The setting for a new, much broader and complex version of The Great Game is the China Sea. The term Great Game – reused in a recent book by Peter Hopkirk – referred originally to the drawn-out conflict, involving mainly diplomacy and secret services, which pitched Great Britain against Russia in Central Asia in the XIX century.
The current game is much larger: 3.5 million square kilometres of ocean, which many analysts have called the theatre, real or virtual, of the third world war. The main players are China and the United States, with the varying participation of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, as well as Japan, Taiwan and Korea. The stakes could not be higher: strategic control of the area, its mineral resources and communication routes. Those waters are criss-crossed by the so-called Sea Lines of Communication, on which Beijing depends for its supplies of crude oil and raw materials from Africa and the Middle East.
For complexity and number of players alone, this situation is more appropriately dubbed not The Great Game but rather the name the Russians used: the Tournament of Shadows.


A multitude of news reports, novels, essays and strategic treatises have been written on the subject. One of the most recent is Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to US Maritime Strategy, by James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara.
But one of the most interesting documents, even in its apparent simplicity, is the article published in the US Naval War College Review by Andrew Erickson, Abraham Denmark and Gabriel Collins: Beijing’s ‘Starter Carrier’ and Future Steps: Alternatives and Implications.

Andrew Erickson, who originally published it on his website, has kindly agreed to my including the first part (and the map shown here) in this post.


"At 5:40 AM local time on Wednesday, 10 August 2011, more than eighty years after the idea was originally proposed, China’s first carrier disappeared into the fog under tight security from Dalian harbor’s Xianglujiao Port, in northeast Liaoning Province, to begin sea trials in the Bohai and northern Yellow Seas. This was yet another coming-out party for China as a great power on the rise. Upon its launch, the nation burst with patriotic pride over the achievement.
Major General Luo Yuan, deputy secretary-general of the China Society of Military Sciences, declared, “Well begun is half done. . . . [T]he effect of having something is completely different from the effect of having nothing.”
Plans are under way to commemorate this new era of Chinese sea power, and to boost the economy further in the process. Tianjin, one of the country’s four municipalities, plans to do its part in October 2011 by opening China’s first aircraft carrier–themed hotel, based on Kiev, once the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s flagship and now the centerpiece of the Tianjin Binhai Aircraft Carrier Theme Park. A Chinese flagship as capable as Kiev once was remains far away, but Beijing has taken the first step and is already reaping added influence at home and abroad.
Before foreign strategists start hyperventilating about the “beginning of the end,” however, a deep breath is needed. China’s initial carrier foray followed a six-year refit and lasted only four days. China’s starter carrier—a vessel originally purchased incomplete from Ukraine in 1998—is of very limited military utility; it will serve primarily to confer prestige on a rising great power, help the Chinese military master basic procedures of naval airpower, and project a bit of military power—perhaps especially against the smaller neighbors on the periphery of the South China Sea. This is not the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.
To realize its ambitions for the future, China had to start somewhere. Late in 2010, Admiral Liu Huaqing, the father of China’s modern navy, passed away. Liu had sought to build China’s navy first into a “green water” force and thereafter, eventually, into a “blue water” navy capable of projecting power regionally, though not globally. He insisted that he was not China’s Alfred Thayer Mahan, but his concept of “Near Seas defense” was roughly comparable to Mahan’s views on U.S. naval strategic requirements (i.e., dominance of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Panama, and Hawaii). The key to the realization of Liu’s vision was an aircraft carrier, and Liu reportedly vowed in 1987, “I will not die with my eyes closed if I do not see a Chinese aircraft carrier in front of me.” Admiral
Liu’s eyes can close now.
Much of the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the Asia-watching strategic community in the United States, is hotly debating the implications of Chinese aircraftcarrier development. Admiral Robert Willard, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, said in April 2011 that he was “not concerned” about China’s first carrier going to sea, but allowed, “Based on the feedback that we received from our partners and allies in the Pacific, I think the change in perception by the region will be significant.” Australian brigadier general John Frewen contends, “The unintended consequences of Chinese carriers pose the greatest threat to regional harmony in the decades ahead.” Former director of Defense Intelligence Headquarters in the Japan Defense Agency Admiral Fumio Ota, JMSDF (Ret.), asserts, “The trials of China’s first aircraft carrier . . . mark the beginning of a major transition in naval doctrine. . . . Aircraft carriers will provide Beijing with tremendous capabilities and flexibility. . . . [A] Chinese carrier could pose a serious threat to Japanese territorial integrity. . . . China’s new aircraft carrier increases its tactical abilities and the chances of a strategic overreach. Other countries in the region should be
worried.”
Yet while the Asia-Pacific region is hotly debating the implications of China’s aircraft carrier, there should be little surprise that a Chinese aircraft carrier has finally set sail. Indeed, what is most surprising about China’s aircraft carrier program is that it took this long to come to fruition. Given the discussions about an aircraft carrier that have percolated in China’s strategic community for decades, it should have been clear to the entire region that this was a long time coming.


