The Asian 6 – Japan, Korea, China, India, Indonesia, and Australia – within the G20 have emerged as a regional leadership group. Coordination among the Asian 6 has been an increasingly important feature in their approach to the global dialogues, and at Pittsburgh and in the lead-up to Seoul (we expect). Together with the United States and perhaps Canada and Russia, the Asian 6 appear like the potential core of an Asia Pacific community for security dialogues, the key gap in regional architecture on which Rudd’s idea focused. Woolcott’s consultations reveal three things clearly: there will be no rush towards a new regional arrangement. There is a need to link whatever is invented to what is there now, in the form of APEC and the East Asia Summit. And more discussion is needed about what is sensible and how to do it – for which purpose Rudd has convened a meeting in Australia in December. Meetings in Tokyo and Seoul before that will make important contributions to that dialogue and the EAFQ will undoubtedly come back to the debate again. Woolcott concludes with some justification: ‘I believe the initiative is continuing to gather momentum. In 1989, I thought APEC was an idea whose time had come. Twenty years on – in 2009 – I believe that another Australian regional initiative, that is the development of an Asia Pacific community, based on fostering habits of cooperation, is an idea whose time is coming.’

Peter YuanCai’s has an important piece today on the crisis in leadership at independent Chinese business magazine Caijing. He notes the huge importance of a credible and independent media voice to China’s ambitions to becoming a responsible stakeholder in the international system. He is right. A magazine, such as Caijing, reporting objectively and critically from a Chinese perspective, is more likely to garner international understanding and support of China’s position and difficulties than is the tightly controlled Chinese official media however valiantly it might try.