No sooner had the guns fallen silent and the terrorist carnage ended in Mumbai than a keen three-way diplomatic tussle began involving India, Pakistan and the United States. The two South Asian nuclear powers are locked in race to get the US on their respective side.

No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world would be in such tumult over so little that is understood. Unimaginable violence, most of it for triumphs that are obscure. Politics buried so deep in their actions, that the motives disappear in the flames, and the suffering itself becomes the end. Aerial bombardment of entire countries, cold-blooded massacre of citizenries. Armies set in place to hold people down, and themselves held down by their inexperience and bewilderment. Populations motivated for revenge rather than for revolution, harmed beyond belief and then diverted from their oppressors to take their justice where it comes. A cheapened world, where values are given over to pieties, and tears quickly dry into the very rage that created them in the first place. Time is circular: this is the myth of eternal return, with the avenging angel appearing once as Demon, then Angel, then Demon again. This is our cauldron.

China has adopted a state-centered approach towards energy security to deepen political and commercial relationships with all energy producing nations and to aggressively invest in oil fields and pipelines around the world. Applying this approach to its relations with its Asia-Pacific neighbors has produced mixed results. While China's energy diplomacy has brought about opportunities for cooperation with some of its neighbors, notably some countries in Central Asia and continental Southeast Asia, it has become a source of conflict with some other neighbors, especially those with border disputes over maritime territories which may have rich natural resources. This paper examines China's stateled search for energy security and its implications for China's relations with Asia-Pacific countries.

Seoul—Government investigators digging into the grim hidden history of mass political executions in South Korea have confirmed that dozens of children were among many thousands shot by their own government early in the Korean War.

What color would you associate with Shanghai? Do you choose red? Or yellow? Or blue?

Most people choose blue… Blue stands for the coast…[And Shanghai's link to the sea made it] China's great gateway to the outside world.

The visit of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to New Delhi last week turned out to be an occasion for the Indian government to fundamentally reassess the strategic significance of the traditional India-Russia partnership. No doubt, the visit took place at a turning point in contemporary history and politics against the backdrop of massive shifts in the international system.

Six months ago Sato Junichi and Suzuki Toru were ordinary men looking after young families. But in June they were arrested by a group of uniformed police, taken to a detention center in Aomori, northern Japan and held for 26 days.

All states have dark secrets, and none finds it easy to confront them. Yet the best assurance that past mistakes and misdeeds will not be repeated is that they be faced, responsibility recognized, and apology and compensation attempted.

In Northeast Asia the record on this score is mixed. It was 1995, a half century after the end of the Japanese colonial empire, before Japanese Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi expressed Japan's regret and apology for the pain and harm done by the four decades of colonialism. A few years later, a similar apology was extended to cover the Comfort Women and in 1998 that apology was explicitly directed to South Korea (by Prime Minister Obuchi).

In a minor skirmish in the history wars, or what might be called “ashes diplomacy,” Chinese authorities finally allowed the ashes of America's last ambassador to China before 1949, John Leighton Stuart (1876-1964), to be interred next to the graves of his parents in Hangzhou, the southern Chinese city where he was born.

Earlier this fall, local authorities in Zhenjiang, a city on the Yangzi known for its vinegar, opened a Pearl Buck Museum in the house where Buck (1892-1973) spent most of her first eighteen years. The ashes of another historic figure, Edgar Snow (1905-1971), are divided between the Hudson River and a spot by the Nameless Lake on the campus of Beijing University, which had been the campus of Yenching University. Leighton Stuart was president when Snow taught there in the 1930s.

It doesn't get much more Japanese than this. The large, white-feathered crested ibis — a wader with a downward- curving bill, a face bare of feathers and bright- red skin and legs — is a worldwide symbol of Japan (though the national bird is the pheasant). The birds grow up to 78 cm long, have a plume of feathers on the back of the head, and the flight feathers are tinged with red, a celebrated feature that was also the cause of their downfall.

The rhetoric of the Global War on Terror appears to have lost its old magic.

In the aftermath of the horrendous Mumbai attacks, it seems there were just as many articles saying this wasn't Mumbai's 9/11 as there were efforts to raise the bloody flag of America's catastrophe over the carnage.

Japan's currency has gained by almost a quarter against the US dollar this year and a third against the euro, making life even harder for the country's exporters, such as Sony and Toyota. Yet Tokyo is unlikely to halt the rise, out of concern over its relations with the United States, its key ally.