Update: a few days ago the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, announced that Chinese naval personnel must “intensify preparations for warfare”. In other translations the word “warfare” is replaced by “combat” or “military struggle”. These words are directed against anyone who threatens the national sovereignty of the China Sea.

...But it’s not a funny story. These three men are the last members of the crew of the Magellanic, the latest in a long line of ghost ships off the cost of Thailand.

They haven’t been paid for months, they have no money to buy food and get by on what they can fish, and they can’t disembark because their Visas for Thailand have expired.
The men are from the Philippines but it doesn’t look as though their embassy is very interested in repatriating them.
The situation doesn’t even seem to interest the authorities in Panama, which is where the Magellanic is based.
The ship-owners are Greek and their Manila-based agent is keeping a low profile.
All this information comes from the only person who is showing any concern for these men, a woman already mentioned on this blog: Apinya Tajit, from the local Apostleship of the Sea.
She has sent a string of e-mails from which one surreal truth emerges: these men are trapped in an inextricable net with seemingly no way out.
The Magellanic is one of those ships that sail on an ocean with no name.
This is not a funny story and maybe not one that people find particularly interesting.
But Apinya hopes that writing about it will prove useful.
I don’t think so, but I’ve done it anyway.

Message from a ghost ship..Help...We want to go home.

“Free Flow”, the theme announced by the Bangkok Design Festival, sounds ironic considering that the disastrous flood that recently hit Thailand – and especially its still potentially devastating consequences – isn’t over yet.


But the festival’s Flow intends precisely to contrast the one that has devastated the country. It’s already happening, thanks to the power of intelligence and creativity, with the exhibition organised at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, called “Let’s Panic”. The exhibition has a great impact on the public, turning survival in a monsoonal country into a show, highlighting the positive. But its main feature is representing the essence of danger, within and without.




These are the streams and flows of consciousness that cross paths in the midst of chaos and, in spite of the surrounding catastrophes, generate energy and form a current of seeming coincidences.
And so, after the flows of innovation in Singapore, here come the flows of Bangkok, which are unavoidably interconnected. And the cover of the art, architecture and design magazine art4d, which titles its latest editorial “Free Flow”, is dedicated to Gaia Scagnetti – a young Italian researcher who specialises in information design. She teaches in the Faculty of Architecture at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and has recently concluded an exhibition on human interrelations and on the flows of reciprocal knowledge.


Speaking with her – perhaps because of her background in complexity science – helps us to understand the beauty of the collapse of this megalopolis, which doesn’t change either on the wave of globalisation or with the rains, but metabolises and regenerates these flows, giving beauty to chaos. It all seems so complex, and it is. But it’s a way of detaching ourselves from the Western World’s inescapable linear logic. Here there is no flow, but a vortex which transports us to another dimension

Bangkok: a sunny morning. People are swimming in the pool of the apartment complex. Guests at the hotel along the river are eating breakfast on the balconies. Longtail boats, those long and narrow traditional craft now used primarily by tourists, ply the river. A couple enjoys the breeze that wafts over the swimming pool in the evening. The restaurants along the river front are brightly lit. Enormous disco boats float along the river.
You are tempted to stay inside your penthouse apartment on the river and write, like a city-dwelling hermit; sometimes writing, sometimes taking a break to swim in the pool or just to gaze out over the city. The Chinese temple across the way looks odd: only the roof of the pagoda and part of the columns decorated with dragons are visible.
Bangkok is, for the most part, under water. Just like almost 15,000 kilometers of Thailand. The economic implications are disastrous. Not to mention the human and social impact. But it all depends on your vantage point: from up on high, they all seem quite removed and distant, as if they belong to another world.
If, on the other hand, you go down there and dare to leave your own small world behind for a moment, you are immediately struck by the fact that the earth has vanished. Many of the streets have become canals, the markets, houses and shops are flooded. The shelves of the small supermarkets are empty, the water taxis that connect the city are not running. The passengers would have nowhere to get off. All of this is, in fact, just a short distance away.
Now a creeping feeling begins to insinuate itself. Your world might very soon, in the next few hours or days, become a prison from which you will be forced to leave to look for food and water. The lights may go out. Suddenly, being up above it all means that you will discover what it is like to climb up thirty flights of stairs.
It seems like a script from a horror film. Nevertheless, the idea haunts you. You get an immediate sense of the fraility of a global system whose disasters can be traced directly to a sacrilegious mismanagement of nature.
Then you think of the even more fragile Asian system, which was perhaps too quickly hailed as the up and coming power of the new century that would see the decline of the West. Skyscrapers here, more often than not, reflect a pretense of power rather than true strength. It is a strange paradox that Bangkok is sinking under the weight of its skyscrapers
The human factor here is too often marginalized: social inequality and decay add to the problems. Then they are carried away with the water.
Finally, though only because it takes time to come to the unpleasant reality at hand, you realize just how weak you are yourself. Most of the Thai people that you meet in front of their flooded homes or businesses smile at you. "Mai pen rai" says someone, with an air of peaceful resignation.


