South China Sea

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The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Centre des Archives Diplomatiques du Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères, 32 CPCOM/79, ASIE 1930–1940, CHINE, E 513-0 sd/e 749. 4. “How Much Trade Transits the South China Sea?,” China Power, Project CSIS, October 10, 2019 (world trade); Schofield and Storey, South China Sea Dispute, p. 9 (tuna); Alan Dupont, “Maritime Disputes in the South China Sea: ASEAN’s Dilemma,” Perspectives on the South China Sea, ed. Murray Hiebert, Phuong Nguyen, and Gregory Poling (Washington, D.C.: CSIS, 2014), p. 46 (“strategic commodity”); Ian Storey, “Disputes in the South China Sea: Southeast Asia’s Troubled Waters,” Politique Étrangère 79, no. 3 (2014), p. 11 (“entire world”). 5.

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China says its claim to sovereignty is rooted in history, which it succinctly set out in a December 2014 paper: “China has indisputable sovereignty over the South Sea Islands and the adjacent waters. Chinese activities in the South China Sea date back to over two thousand years ago. China was the first country to discover, name, explore, and exploit the resources of the South China Sea and the first to continuously exercise sovereign power over them. From the 1930s to the 1940s, Japan illegally seized some parts of the South China Sea islands during its aggression against China. At the end of the Second World War, the Chinese government resumed exercise of sovereignty over the South China Sea islands.”1 Other nations challenge the Chinese claim to sovereignty, arguing that for many centuries Southeast Asian and Arab merchants dominated trade in the region.

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Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Touchstone, 2002), p. 197. 2. Bill Hayton, The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 28, 121 (“not wise enough”). 3. Carlyle A. Thayer, “Recent Developments in the South China Sea: Implications for Peace, Stability, and Cooperation in the Region,” South China Sea Studies, March 24, 2011, p. 3; U.S. Department of State, “Limits in the Seas”; Tran Truong Thuy and Le Thuy Trang, Power, Law, and Maritime Order in the South China Sea (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), pp. 103–15. 4. Interviews; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 79; Edward Wong, “Chinese Military Seeks to Extend Its Naval Power,” New York Times, July 23, 2010.

2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman, James Admiral Stavridis

coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, digital map, loose coupling, mutually assured destruction, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, undersea cable

If your government takes any retaliatory action for Galveston or San Diego, it won’t be a Chinese ship that we sink next but an American one.” Patel presented his nephew with another image, a map that showed the approximate disposition of Indian naval forces in and around the South China Sea. “And as you’ll see, this isn’t a hollow threat.” Patel’s map seemed an impossibility to Chowdhury. If accurate, it meant that dozens of Indian warships had infiltrated into the South China Sea undetected, representing a gross underestimation of India’s stealth-cloaking and cyber capability by his own country. Chowdhury’s thoughts shifted to a couple of days before, how his uncle had learned of the Enterprise’s receipt of launch orders against the Chinese mainland.

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pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r1 “For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” —Herman Melville Contents 1. The Wén Rui Incident 2. Blackout 3. Blinding the Elephant 4. Red Lines 5. On Death Ground 6. The Tandava Coda The Horizon Acknowledgments 1 The Wén Rui Incident 14:47 March 12, 2034 (GMT+8) South China Sea It surprised her still, even after twenty-four years, the way from horizon to horizon the vast expanse of ocean could in an instant turn completely calm, taut as a linen pulled across a table. She imagined that if a single needle were dropped from a height, it would slip through all the fathoms of water to the seabed, where, undisturbed by any current, it would rest on its point.

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He knew there’d be hell to pay for flying throttle and stick, but he’d deal with that when he got back to the Bush. He wanted to feel it. If only for a second. And if only for once in his life. It would be worth the ass-chewing. And so, with a bunch of noise behind his head, he banked into Iranian airspace. * * * 14:58 March 12, 2034 (GMT+8) South China Sea “You wanted to see me, Commodore?” Commander Jane Morris, captain of the John Paul Jones, seemed tired, too tired to apologize for being almost fifteen minutes late to her meeting with Hunt, who understood the strain Morris was under. Hunt understood that strain because she herself had felt it on occasions too countless to number.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Derek Watkins, “What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea,” New York Times, February 29, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/world/asia/what-china-has-been-building-in-the-south-china-sea-2016.html. [back] 67. US Department of Defense, “Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy,” 17. [back] 68. US trade accounts for $1.2 trillion of the total $5.3 trillion. Bonnie Glaser, “Armed Clash in the South China Sea,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 2012, 4, http://www.cfr.org/asia-and-pacific/armed-clash-south-china-sea/p27883. [back] 69. Andrei Kokoshin, “2015 Military Reform in the People’s Republic of China: Defense, Foreign and Domestic Policy Issues,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, October 2016, vi, http://belfercenter.org/publication/27040.

