review of the punishing history related to the establishment of the State of Israel and its colonial-settler expansion ever since 1948.
1 March 2024
Pearls and Irritations in the Pearl River Delta
Pearls and Irritations is widely read outside Australia. In particular, its content is now reviewed by certain media writing and presenting in Chinese in Hong Kong.
25 February 2024
Amidst rising American poverty, $6M per missile response in US war on Yemen
In October last year, Time Magazine reported a serious lift in poverty levels across America. You can read the full chilling report here.
23 February 2024
A remarkable Hong Kong media story
In Hong Kong, a vibrant Chinese media-oasis is forming within the vast territory long staked-out by the exceptionally dominant Mainstream Western Media.
17 February 2024
Does China want Trump to win in 2024?
Agathe Demarais is a senior policy fellow on geoeconomics at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a Foreign Policy columnist. She recently argued in that journal (with a clear anti-Trump tilt)-that China is Rooting for Trump
12 February 2024
What's ruining America?
David Brooks describes himself as a moderate-conservative. Born in Canada but long resident in America, he is a respected, outspoken columnist for the New York Times and a range of other outlets. He has now explained what he believes is devastating America.
4 February 2024
The BRI gets it right
Chinas Belt and Road initiative (BRI) operates on a huge scale and is the focus of rarely halted negative coverage across many prominent outlets in the Global West. A new extended article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy, however, provides a measured, informed exception to this general rule.
3 February 2024
The state of Israel: A critical Swedish assessment
Around two decades ago, the Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, took an increasingly close interest in the wretched condition of Palestinians living under punishing Israeli domination. What he saw convinced him that Israel was maintaining an apartheid state very like those he had previously visited, at length, in Southern Africa.
16 January 2024
The remarkable global impact of the Chinese car industry: Trade beats war every time
Around 25 years ago, wise commentators said China may, in due course, be able to produce acceptable basic, manufactured white-goods but making motor cars that would sell globally was not conceivable. Far too many complex inputs went into making a modern family sedan compared to a refrigerator. As for landing a rover on the Moon and Mars unimaginable. Those rovers successfully landed in 2013 and 2021 respectively. And now China has become the largest builder and exporter of motor cars on the planet. The Global West, especially, is widely surprised, indeed, startled.
13 January 2024
Henry George: more comebacks than Dame Nelly Melba
Henry George (1839 1897) was a remarkable, self-taught radical American political-economist who developed a theory of land taxation, which evolved to become, in essence, a programme for applying a single, substantial annual tax on all land but not on improvements to the land such as buildings - while abolishing all other taxes.
29 December 2023
The American war on global capitalism
In January, 2023, Ezra Klein from the New York Times interviewed Yuen Yuen Ang. Professor Ang is a widely published, China scholar at Johns Hopkins University in the US. Towards the end of this long interview, Ang provided an acute summary of what US-China competition came down to. What matters most, she argued, is: Which of these two countries is going to make the best use of their political system to solve the problems of capitalism? Less than a year after Professor Ang laid out her concise test, America has verified that it is currently the one least able to...
26 November 2023
Living with the Sino nemesis
Chinas economy today is around 50 times larger, in real terms, than it was 50 years ago. A World Bank report in 2022 confirmed that during this period, China lifted at least 800 million people out of extreme poverty, contributing close to 75% of the total reduction in extreme poverty, globally.
21 October 2023
China sees remarkable growth in global soft power
Almost all geopolitical soft power explanations draw on the seminal analysis by the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, who promoted the term in his 1990 bookBound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. At that time, he wrote, When one country gets other countries to want what it wants (this) might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.
20 October 2023
Return of the Wild West: America was built on genocide
Gravity-defying Western double-standards are now on worldwide display, as the US and its liegemen line-up to support a vengeful Israel to the hilt. Which prompts this question: what is the difference, today, between the universal human rights gospel of the Global West and a Potemkin Village? Answer: Increasingly little.
13 October 2023
Israel's latest terrible war
Michael Hirsh has just published a withering review, in Foreign Policy, of the lead-up to horrific war now underway between Israel and Hamas entitled Netanyahus Road to War.
4 October 2023
American anxiety
Bad-tempered coverage of China continues to flourish across the entire US media. It ranges from fire-breathing to pearl-clutching. Most commentators look daggers at Beijing in a dozen different over-cooked ways and especially at the Communist Party of China while reminding readers and viewers of Americas continuing paramount superpower status.
