Queen Elizabeth’s soft power in Asia went beyond the Commonwealth

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has in the past expressed support for his country becoming a republic, told the broadcaster ABC on Sunday that now was “not a time to talk about our system of government.”

“Quite clearly, this is a time of national mourning,” he said, against a backdrop of calls by Greens party leader Adam Bandt and others for Australia to ditch the U.K. monarchy.

The debate in Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries over their ties with the British monarchy will unfold as the distance from Elizabeth’s death grows. Charles has a different public persona to his mother and has previously been outspoken — sometimes contentiously — on political debates on subjects such as the environment.

In Asia, the new king will have to reckon with the absence of the personal bonds the queen forged during decades of trips to countries there. These included some — such as China — with whom the U.K. has difficult political relations.

Charles will also have to deal with pressure in some Commonwealth countries for apologies and reparations for British colonial abuses.

Imperial-era atrocities loomed over the pageant and statements of mutual appreciation during visits Elizabeth paid in 1961, 1983 and 1997 to India, where as many as 2 million people died in communal violence when the U.K. pulled out in 1947. On her last trip, to mark the 50th anniversary of independence, she finally broached the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in the northern city of Amritsar, when hundreds of unarmed civilians peacefully protesting colonial rule were gunned down on a British general’s orders.

“It is no secret that there have been some difficult episodes in our past — Jallianwala Bagh, which I shall visit tomorrow, is a distressing example,” Elizabeth said, before laying a wreath in Amritsar.

Elizabeth found the going more comfortable during three visits to Singapore, where the Cambridge-educated founding father Lee Kuan Yew modeled aspects of the new city-state on precepts proclaimed by the U.K., such as the rule of law.

During her last state visit, the queen stayed at the Raffles Hotel, an iconic white building preserved in its colonial style and named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who chose the island for an East India Company trading post in 1819.

But other U.K. royal trips to former British colonies showed the limits of such diplomacy. Occasional visits to Myanmar over the years by Princess Alexandra, Elizabeth’s cousin, and Princess Anne, her only daughter, failed to thaw frigid relations as the country spent much of its post-independence life under military dictatorship.

Ties have hit rock bottom this year. The latest military regime expelled Peter Vowles, the British ambassador designate, and jailed a former envoy, Vicky Bowman, and her husband, artist and former political prisoner Htein Lin, on immigration charges.