Comparing the way you feel with the way they behave is a little disquieting. You see your flaws and weaknesses, your detachment from reality.
I haven't believed in coincidence for a long time. The Naga has reaffirmed my disbelief; this seven headed serpent which represents the spirit of water in Asian myths. It can be as benevolent as it can be vindicative and devastating. At the moment I am translating a book by the Thai author, Tew Bunnag, titled The Naga's Journey (the Italian edition to be published in 2012 by Metropoli d’Asia). The Naga, in the form of a disastrous flood which wreaks havoc on the fragility of Bangkok and its populace - "Fragile does not mean weak, it means that it breaks easily" says Bunnag - is the underlying character of the book.


In the meantime, another day has passed. A couple enjoy the breeze.The restaurants are enlighted. At least here, the chance and the chaos are still covered beneath the water, as is the Naga.

A video in Thai with English subtitles that explians, in the Thai fashion, what is happening and why. It is very good in its way.

I was marooned on a ghost ship. Since my last post that story has been resolved. The sailors were paid, maybe because the post was used as a bargaining tool.
In the meantime, I spent a few months in the west and no stories appeared on the Bassifondi blog. Not that there aren’t any stories in the West. Quite the contrary, the bottom rung of society is getting longer, it’s becoming a swamp where ideas stagnate and rot. It’s as though there were something in the air paralysing ideas. As though our minds were too busy thinking only about the pros and cons of someone or something. It all inevitably comes back to that. Like a labyrinth that has lots of entrances but the exit has yet to be opened.
But enough already. I came back East. Not that there are no crises in the East. Quite the contrary, crises often take on catastrophic, biblical proportions in this part of the world. And beyond the images of development, there are always some shady areas. It’s just that here you feel part of a flow, a current of ideas, far-off horizons can be perceived and people are curious to get there and see for themselves.

This is going on, for instance, at a small Bangkok art gallery which is holding an exhibition in which artists from India of Hindu, Muslim and Christian religion interpret Ramayana. According to the Indian-American curator, Siddharta V. Shah, it’s a way of materialising Jungian archetypes and overcoming the clash between culture and religion. The possibility may be slim, but at least it’s there.


In Singapore, colossal projects that change the very concept of urban planning are taking shape, such as Gardens by the Bay.


Other, less evident but still striking artistic comingling is also going on. Such as the amazing calligraphic images by Frenchwoman Fabienne Verdier, exhibited at the Art Plural Gallery.


So, in the end, perhaps we can still hope that this flow will reach the West, so that we can take to the seas again.

teaser : fabienne Verdier : flux: un film de philippe chancel from philippe chancel on Vimeo.

There is a ghost ship. An old rusty tramp steamer, one of those boats that go wherever there is cargo to be loaded. It has been lingering in South-East Asian waters for months waiting for cargo.

At the moment it is moored off a long beach on the edge of a large city. From the beach, it looks like just another part of the view. At night all you see are a few lights twinkling on the deck.

Even the crew are ghosts. They too are tramps, vagabonds who have sold themselves for a two-dollar-a-day pay check.
From on board they look towards the coast, the beach and the city. They would like to disembark, feel the sand under their feet, walk amongst the buildings or buy something at one of the local eateries lit up with coloured lights. Perhaps even find a woman.
But they can’t do any of that, they have to remain ghosts. If they went ashore, they would become men. Or rather, sub-men with no legal identity. They would be put in jail and would probably stay there for a long time. No one would come to free them. And they would lose what little they do have.
That’s why these ill, hungry and desperate ghosts stay on board. They are waiting for the ship owner to pay them and send them back home. In the meantime, they catch fish to survive.
There is only one woman who can help them. She works for charity and sailor protection organisations. She has taken water, rice and chocolate on board. And a phone card. She is the only person that can protect them from Mr Lu, the ship owner. He’s another ghost, but a bad one. He never appears, but he sends the odd message to the captain. He wants to convince him to move elsewhere, where they will be able to repair the ship and set sail with a new cargo. But in those waters there is no possibility of outside help or control. Not to mention that, while sailing to other coasts, the ship may well disappear on the high seas.
For now, the woman and the crew still hope that the ship owner will decide to pay them. If he doesn’t, the final resort would be to report him for human trafficking. In that case the eleven men on board ship would be deported. But they would be going home penniless.