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Notable cases include China’s abrupt cessation of all exports of rare metals to Japan in 2010 (to persuade Japan to return several Chinese fishermen it had detained); its zeroing out of salmon purchases from what had been Norway’s number-one market in 2011 (to punish Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s selection of a noted Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo); and its prolonged inspection of bananas from the Philippines until they had rotted on the docks in 2012 (to change the Filipino government’s calculations about a dispute over Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea). China enjoys such superiority in its balance of economic power that many other states have no realistic option but to comply with its wishes, even when the international system is on their side. In 2016, for instance, China flatly rejected an unfavorable ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration over a dispute with the Philippines in the South China Sea, setting the table for another contest of wills. In this standoff and others involving the South China Sea, China has demonstrated an ability to combine charm, largesse, bribes, and blackmail to find “compromises” that give it most of what it wants.

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If Beijing were prepared to remove antiship and anti-air missiles from its islands in the South China Sea, Washington could limit surveillance operations along China’s borders, especially near China’s military installations on Hainan Island, as the country’s leaders have long demanded. China could agree to end regular patrols near the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea in return for the US stopping provocative freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea. The US could propose that China freeze island building in the South China Sea, accept limits on the modernization of its submarine fleet and antisatellite weapons, and reduce its amphibious warfare capabilities in exchange for the US slowing or even stopping development of a Conventional Prompt Global Strike capability, delaying deployment or removing advanced missile defense systems in South Korea and Japan, and recognizing Chinese sovereignty over the Paracel Islands.

Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas by John S. Burnett

British Empire, cable laying ship, Dava Sobel, defense in depth, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, North Sea oil, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

The passage ahead will take me from Singapore across the South China Sea to Ho Chi Minh City, the same route of the Petro Ranger, and past the spot where she was hijacked. 17 Into the Dead Zone Petro Concord, South China Sea If a voyage down the Malacca Straits on the Montrose was an exercise in caution and awareness, then a passage across the murderous waters of the South China Sea on a smaller tanker is a passage in abject fear. Ships out here are far more alone, more vulnerable, than in the congested and tightly regulated channels. Located just on the other side of the Straits, the South China Sea is a violent, unregulated no-man’s-land, the private game reserve of organized crime; it is in these international waters that the hulking beasts of the sea like the Petro Ranger are hunted down.

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Some investigating officials are convinced that money from these activities has funneled down to various militant organizations in the region, including the Abu Sayaf in the Philippines, and to GAM, the fundamentalist separatist movement on Sumatra, and to the Jamaah Islamiah in Malaysia.42 Four loosely connected multinational crime organizations control four areas: The Singapore syndicate controls the southern part of the South China Sea and Malacca Straits; Bangkok controls the Andaman Sea, bordered by Thailand, Burma, and Malaysia; triads in Hong Kong control the northern part of the South China Sea; Jakarta controls the Java Sea and parts of the South China Sea to Borneo. There are syndicate branches in Vietnam, Malaysia, Sumatra, Cambodia, the Philippines, Burma, and mainland China. Targeted cargo vessels steaming from one turf to another provide the syndicates with a movable feast and often the spoils are divided.

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Man dies as he dreams. Alone. —Joseph Conrad PROLOGUE The Attack The young Indonesian poked me in the stomach with the barrel of his assault rifle. His eyes, cold and hard, challenged me to resist. I was at the edge of doing something stupid. I had been sailing alone across the South China Sea to Singapore in January 1992 aboard my sloop Unicorn. While not a large boat—only thirty-two feet long—it is stout enough for ocean passages and comfortable enough to call home. Setting off single-handed was not recommended; Indonesian harbor officials in Borneo on the other side had warned me that an oil tanker steaming through the same area had been attacked by pirates the night before.

