I tend to find that a blog­ging ennui sets in when in New Zealand. I have no idea why — per­haps the weather, the heav­ier food, the extended social routes, the lack of a per­sonal work­ing space, or per­haps just because.

In 2012 I’ve spent some 2 1/2 of the 4 months to date in the coun­try and blogged very sporadically.

I think i’m just mak­ing excuses.

So, here I am back in South East Asia and you imme­di­ately get the urge to scrib­ble again. I guess sit­ting in the midst of a aspir­ing cold war with the poten­tial to go hot on the edges does focus the mind some­what. I don’t think it will — go hot that is — but you do some­times won­der if there are those beyond the region who would like noth­ing more.

Two things came at me — both Asia cen­tric yet glob­ally sig­nif­i­cant — which I had a mind to say some­thing about, and to link because they’re clearly related.

Read the rest of this entry

So the United States wants to re-engage the Asia Pacific region.

In the wake of the wind-down and rel­a­tive fail­ure of the war/post-war peri­ods in Iraq (ok — lets call it a defeat: the dom­i­nant power in that region is now Iran, the insur­gents are either run­ning parts of Iraq or hold the power bal­ance in the gov­ern­ment, the coun­try is eth­ni­cally cleansed, there is still no fuck­ing elec­tric­ity and the US have been forced to hud­dle their remain­ing troops in client gulf states) and the impend­ing draw­down in Afghanistan, likely with sim­i­lar results to Iraq, the United States has now decided to trans­fer part of and flex its not incon­sid­er­able mus­cle in the region, argu­ing that it is mak­ing up for lost time as it lost focus over the past decade.

Despite the facade of unity at the recent Bali ASEAN lead­ers gig, there is clear and obvi­ous dis­quiet across much of the region. Regard­less of  this it’s pretty obvi­ous that the US intends to do what the US intends to do and to hell with most every­one else. As always.

There are sev­eral pos­si­ble rea­sons I can think of.

Firstly the United States is now a per­ma­nent war econ­omy — it main­tains a mas­sive mil­i­tary machine, a vast intel­li­gence appa­ra­tus and an even big­ger military-industrial and sup­port base and needs to con­tinue main­taing these in order the fore­stall a crash that would dwarf 2008 if it didn’t. Mil­lions of peo­ple and count­less indus­tries are part of this war econ­omy and are depen­dent on the United States either being at war or hav­ing an armed con­fronta­tional pos­ture around the world.

Sec­ondly — dis­trac­tion, and the need to be seen to be doing some­thing to counter the down­turn and those who are pop­u­larly per­ceived to be in large part respon­si­ble for it. The eco­nomic mess they are now in is a stink­ing quag­mire that is not improv­ing despite bil­lions thrown at it, seems resis­tant to the change in fun­da­men­tals nec­es­sary, and has mutated into con­fused des­per­a­tion as the dream which was never sup­posed to crum­ble, falls apart. That des­per­a­tion has man­i­fested itself in sev­eral ways: the nutty and con­tra­dic­tory Tea Party, which brings together dan­ger­ously all the arch-conservative, para­noid, ill-informed and extrem­ist ele­ments that have been gath­er­ing pace in the USA in recent decades (or, in the case of the national delu­sion they call Amer­i­can Excep­tion­al­ism, has fes­tered for many decades), the OWS move­ment, and the boo­gie man.

The boo­gie man used to be Soviet Rus­sia (and ‘Red’ China), then it was rad­i­cal Islam (which still has its claws in the national psy­che) and now it’s just China. China is the boo­gie man. And that’s num­ber three: con­front the boo­gie man and we’ll all get our jobs/industry/global stand­ing (as con­ferred on us by Amer­i­can Excep­tion­al­ism) back. It’s an extended real world Tru­man Show sce­nario — with the US play­ing Tru­man and the the rest of the world look­ing in, and it runs all through Con­gress — both sides — and the admin­is­tra­tion: it’s Chi­nese cur­rency manipulation/protectionism/bad labour practices/aggression/price fix­ing. Insert any or as many of those as you wish. Address those and the Amer­i­can dream returns.

So when Obama makes a pro­foundly arro­gant — racist — state­ment instruct­ing China to “play by the rules”, he is effec­tively telling the most pop­u­lous and increas­ingly devel­oped nation in the world to do as they are told; we are Amer­i­cans, you are are Asi­at­ics, we make the rules, you have no right to do that, and to enforce our self-anointed role as the global rule maker we’ll flex our mil­i­tary mus­cles at you as and where necessary.

The East would be so much eas­ier if it were all still Suzie Wong.

How­ever there are prob­lems with this. Firstly the United States hasn’t been a peace­maker in the region since the end of the Korean War. Its adven­tures took the lives of mil­lions in South East Asia in the 50s, 60s and 70s includ­ing hand­ing Cam­bo­dia to Pol Pot and then sup­port­ing him when the Viet­namese tried to resolve the hor­rors. It played an active part in the coup that over­threw Sukarno in Indone­sia, the after­math of which was the extended hor­rific mas­sacre of up to a mil­lion peo­ple some of whom were con­demned on a CIA pro­vided hit list, plus a 30 dic­ta­tor­ship. It then sup­ported and armed the inva­sion of East Timor and has recently begun work­ing with the same Indone­sian spe­cial forces cur­rently ‘sup­press­ing’ the West Papuan inde­pen­dence move­ment with violence.