This is just one of many stories of abandoned ships, of crews betrayed and replaced by other equally desperate people. This story quotes no names or nations, no acronyms or flags. That’s because it may still end well. If ending well means anything.
In the meantime many other stories are ending or still going on. There are people working like slaves on fishing boats, and they are the ones that vanish into thin air. There are still many murky areas in the beautiful waters of South-East Asia.





Link.
The International Maritime Organization
The International Committee on Seafarers' Welfare
International Transport Workers' Federation
Apostleship of the Sea

Yingluck Shinawatra’s victory at the Thai elections has generated reactions from local feminists. Contrary to many Thai women, they are reluctant to consider it a successful step on the way to equality.
"How can we be proud? Everyone knows it’s down to Thaksin”, declared Sutada Mekrungruengkul, director of the Gender and Development Research Institute of Thailand, to the AFP news agency.
Indeed, Yingluck’s success is largely due to her being the younger sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister overthrown after a military coup in 2006, and as adored by the poor as he was hated by the elite.
Yingluck’s success has, however, gone beyond all expectations, which is a sign that she managed to convince not only her brother’s followers but also many undecided voters. Without counting that, if she won because of being Thaksin’s sister, she could easily have lost for the very same reason. Yingluck may go from little sis to the Big Sister.
But Sutada’s declaration, shared by all the political adversaries of Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party, doesn’t stop there. It falls into the ridiculous with a comparison to Aung San Suu Kyi, who, they say, «has fought for twenty years and is still not prime minister of Myanmar». That can’t be said to be Yingluck’s fault. It shows that, despite many limits, there is democracy in Thailand, unlike in Burma. The comparison also ignores the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi succeeded in becoming leader of the opposition because she was the daughter of general Aung San, the founder of independent Burma. Another powerful female Asian politician, Indira Gandhi, owed her success to her family. Not Gandhi’s (her husband, no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), but her father Nehru’s, the Indian Prime Minister between 1947 and 1964.
The problem may lie less with gender and more with dynasties, which in Asia often result in a chiefly female line.
Using Yingluck for the umpteenth feminist controversy could also be seen as a symptom of hysteria. Not because hysteria is to be considered as a solely female condition (the term derives from the Greek hystera meaning womb). But because, as many psychologists maintain, it is the manifestation of a crisis that a person expresses in a coded representation that he/she knows.
Yingluck’s victory could positively be interpreted as the recognition of female qualities, such as moderation and reconciliation, on which she based her election campaign.
But in the coded representations of extreme feminism, that could not happen. So there must be another reason.
You have to wonder: would the feminists have been quite so critical if she had been ugly? But then, male honesty demands: would she have won in that case?
What is important for Thailand right now is that Yingluck really manages to unite all the different factions. Under the same sky.