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

D. 174 Gokstad ship 369 gold 57 , 76 , 106 , 244 , 505 , 540 , 547 , 588 , 640 , 717 African 471–4 , 475 , 481 , 484 , 496 , 500–501 , 506 ; Guinea/Mina coast 507 , 508 , 509–11 ; ‘River of Gold’ 471 , 473 , 474 , 484 , 496 , 500 , 502 , 511 artefacts found in Broighter 331 Aztec 635 bars 509 from Bia-Punt 79 boat model 331 bracelets 509 bribes 207 , 782–3 bullion famine 500–501 Californian 852–3 Caribbean 531 , 553 , 555 , 582 , 588–9 and China 216 of Chrysé and Argyré 134 coins 164 , 172 , 352 , 478 , 687 , 730 , 803 and Columbus 524 , 528 , 529 , 531 , 588 , 589 and crusades 481 dust 207 , 216 , 475 , 510 , 531 , 840 and economic warfare against Islam 501 , 537 , 546 and El Dorado 553 , 590 and encomienda system 531 English ambitions for 663–4 ‘fool’s gold’ 664–5 of Funan 140 and Hispaniola 531 , 582 Inca 635 ingots 156 and Japan 194 , 216 , 221 , 232 , 524 , 847 leaf 216 mining 174 and the Moluccas 611 and Oc-èo 141 of Ophir 80–81 , 82 in Philippines 574 and the Portuguese 471–4 , 501 , 502 , 506 , 507 , 508 , 509–11 , 546 , 548 , 560 , 635 , 652 ; funding imperial expansion 511 ; gold funding imperial expansion 511 of Ptolemy’s Syria 97 in Red Sea 176 Roman 108 and Russia 801 , 802 , 803 and Singapore/Temasek 286 and slavery 582 and Sofala 548 and Solomon 81 and the Spanish 531 , 553 , 555 , 582 , 588–9 , 729 and Śri Vijaya 153 tribute 546 Viking raids on 362 Welsh 302 Golden Hind 665 Gomes, Diogo 488 Gomes, Fernão 504 , 506 Gonneville, Binot Paulmier de 557–60 Gonville Hall, Cambridge 669 gooseberries 114 Gothenburg 717 , 722 , 723 , 724 , 725 archipelago 726 ‘Little London’ and the British 723 Reformed Church 723 Gotland 353 , 357 , 366 , 367 , 368 , 418 , 419 , 423 , 424 , 425 , 427 , 437 , 448 Bronze Age 368 Gotlanders’ Saga 368 Gouvea, Francisco de 653 Graf Spee 888 grain trade xix , 57 , 104 , 106 , 238 , 276 , 352 , 432 , 442 , 444 , 470 , 860 see also barley ; maize ; millet ; rice ; rye ; wheat Ålander 874–6 Black Sea 872 British imports 881 and Ceuta 475 , 478 and the Dutch 428 , 675 , 676–7 English 389 , 391 , 444 , 458 grain surpluses 50 and Hansards 428 , 429 and Iceland 390–91 Santo Domingo imports from Spain 587–8 Spanish 587–8 Gran Canaria see Grand Canary Gran Colombia 852 Granada 475 , 476 , 477 , 485 Grand Canary (Gran Canaria) 472–3 , 501 , 505 grapes 114 graves see burial ; tombs Gray, Robert 793 , 794 Great Britain see Britain Great Britain , SS 864 Great Chronicle of London 533 Great Collection of Buddhist Sutras 234 Great Depression 883–4 , 886 Great Eastern , SS 864 Great Gift 773 Great Northern War 802 Greece/Greeks Alexandrian Greeks 99 and Bereniké 111 Buddhism and Greek culture 90 coins 326 Greco-Roman merchants see merchants: Greco-Roman/‘Roman’ Greek pirates 130 Greek towns in northern Italy 334–5 and Hellenization 46 , 93 Ionia see Ionia maritime trade from 19th century 872–3 Massalia and Greek travellers 331–2 Mycenaeans see Mycenaeans and Persia 85 pottery 94 , 323 settlers in Africa 841 ships 109 , 872–3 and Socotra 129–30 trade routes of Bronze Age Greece 314 Greek language 111 of Socrotans 130 Greene, Daniel 795 Greenland xix , xxi , 362 , 380 , 393–409 , 721 Black Death in 405 Christianity 397 , 400 Corte Real’s