Hello friends!
No Malaysia update today — have some thorough looks in the works for the next few weeks.
I would like to flag the mass arrest of Malaysian LGBT attendees at a Halloween party Saturday night. This is something we will dig deeper into shortly. There is, understandably, a lot of rage and emotion that this would occur at all, let alone during the election period in which LGBT Malaysians are often demonised for votes. I’m certainly not the best person to weigh in on this so I’m very keen to bring an original piece in later this week.
Also, I’ve abandoned my region-in-two-newsletters approach of the last few weeks. It just didn’t feel right to me. Give me a yell if you have a few any which way, always happy to reassess.
ALSO! I tried to do a fun inbox-zero thing and deleted two emails from people in Chiang Mai. Please let me know if that was you. Happy to shout the first Chang in apologies.
See you then,
Erin Cook
🇻🇳 Old friends meet again
Communist Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong is in Beijing until Wednesday after accepting an invite from Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“There is no more opportune time for a communist leader to congratulate another newly reelected communist leader. Vietnam is taking this opportunity to confirm China as its most important diplomatic partner,” Nguyen Thanh Trung from Fulbright University Vietnam told Nikkei Asia.
Nian Peng, from the Research Centre for Asian Studies in China, wrote for the Diplomat that it may go beyond reaffirming communist ties. US Prez Joe Biden will be in the region later in November for the slew of multinat meetings in Thailand and Cambodia and is planning a visit to Vietnam. Therefore: “Trong needs to visit China before Biden’s Vietnam trip, so as to convince China that the Sino-Vietnamese relationship is still the priority of Hanoi’s diplomacy.”
It’s Xi’s first major meeting with a foreign leader since the Congress and this piece from Bloomberg lays out a busy itinerary for him for the rest of the year, which will also include the APEC and Asean summits in Thailand.
Vietnam has such an intriguing, compelling relationship with both of these enormous states so I’m really looking forward to further coverage and analysis later in the month.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dari Mulut ke Mulut to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.