The only part of Asia were you could argue that it’s main­tained the peace is Korea.

Its mil­i­tary sits per­ma­nently at the Chi­nese sea-border, nuclear armed, and con­tin­u­ally prods at their ter­ri­tory with spy planes and ves­sels in a way that they would never tol­er­ate at home if it were to be reversed. It con­tin­u­ally encour­ages the dis­putes between China and other South East Asian nations in the South China Sea where it is an agent provo­ca­teur for­ment­ing mischief.

Indone­sia, Malaysia, Sin­ga­pore and Thai­land repeat­edly rebuffed its attempts to join the joint task force guard­ing the Straits Of Malacca. It’s the last thing any of them want.

Sec­ondly, the idea that the US mil­i­tary can, to quote Obama, “ful­fil its com­mit­ment to the entire Asia-Pacific region” by mil­i­tary pos­tur­ing is absurd. The only time the US and China entered into a shoot­ing war the US was routed, all the way down the Korean penin­sula, and it was only able stop the shoot­ing by using all its mas­sive mil­i­tary mus­cle to force a stale­mate that con­tin­ues to this day. And that was against a peas­ant army with a mas­sive dis­par­ity in arms and tech­nol­ogy. At the end of 2011 no such dis­par­ity exists and world’s largest mil­i­tary — in num­bers — would likely rout any con­ven­tional US mil­i­tary assault or threat again.

Thirdly, it’s not your region — look at a map — go away. At least that seems to be the unspo­ken in large parts of the region. It was notable that the Thai gov­ern­ment quickly rejected US naval help in the floods –aside from map­ping assis­tance later on, as Hilary rushed into Bangkok. The phrases “Global reces­sion” or “Global Down­turn”  have huge cur­rency in the west at the moment, but there is no reces­sion in most of Asia, no down­turn, quite the oppo­site. Across the region, despite end­less pred­i­ca­tions of immi­nent col­lapse from the west, every­one is doing quite nicely thank you. The Thai floods have had a huge global impact across a range indus­tries from cars to elec­tron­ics to food — they hit stock prices in Wall Street and Tokyo — but their $10Bn price tag is but a blip in a growth pat­tern that is reflected across Asia.

And they want to keep on doing nicely. US bull-in-a-china-shop desta­bil­i­sa­tion is nei­ther desired nor help­ful as Asia comes into its own as an eco­nomic pow­er­house. The rules of the party have changed and the USA has gone from hand­ing out the dance cards to being a wall­flower, albeit an armed one look­ing for an excuse to bare those teeth.

Bizarrely the agree­ment is to place 2,500 Marines in Aus­tralia, in Dar­win. This places them not at the foot of China but squarely under­neath Indone­sia. How odd. Well not really — I doubt any­one closer to China would have them.

And Aus­tralia must be rather thrilled to be asked. It already has B-52’s in the North­ern Ter­ri­tory from time to time and Aus­tralia has long been the junior part­ner in the West­ern Alliance des­per­ate to be seen as a major player but never quite get­ting there, so one can imag­ine the glee in Can­berra when this was agreed.

There was a time when Aus­tralia was con­vinced Indone­sia was going to invade and built a multi-billion dol­lar series of bases across the top of the coun­try to defend against this. Any of the hun­dreds of thou­sands of Ock­ers who have been to Bali could’ve told the mil­i­tary that Indone­sia can’t even keep the traf­fic lights going reli­ably, let alone trans­port an inva­sion force across water and desert. It was absurd and must have caused some mirth in Suharto’s Jakarta (espe­cially as the Aus­tralians were also arm­ing his troops on the other hand).

In 2012 the threat posed to the Aus­tralian nation by Indone­sia is zero.

And so Hillary is going to Myan­mar. It is, so the media has been primed to tell us, on the cusp of democ­racy. It seems nobody has told the gen­er­als this — hun­dreds of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers remain in jail with lit­tle move­ment beyond a token release ear­lier this year as part of a general amnesty.

Myan­mar has been des­ig­nated ground zero by the USA in the impend­ing con­fronta­tion with the boo­gie man. And sit­ting across the bor­der — given the US his­tory in South East Asia — it’s very, very scary.

The US attempts to find a client state here is like a page out of the cold war his­tory books, it’s South Vietnam, Guatemala and Cam­bo­dia all over again, and with­out the teeth that gives it cred­i­bil­ity unless they go nuclear.

And then there are no winners.

Here’s Fran­cis Wade from the Demo­c­ra­tic Voice of Burma, in an Al Jaz Op/Ed, giv­ing a more detailed view of all this (and I’d sug­gest read­ing the whole thing, it’s pretty powerful):

Omi­nous signs already sug­gest that the US will sad­dle up to repres­sive regimes in order to realise its over­ar­ch­ing pri­or­ity for return­ing here, that of con­tain­ing China and pen­e­trat­ing deeper the region’s markets.

and

His­tory tells us how­ever that the stan­dards the US sets for its allies are wildly incon­sis­tent and arbi­trary. Much of the talk on Burma among White House offi­cials is of “reform”, and less so that of “democ­racy”, allow­ing Naypyi­daw some flex­i­bil­ity in the bench­marks it is required to meet.