rediscovery 534 Eastern Settlement 397 , 399 , 400 , 404 , 406 Eskimos: Dorset 398–9 ; Inuit 398 , 399–400 , 404 , 405 , 406–7 falcons 398 hunting 397 and Iceland 393–8 , 400–402 named Labrador 534–5 Norse discovery and settlement 393–402 , 403–7 , 655 and Norway 712 paganism 400 Southern Settlement 397 trade 398 , 402–4 , 407 , 408 Western Settlement 397 , 404 , 408 women 406 Greenlanders’ Saga 407 , 409 , 410–11 , 413 Greifswald 418 , 426 Gresham, Sir Thomas 669 Gresham College 669 Grijalva, Juan de 614 Grim Kamban 380 Grimaldo, Juan Francisco de 588 Grotius, Hugo 679–82 , 773 , 822 Guadeloupe 768 Guam 573–4 , 856 Guanches 472 , 488 Guangdong 159 Guangzhou/Canton xxix–xxx , 136 , 138 , 147 , 149 , 163 , 164 , 172 , 199 , 240 , 243–50 , 636–7 , 640 , 642 , 723 , 725 , 814 and the British 709 , 814 , 825 ‘Canton System’ 789 and Empress of China 785 , 786–8 and the French 827 and furs 806 Hoppos 789 merchants in 824 , 825 and New Julfans 706 North American trade with 786–91 and opium 825–6 and West Indies 711–12 Guatemala 581 guavas 644 Guðrið, wife of Þorfinn Karlsefni 411 , 412 , 413 Guðroð Crovan 378 Guðrum 361 Guerra, Luis 553 Guerra brothers 553 guilds, merchant 183 , 184 , 213 , 249 , 355 , 669 , 789 Guinea 504–8 and the Brandenburgers 716 coast 489 , 490 , 504 , 505–12 , 545 , 669 , 702 , 712 , 716 , 718 ; Carlsborg fort 717 , 718 and the Danes 712 , 716 , 721 and England 716 and France 561 and the Portuguese 504–8 , 754 scramble in 17th century for 716–19 and the Spanish 754 and the Swedes 716 , 718 trade see trade: Guinea trading stations 716 Guinea Bissau 504 Gujarat/Gujaratis 51 , 602 , 604–5 Diu see Diu, Gujarat Gulden Zeepaert , ’t 741 Gulf Stream xv gum arabic 839 Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakuson 396 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden 716 , 717 Gwadar, Oman/Pakistan 829 Gypsies 46 Habsburgs 439 , 604 , 703 Angra’s Spanish Habsburg fortifications 752 and France 672 Magnus Intercursus treaty between England and Habsburg rulers of Flanders 669 and New Christians 702 , 704–5 Portuguese 1640 rebellion 705 and São Felipe, Cape Verde 753 southern Netherlands transfer from Spanish to Austrian Habsburg rule 722 in Spain 614 , 764–5 Hacho, Mount 474 , 475 , 478 Hadhramawt, south Arabia 128 hairstyles 170 Haithabu 365–7 , 371 , 421 Haiti 527 , 685 see also Hispaniola Hakata (Fukoaka) 196 , 212 , 224 , 652 Hakata Bay 196 , 197 , 215 , 216–17 , 223 , 224 , 225 Hakluyt, Richard 658 Hakusuki, battle of 192 Halley, Edmund 750 Hallstatt culture 326 , 330 , 331–2 Hamburg 424 , 437 , 445 , 449 , 673 , 676 , 702 , 712 , 880 Chilehaus 880 and Portuguese Jewish merchants 701 and Second World War 891 , 892 Sephardim 701 trading links with South America 880 Hamburg–Amerika Line 869 Hamilton, Alexander 818–19 Hamwih (Southampton) 353 Hangzhou (Quinsay) 221 , 224 , 226 , 238 , 239 , 240 , 245 , 248 , 250 Hannibal 845 Hanoi 138 Hans, king of Denmark 464 Hansa, German xxii , 403 , 415–31 , 432–46 , 668 and Antwerp 673 Baltic members’ importance 433–6 and Bergen 418 , 419 , 443–6 and Bruges 433 , 438–9 , 440 , 441–2 cogs 426 , 428 , 451 and Cologne 428 , 433 , 438 , 441 , 442 , 444 , 447 , 448 , 452 Diets (Hansetage ) 420 , 432–6 , 437 , 453 and the Dutch 425 , 428 , 668 , 674–5 , 