12 September 2023
Fukushimas nuclear waste: Stigmatising Russia, approving Japan
Twenty years ago, Japan demanded Russia halt disposal of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. What changed? Is it the case that there is felonious nuclear waste and respectable nuclear waste? Japan seems to believe that this is so and the Mainstream Media understands why this narrative may deserve its support.
1 September 2023
Life on a geopolitical fault line
Hong Kong can do nothing right, it seems. But its not the communitys fault: it lives on a fault line, trying to balance between two much larger, more powerful entities. Richard Cullen recalls a different occasion when two big powers, the US and the UK, had a difference of opinion. Often, much smaller communities end up paying the price.
16 August 2023
How Pearls and Irritations rectifies distortion
Pearls and Irritations has played a fundamental role in providing an internationally recognised and widely read platform where serious arguments can now challenge the shallow, rancorous Hong Kong denigration agenda advanced by the MWM.
22 July 2023
$1 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban
The United States left Afghanistan in a state of dangerous and monumental disorder in 2021. Soon after, it made matters still worse by confiscating the meagre foreign exchange reserves of one of the world's most deprived countries shamelessly claiming that it was advancing certain human rights while doing so.
3 July 2023
Why Australia should never become involved in a Taiwan war
Australia should do all it can to foster a long-term, peaceful resolution of the acute, multi-decade dispute spanning the Taiwan Strait. But Chey and Keating are unmistakeably correct on this issue: Australia should never become involved in any war over Taiwan.
11 June 2023
Harvard China academic takes on the Economist
Even without Chat-bot assistance, it is fun to look up quotations and their origins online and then discover, for example, this quote reportedly from Winston Churchill: The only statistics you can trust are the ones you have falsified yourself.
12 May 2023
Intriguing tale of Chinas speedy pandemic recovery
No jurisdiction has managed a flawless COVID response, says Richard Cullen. But China, despite its imperfect COVID management experience, did better than any other major jurisdiction and, in fact, displayed many examples of early-best-practice unseen elsewhere. Exasperatingly, the West found, yet again, that it there is much it can learn from China and then, naturally, it got back to lecturing China on how to do things properly!
4 May 2023
The American version of "one country, two systems"
Over a period of decades, the US has refined and applied its own exceptional version of One Country, Two Systems. What is most curious is that this has materialised within plain sight yet it has largely remained undetected, as such.
29 April 2023
France bets on future by backing best global alternative
Recently, the former senior Singaporean diplomat and respected geopolitical consultant Kishore Mahbubani offered Australia some acute advice: Stop betting on the past. Mahbubanis article was figuratively bookended with visits to Beijing by President Emmanuel Macron of France (shortly before publication) and President Lula da Silva of Brazil (soon after publication).
25 April 2023
Does the Vatican's road to Beijing run through Hong Kong?
An invitation to visit Beijing was issued late last year to Stephen Chow, Sau-yan, the Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong. His recently completed visit is the first by a Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong to the Mainland since the recovery of Hong Kong by China in July, 1997. It may help provide a strengthened framework for the continuing dialogue between the Vatican and Beijing as they each proceed with their diplomatic long-game.
16 March 2023
The return of the paranoid American foreign policy
When a severe political cancer returns after a period of remission, we have a recurrence. In serious cases, cells from the original cancer regrow and spread virulently. One of Americas best-known commentators, Fareed Zakaria, recently compared the current grave dysfunctionality and panic-driven decision making in Washington to the worst of the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
16 February 2023
China formulates its own future
Despite countless Western bossy-boots beavering away in the media and beyond, generating worst-case projections as they strain to create a collective storyboard for China: The Disaster Movie, China, exasperatingly, keeps successfully pressing on towards its own clearly considered, affirmative future.
5 February 2023
Australia's Taiwan nightmare
Australia has been persuaded, enticed and strongarmed into taking gravely dangerous decisions. But Australia is a sovereign state and its fingerprints are, ultimately, all over the formation of its terrible abdication of national independence.
6 January 2023
The CIA can't make make up its mind who to back in Venezuela!
You need to fix your eye on the ball if you want keep up with the frocking and de-frocking of Americas offshore political proteges especially in Venezuela.
4 January 2023
Why Japan is not an acceptable military ally
There is some terrible double-foolishness afoot, that is certain to be widely noticed beyond the Western bubble. Australia is stepping forward with gusto to secure its position as a best-military-buddy not only with America, the most warlike nation in history, according to Jimmy Carter, but also with Japan, one of the 20th centurys most infamous warmongers, presently rearming with alarming relish. You are, as they say, known by the company you keep.