One hopes that Myan­mar is slowly head­ing in the right direc­tion, but it’s worth not­ing that the civil­ian leader  is a for­mer gen­eral and is still head­ing a gov­ern­ment absolutely under the thumb of the same mil­i­tary who have been the bad guys for decades. The 2010 elec­tion was almost uni­ver­sally decried as fraud­u­lent, but despite that the cur­rent US admin­is­tra­tion is sidling up to them as they did so many times with awful regimes in Cen­tral Amer­ica, Africa and the Mid­dle East in the 20th century.

This sort of embrace of ‘reform­ing’ despotic regimes by the US has a recent prece­dent too: it was less than a decade back when Libya and its leader were warmly wel­comed back into the cir­cle of nations by the last US Admin­is­tra­tion and the UK as reform­ing. I’m more con­fused than ever by the rights and wrongs of the last ten months in Libya but the hypocrisy there is glaring.

This will not end well.

With an hour of the first morn­ing in China this week some­one had tried to lift my cam­era from my jacket pocket.

It was my fault of course — I’d taken my hand off it to hold myself steady on the over­bridge stairs as the other was occu­pied with the wheelie bag full of lap­tops that we had decided not to leave at the hotel.

The hotel had been booked online and smelled rather badly of cheap tobacco — and worse — when we arrived at mid­night. The man stand­ing in the cor­ri­dor in his socks and under­pants really didn’t help.

When you book online, I guess you always take a risk. Some­times it works out well — and it has in NYC and Hong Kong in recent times — and some­times you end up in the real­ity of the  non-photoshopped ver­sion of what was on the web­site when you booked.

Dubai and Sin­ga­pore — per­haps the two most over­priced and under deliv­er­ing hotel des­ti­na­tions on planet Earth — spring to mind.

How­ever, there is some­thing about encoun­ter­ing a grossly over­weight man in his jocks with a fag in his hand when you are vaguely jet­lagged in the mid­dle of the night.

It was the first time I’ve ever used one of those door chains at night, and the first thing I looked for — in vain — was the in-room safe.

I’d argue that you get what you pay for, but those grossly over-priced dumps in Orchard Rd and the UAE would put the lie to that cliché.

China fas­ci­nates. Mostly I love and hate it in two simul­ta­ne­ous but par­al­lel men­tal streams which rarely cross.

I wan­der obsessed / gob-smacked at the blis­ter­ing fast maglev trains as I side­step the pools of offal in the street.

As I grabbed — suc­cess­fully — to retrieve my cam­era from the pick-pocket in Shen­zhen I wor­ried about the images of the tow­er­ing neon-lit Shun Hing Square I’d tried to take the night before as we drove in. They were all unus­ably blurred any­way from the motion and the reflec­tion on the bus win­dow but I didn’t know that at the time and had high hopes.

In the mar­kets the sales­men and women, in per­fect Eng­lish, offer you designer items unbranded. I bought a quite hand­some leather satchel that was sold to me on the under­stand­ing that I could, if I was will­ing to wait a few min­utes, have Prada, Gucci, Armani or any other brand of my choos­ing pressed onto the flap and sewed into the lining.

I chose: none. Brand­less. Nude.

The bag was quite fine and per­fectly designed in its own right with­out need of any faux brand to boost my pub­lic rank­ing. I would, truth be told, have pre­ferred to have had the name of the anony­mous Chi­nese designer who had actu­ally crafted it stamped on the side.

I was offered an iPhone. $30. It had the shell but the screen offered up some sort of crazy paving themed local ver­sion of iOS.

I demurred.

For $60 I was then offered another, unbranded — they would stamp Apple on the back for another $2.50 — but with a fully func­tional oper­at­ing sys­tem that I was assured would con­nect to the Apple App Store with­out issue, and behave exactly as the ‘real’ one would.

Copy­right issues aside, I didn’t believe him, but Felix, who’s lived in China and Hong Kong for twenty years and always takes us to inter­est­ing places, told me two days later as we ate prawns and Cala­mari in the New Ter­ri­to­ries, that this was not only true but per­haps because com­mon wis­dom, and his per­sonal expe­ri­ence, says that all Chi­nese fac­to­ries, includ­ing Fox­conn, usu­ally find a way to run a shadow fac­tory to slip a few extras into the pro­duc­tion schedule.

Given the $100 iPads that were doing the rounds here in Bangkok last year it makes sense.

And as I was about to be given the pitch on that, there was the flus­ter and a dash as they all rushed to hide the fake bags, wal­lets, gad­gets, phones and any­thing else.

The intel­lec­tual prop­erty police were com­ing we were told.

Amer­i­cans crack­ing down? I asked.

‘No, Amer­i­cans are no prob­lem — this is about the Ital­ians.‘