Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

Where War Could Begin

No shots were fired, no one was injured, and the most potent weapon employed was a water hose. By the standards of modern war, Sunday’s encounter between a US surveillance vessel and a group of Chinese naval ships in the South China Sea, was a drop in the ocean – but 48 hours later the ripples were still spreading.

The Pentagon accused the Chinese of “harassment” in international waters; Beijing denounced the Americans for operating illegally in its exclusive economic zone. Most strikingly, the price of oil rose by $3 a barrel. What is it about this particular patch of ocean that generates such heat and anxiety over an apparently trivial incident?

[Click on it for a larger version of the spooky black map.]

Days of the Boar: Predictions for 2007

[Madame Sosostris, the renowned clairvoyant, is very bunged up when I call on her, but even dosed up on Sudafed and Flu Strength Lemsip she remains one of the most brilliantly gifted ladies in the expanded Europe Union, and her Tarot pack is (for want of a better word) wicked.

Her parlour is in a narrow gritty street in Shoreditch, a quarter of minicab offices and kebab shops, unencroached upon by rising rents and yuppification. A mute man in his sixties (said to be Madame S's son by a famous matinee idol) answers my ring and leads me into the dim room where she sits, an ancient figure wreathed in scarves, her black eyes sparkling in a mask of powder and mascara. She croaks a greeting, and directs me to the leather armchair at her side. A cup of bitter tea is offered in a brittle China cup. I hand over the agreed amount which she counts with supple fingers.

"So, my dear," she wheezes. "What's it to be? To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits? To report the behaviour of the sea monster? Describe the horoscope? Haruspicate or scry?"

"I seek, Madame, to know what will transpire in the Orient in the twelvemonth ahead."

"In the Orient, eh?" she says, shuffling the Tarot deck. Cards flash and are covered, some of them familiar to me. The drowned Phoenician Sailor; Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks; the man with three staves; the one-eyed merchant. "I do not find The Hanged Man," she says in a tone of puzzlement. "Curious, in the circumstances."

Here, then, are Madame Sosostris's predictions for 2007, the Year of the Boar.]

Assembly of Goons

Gatherings of international leaders inevitably contain a good deal of ghastliness, but those in Asia are the most stomach-churning of all. Perhaps it is because the tension between the participants is so much more obvious than in Europe or the Americas, and the conciliatory guff about unity of purpose, common agendas and convergence all the more unconvincing and ridiculous.

The cheesiness is never on more obvious display than in the class photo which has become the traditional climax to these pageants of uneasiness. The latest examples come from the array of leaders at the Asean summit and the East Asian Summit which followed it in Kuala Lumpur this week. There they are, arms linked in an impersonation of chumminess, struggling to conceal the indignity of it all beneath goon-like smiles: South Korea’s Roh Moo Hyun, with his hair dye and Botox; Lieutenant General Soe Win, prime minister of the Burmese narco-state, smarming with Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong (who demonstrated a contradictory attitude to drug smugglers earlier this month by hanging another trafficker, a young Australian); and Japan’s Junichiro Koizumi, managing not to look even slightly concerned that the leaders of the two most important nations at the meeting, China and South Korea, refused to speak to him.