Old, ugly and bad. That’s how I describe the four defendants in the second trial of the Extraordinary Chambers set up by the UN at the Cambodian Tribunals to pass judgement on the crimes committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
They are the surviving leaders of the Angkar, “the organisation” that between 1975 and 1979 turned Cambodia into hell on earth. In “those 3 years, 8 months and 20 days”, as that period is defined, roughly two million people died in Cambodia, either from starvation or exhaustion, or directly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. About three million were forced to leave the cities to work in the fields. Tens of thousands simply disappeared into death camps.
These old men are: Khieu Samphan, 79, still the official head of the Democratic Kampuchea; Nuon Chea, 84, Khmer Rouge’s ideologist; Ieng Sary, 85, the foreign minister, and his wife, Ieng Thirith, 79, the social affairs minister.
The list of charges they face is chilling: crimes against humanity, genocide, execution, slavery, deportation, racial and religious persecution, torture…as well as “other inhumane acts”.
All have entered not guilty pleas. Sary, because he was granted a pardon by King Norodom Sihanouk in 1996. Samphan and Thirith, because they affirm that in their position they were not able to properly understand what was happening. Nuon Chea is mounting a defence on the basis that you cannot judge those events outside of their historical context: American bombings, threats from Vietnam. Also known as “Brother Number Two”, he maintains “I was pursuing the dream of an egalitarian agricultural society. It is the Empire that should stand accused, not me”. In pursuit of that dream, Sary admitted, although in secret, that the Khmer Rouge aimed to cut the Cambodian population from 7 million to 1, to attain perfect equilibrium. That was the theory worked out years earlier by Khieu Samphan. That dream came about in the project hatched by Saloth Sar, known as Pol Pot, or “Brother Number One” of the Khmer Rouge: an extreme hybrid of Marxism, Maoism and archaic ultra-nationalism. “Individual rights were not sacrificed for the common good; they were simply abolished. All expression of human individuality was condemned. Individual conscience was systematically demolished”, writes historian Philip Short in his book Pol Pot.
The preliminary hearings were held last week, but the trial will only begin in earnest in a few months’ time and may go on for years: there are almost 4000 plaintiffs and legal processes amount to over 450,000 pages. In this trial old age is an advantage: it doesn’t absolve you, but it may get you off serving the sentence.
One man who will perhaps outlive his sentence is the man found guilty at the first trial of the Extraordinary Chambers of Cambodia, which concluded last year. Kaing Guek Eav, 68, known as “Comrade Duch”, was first deputy and then director of Tuol Sleng, the prison and interrogation centre of S-21, the Angkar security service. Twelve thousand three hundred and eighty people were imprisoned there. Fifteen survived. Duch was sentenced to 35 years, subsequently reduced to 19.
I saw him in the flesh during the trial. I observed him to see if he had the tell-tale signs of moral yellowness (in italian only, sorry), a sign of evil. I didn’t spot anything, or only in my imagination. Now I continue to look at the photos and videos of these four old men. In the end, they don’t look all that ugly, they don’t seem to give off any malign vibrations. But I am beginning to understand the meaning of what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil". The German philosopher claimed that evil meted out in the name of politics is not a means to an end. It is an end in itself. There are no laws in history or in nature that can justify it. It nourishes itself like a cancer. That’s the best response, if any were needed, to Nuon Chea’s “defence”.
“Totalitarian regimes have discovered, without knowing it, that there are crimes that men can neither punish nor pardon. When the impossible has been made possible, it has become absolute evil, unpunishable and unforgivable", wrote Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. However, unpunishable does not mean that it must not be punished; rather that no worthy punishment exists.

A video of the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor. It features the reactions of citizens to a proposal to release the defendants on bail ahead of sentencing. Watch it: it is an exercise in human nature. At the beginning you can see those four old men and judge them for yourself. Signs of evil can be seen, as well as many of indifference or stupidity. There is also a nice old man who, in my view, stands on the side of the Good.

Cambodian Citizens React to ECCC Hearing on Application for Release of Indicted Khmer Rouge Officials from Cambodia Tribunal Monitor on Vimeo.

For details and updates on the trial, click here and here.

The UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, has issued the World Drug Report 2011.
The global situation is largely stable: “opiates on a downward trend, increases in the use of cocaine and synthetic drugs” it writes, just like a financial statement.
South East Asia is bucking the trend, however. In Burma opium growing and production have risen (580 metric tonnes in 2010).
“A toxic mix of problems” is how Gary Lewis, UNODC representative for East Asia and the Pacific, puts it. “In Myanmar many people live in a war zone. The problem is getting money. Either to survive or to fight...The situation with food shortages in the Shan states is terrible. If you’re a father you do what you can for your family".
Aside from any consideration about the results and the efficacy of the UN agencies, men like him provide some hope. Because they don’t speak in abstract terms, they don’t judge; they try to act. In spite of everything. “We can’t talk of eradication”, he said, referring both to plantations and to the issue in general. “We are trying to work towards containment”. That’s a lesson in reality and in moral honesty.
(Click here to download the summary of the report)

I few days ago I spoke with Aung San Suu Kyi. It was her birthday. We had just a few words on a very bad phone line. The interference was probably due to someone listening in. The time we had, though short, was very emotional for me. The voice of Daw, an honorific name given to the lady, is beautiful clear and strong (article published in Il Sole 24 Ore. In Italian only).
The next morning I worked on a different story. I went in search of the last glimpses of the old Bangkok harbour. I walked along a very long and rickety wooden jetty over a muddy canal. And I came upon a wharf where an old tramp steamer was moored. It was just the place I was looking for. Once again, it had an emotional impact.
If you keep looking for them, you will feel and see stories. Then they have to be told.
But that’s another story.