Japan's concern to maintain relations with the United States, its closest ally, on an even keel means Tokyo will seek to allow its currency to continue its steady appreciation, despite the profit erosion this causes in the key exporting sector.

The US-Iraq agreement signed on November 27, 2008 at a moment when the world was mesmerized by the Mumbai bombing, is an extraordinary document, not only for the US-Iraq War, but in the history of the American empire of bases and that nation's numerous twentieth century wars. Going well beyond the commitments that either George W. Bush or Barack Obama offered, the agreement states unequivocally that “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011” (Art. 24.1). Moreover, “All United States combat forces shall withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages, and localities no later than the time at which Iraqi Security Forces assume full responsibility for security in an Iraqi province, provided that such withdrawal is completed no later than June 30, 2009,” (Art. 24.2).

The article posted here by Dai Qing appears in a December 2008 special issue on The Heritage of Beijing Water, guest edited for The China Heritage Quarterly by the Beijing-based writer, historical investigative journalist and water activist. The issue focuses on the aqueous heritage of China's capital city. Reflecting on the well-springs of the Olympic year and the bountiful supply of water during 2008, Dai Qing discusses the diminishing heritage of a resource that sustained the ancient city in the past, shaped much of its life, and determines its future. The issue features a map of Beijing Waterways and an important study, ‘Beijing's Water Crisis, 1949-2008’ with important contributions by Probe International, an independent Canada-based think-tank and environmental protection group.

US economists have relentlessly harangued the Japanese for their supposed mismanagement of their post bubble era, which has led to nearly 20 years of low growth, borderline deflation, with a not-much-discussed, robust export sector.

Along with others, we complained in the early days of the Fed/Treasury emergency response that they were taking one of the worst elements of the Japanese playbook, namely, trying to prop up the value of dud assets, rather than figuring out how to do more price discovery and ameliorate the attendant reaction (not damage, mind you, the damage was already done when the bad loans were made). Yes, the Treasury has made some capital injections into banks, but without cleaning up the balance sheets, the benefits are limited. Even with supposedly more aggressive action on realizing losses, our banks act a lot like their Japanese pre-writedown zombie counterparts.

North Korea, declared a member of the “Axis of Evil” by George W. Bush, responded by becoming a nuclear power. By the end of the Bush administration, however, it had completed Phase Two of the Beijing Six-Party agreement on denuclearization and normalization and in October 2008 was deleted from the list of terror-supporting states.

Recent reports of Kim Jong-il's death may have been, to quote Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated,” but they did reveal a great deal about South Korean thinking regarding the future of North Korea. Anonymous officials leaked information that the government was looking at operationalizing ConPlan 5029, the contingency plan for joint US-South Korean intervention in the North that had been suspended under the previous administration. Given the lack of any signs of unrest in Pyongyang, the urgency of such planning was questioned by critics.1 But it reflects an ongoing concern that has been building in South Korea over the years: that if North Korea ever does collapse, the opportunity to determine the future of the peninsula may not fall to South Korea, but rather to China.

The measure of success of president-elect Barack Obama's new “Afghan strategy” will be directly proportional to his ability to delink the war from its geopolitical agenda inherited from the George W. Bush administration.

It is obvious that Russia and Iran's cooperation is no less critical for the success of the war than what the US is painstakingly extracting from the Pakistani generals. Arguably, Obama will even be in a stronger negotiating position vis-a-vis the tough generals in Rawalpindi if only he has Moscow and Tehran on board his Afghan strategy.

Historical issues haunt Japan. The world is facing a crisis, which may become a once in a century depression in the wake of Wall Street's financial meltdown and the subsequent recession throughout the world. Japan is no exception. At this time of crisis each country must show its resilience to alleviate immediate pain while implementing a long-term policy to strengthen the fundamentals of its economy and society. Japan is asked to come up with a powerful economic policy to overcome its crisis and contribute to global solutions. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and expectations are rising not only in the States but throughout the world that the U.S. will confront this challenge effectively. This is a golden opportunity for Japan because the fundamentals of Japan-US relations are solid and much of Obama's agenda coincides precisely with what the Japanese government has asserted for decades: the necessity for a sustainable global economy, emphasis on the environment, need for a long-term energy policy, serious concern about nuclear disarmament, cooperation through the United Nations and so on. Why not come up with creative ideas to attract the attention of Obama's new team and consolidate the alliance?