26 December 2022
Public transport system is one of Hong Kong's wonders
Bloomberg recently reported that Hong Kong has just been ranked as having the best metropolitan public transit system in the world, ahead of Zurich, Stockholm, Singapore and Helsinki. The study on which the report was based surveyed 60 major cities worldwide. It was carried out by the Oliver Wyman Forum and the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
22 December 2022
Canberra and Beijing The last fifty years of mutual benefits
The fiftieth anniversary, this year, of Canberras recognition of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China, has triggered many reflections.
13 December 2022
Sabre rattling in the US department of attack
With America pivoting from a war on terror to provoking China, why not cut to the chase and change the name of the US Department of Defence to the Department of Attack?
12 December 2022
How sound is the Ukraine debate?
Stephen M. Walt understands the deep anger felt over the Russian invasion but believes the Ukraine debate needs to be shifted away from its distorting over-reliance on moral outrage. Walt perceives a profound need for more dispassionate thinking.
1 December 2022
Divisive China-threat politics deliver defeat in Taiwan
In 2019, President Tsai Ing-wen led the DPP to record-setting election victories in Taiwan by megaphoning the China-Threat. This same approach has crashed badly for the DPP in the recent local elections in what can only be read as a rebuke to US China baiting and a win for regional peace.
26 November 2022
Americas Taiwan endgame options
We could hardly expect, nowadays, that the US would ever have Chinas best interests at heart (or vice versa). But ultimately, neither does the US have the best interests of Taiwan at heart. It is the perceived hegemonic security interests of a fearful America that unquestionably dominate how America identifies what matters most of all: US geopolitical interests in Taiwan.
24 November 2022
The central importance of Chinas common prosperity
Nikkei diplomatic correspondent Ken Moriyasu debunks the notion that Xi Jinping has been set up as some sort of President-for-life, stressing that Xis tenure is conspicuously dependent on maintaining overall performance legitimacy at a time when head winds look set to dominate.
10 November 2022
Taiwan endgames
The term endgame was originally applied to the final stages of a multifaceted matching of minds in the likes of chess or bridge. The term has also been widely used in politics to introduce and debate outcome investigations, as in, the Cold War endgame, the globalisation endgame and the Ukraine War endgame. This article considers the two primary perspectives, that of China and Taiwan, on the basic shape of Taiwan endgame alternatives.
29 October 2022
The remarkable resilience of Hong Kong
Vibrancy and efficiency combined with a particularly safe living environment all remain evident in Hong Kong in a way not commonly seen in other large, modern global cities. Still, the series of tests which the HKSAR faces today are acutely demanding. This, though, resonates with the position faced in most jurisdictions worldwide. Hong Kong, meanwhile, has an extended track-record of candidly accepting matters as they are, over time, prior to regrouping and moving forward affirmatively.
19 October 2022
Western anxiety attacks intensify with the Chinese National Congress
On October 16, President Xi Jinping delivered his report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). During the weeks prior to this, we witnessed a conspicuous intensification of Sino-phobic censures from across the Mainstream Western Media, triggered by the approaching National Congress. Leading commentators and core Western politicians have been straining to make themselves heard above this recharged hullabaloo.
15 October 2022
On The Beach a haunting evocation of nuclear war
Professor Emeritus Richard Falk, from Princeton University, argues that, nuclear dangers have become more salient than at any time at least in this century. More than sixty years ago the outstanding novelist, Nevil Shute, accentuated the same profound hazard in his most considered work, On the Beach.
27 September 2022
Almost 90% of the world is not following America on Ukraine
A remarkable recent article in Newsweek, has documented concisely and convincingly how: Nearly 90 Percent of the World Isnt Following Us on Ukraine and what consequences follow from this.
22 September 2022
Fostering trade beats making war every time
It is over a month since Nancy Pelosis vexing visit to Taipei and Chinas disapproving response, which included large scale air and naval exercises around Taiwan. This ill-omened stopover by the third-ranking person in the US political hierarchy ineptly created, amongst other things, further acute doubt about Washingtons continuing commitment to the one-China principle.
14 September 2022
Is Hong Kong experiencing a Teacher Exodus? Time to correct the record
Is Hong Kongs world class education system really seeing an exodus of teaching staff? Are reductions in staffing levels linked to political crackdowns and the COVID 19 Pandemic? Not so fast. Lets correct the record.
10 September 2022
Entrenched political polarisation in America
Has the Republican Party gone completely rogue and is the American experiment beyond repair?