676 , 683 ; conflict with Spain 685 and England 419 , 447–53 , 456 , 458 , 463 ‘Hanseatic League’ 419 , 432–3 , 452 and herring 674 and Iceland 461–3 Kontor 440 , 444 , 445 , 446 , 447–8 and Norwegians 442–6 and Portugal 431 , 477 post-plague ‘Hansa of the Towns’ 432–6 Prussian members 452 and Teutonic Order 420–21 , 428 , 436 , 437 , 441 , 452 trade routes 424–5 , 438 HAPAG 881 , 885 , 886 , 891 , 904 Harald Fairhair 362–3 , 373 , 380 , 384 , 385–6 , 389 , 401 , 402 Harald Hardraða 361–2 , 377 , 378 Harali 57 Harappā 63 Harland, Edward 870 Harland and Wolff shipyard, Belfast 870 , 899 Harold Godwinsson 362 harpoons 28 , 304 , 399 Harris, William xxiii Harrison, John, chronometer 812 Hartog, Dirk 736 Harun ar-Rashid 170 , 365 Hasekura Tsunenaga 632 Hastings, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of 821 Haswell, Robert 793 Hathab/Astakapra 129 Hatshepsut/Hashepsowe, Queen 75–6 , 77 , 78 , 82 Havana xviii , 591–3 , 617 , 701 , 754 Hawai’ian islands xxiii , 3 , 20–21 , 25–7 , 810 , 813–17 , 859 agriculture 26–7 first settlers 24 Kaua’i 25 , 814 , 815 and Māori language 132 and Marquesas 24 , 30 O’ahu 24 , 25 , 814 , 816 pineapples 859 sweet potatoes 29 and the USA 816 , 817 , 856 , 859 Hawaiian Citizen 903 Hawaiki 5 , 33 , 34 , 35–6 , 37–8 Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit 280 Hayes’ Island 739–40 hazelnuts 114 Hazor 80 Heaney, Seamus 351 Hebrides 328 , 377 , 378 Viking raids 372 Hedeby see Haithabu Heian see Kyoto/Heian Hekataios 88 Hellenization 46 , 93 Helluland 409 Helsingborg 425 Helsingør (Elsinore) castle 713 Helsingør narrows 685 hemp 194 Henriques, Moses Josua 719 Henry I of Schwerin 425 Henry II of England 458 Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor 402 Henry III of England 450 , 469 Henry IV of England 452 Henry V of England 476 , 477 Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor 449 Henry VII of England 526 , 532–3 , 534 , 557 Henry VIII of England 557 , 656 Henry the Impotent, king of Castile 504–5 Henry the Lion 424 , 425 , 427 Henry of Navarre 676 Henry the Navigator, Prince Henry 431 , 465 , 469 , 476 , 478 , 479–80 , 481 , 484 , 485 , 499 , 501 , 502 , 503 , 514 and the Azores 487 , 488 Belém statue 480 and Madeira 484 , 485 hens see chicken Herjólfsnes, Greenland 404 , 405 , 406 , 410 Hermapollon 112–13 Herodotos 88–9 , 90 , 334 herring 306 , 420 , 426 , 428 , 429–30 , 436 , 451 , 562 Baltic 430 , 436 , 451 , 674 and the Dutch 668 , 674 , 683 , 685 North Sea 430 , 436 , 674 Heyerdahl, Thor 27–30 , 299 , 727 Heyn, Piet 686 Heysham, Robert 749 Heysham, William 749 hides see skins/hides Hideyoshi Toyotomi 628 , 629 , 630 , 646–7 , 649 , 651–3 Dutch merchants in 650–51 Himilco 333 Himyar 122 , 123 , 166–7 Hindenburg 898 Hindostan , SS 865 , 867 Hinduism/Hindus 109 , 183 , 548 Brahmins see Brahmins Buddhism interwoven with Hinduism 293 and Madagascar 759 and Majapahit 280 and Melaka 293 , 295 Oman and Hindu merchants 834 and the Portuguese 547 , 548 , 606 ; Portuguese Christianizing mistakes over images 541 and Socotra 128 and Vietnam 144 Vishnu statues 159 Hine-te-aparangi 32 , 34 Hippalos 102 , 109 Hirado, Japan 692 , 693–4 Hiram, king of Tyre 73 , 80 Hispaniola 491 , 555 , 582–6 , 656 , 768–9 , 770 cattle 590–91 and Columbus 520 , 521 , 527–8 , 529 , 530 , 531 , 582 , 585 , 769 and the Dutch 683 gold 531 , 582 and Havana 592 hides 590 , 591 salt 588 Santo Domingo see Santo Domingo, Hispaniola sugar 582 , 589–90 , 768–9 Taínos 520 , 521 , 527–8 , 529 , 530 , 531 , 582 , 583 Hitler, Adolf 887 , 888 Hjǫrleif 384–5 Hoëdic 306 , 308 Hojeda, Alonso de 534 , 550 , 551 , 552 , 554 Hokianga nui a Kupe 33 Hokkaido 191 Hokule’a 20 Holocene period 303 , 304 Holt, Alfred 864–7 , 868 shipping company see Blue Funnel Line hominids, early, in Flores 7 Honduras 591 , 592 honey 194 , 389 , 391 , 444 , 470 Hong-wu 256 , 260 Hong-xi 267 Hong Kong 637 , 639 and Blue Funnel Line 867 , 891 and Britain 639 , 826–8 , 893 Chinese bazaar 827 Chinese settlers 827 Club 827 as a container port 904 , 907 and the Depression 886 merchants 789–90 , 808 , 824 and Mizrahi Jews 841 opium trade 827 , 828 P&O office 892 and People’s Republic of China 639 , 892–3 , 907 and pirate raids 867 and Second World War 887 , 892 ; and post-war period 892–3 and the USA 893 Victoria Island 826 , 867 Wallem shipping company 890 Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company 905 Honolulu 903 Hopewell 706 Hoppos, Canton 789 Hoq cave, Socotra 128 Horace 170 Hormuz 8 , 254 , 264–5 , 267 , 269 , 598–9 , 604 , 606 , 608 , 610 , 634 Strait of 52 , 62 , 166 , 598 , 634 Horrea Piperataria 114 horses 220 , 404 , 489 , 581 , 652 , 730 horse-breeding on Cape Verde 489 , 502 and yellow fever 855 Horta, Azores 750–51 horticulture, Lapita 12–13 Hotu Matu’a 30 houses circular 321 , 324 , 329 in circular villages 321 with dry-stone foundations 321 Inuit 399 Madeiran 484 merchant 425–6 , 443 , 445–6 , 838 oblong 321 of timber and wattle 366 Howqua (Hong merchant) 790 Huang Chao 172 Hudson, Henry 665 Hudson Bay 408 , 557 , 658 , 664 , 665 , 666–7 Huelva 319 Huguenots 676 , 696 , 697 Hull 447 , 451 , 462 , 871 human sacrifice 367 , 368 , 730 , 809 , 810 Humboldt, Alexander von 852 Hundred Years War 469 Hung Wu-ti 219 , 220 hunting 302 , 304 , 306–7 , 397 , 399 in Greenland 397 grounds 404 , 406 , 794 by Ming emperors 256 seals 399 turtles 105 whales see whales/whaling Hussein, sultan of Johor 821–2 Hutchison Ports 905 Hygelac 348 Hyksos 75 Hyogo 218 Iberia xxii , 305 see also Castile/Castilians ; Catalans ; Galicia ; Portugal/Portuguese ; Spain/Spaniards Atlantic culture of 324–5 Bronze Age 316 , 322 Christian vs Muslim struggle in 12th century 467–8 circular villages 321 Iron Age 330 Neolithic 308–9 , 313 pin-brooches 326 roundhouses 329 ships in Mediterranean from Atlantic Iberia 470 and Spanish Reconquista 468 , 477 swords 318–19 visitors to London 455 Ibn al-Muqaddam 182 Ibn Battuta 248 Ibn Hawqal 171 Ibn Iyas 595 Ibn Sab’in 475 Ibrahim Pasha, Pargalı 603 , 607 ice 303–4 Arctic 339 , 655 , 657 , 660 , 661 , 664 glaciers 304 receding 908 Ice Age 303–4 ‘Little Ice Age’ of 17th century 767 Iceland xix , 362–3 , 383–8 Black Death in 403 , 405 and Bristol 461–3 and Columbus 410 , 524 and England 461–3 and Greenland 393–8 , 400–402 and Hansards 461–3 and Norway 712 paganism 387–8 , 400 , 407 sagas 370 , 380 , 384 , 386 , 387–8 , 396 , 444 ; Egil’s Saga 389 , 391 ; Orkneyinga Saga 311 , 363 , 364 , 373 , 375 , 376 tallow 721 trade 390–92 , 461–3 vaðmal cloth 390–1 , 403 Ictis island 336 Ideal-X 902–3 Idrisi, