Bradley Perrett covered China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. He is a Mandarin-speaking Australian.
Before joining Aviation Week in 2006 he was a macroeconomics, politics and aerospace journalist with Reuters. Perrett holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Macquarie University, Sydney. He left Aviation Week in 2020.
“China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,” Beijing’s then foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, impatiently told Southeast Asian leaders looking for U.S. support in the South China Sea in 2010. The message was clear enough: they should do as they were told.
Despite China's apparent ambition to control just about all of the South China Sea, only two of the countries adjoining that body of water are clearly reacting with armament efforts—Vietnam strongly and the Philippines much less so.
Boeing is urging customers considering ordering the P-8 Poseidon maritime aircraft to move before U.S. Navy contracts for the type dry up this decade, pushing production prices higher.
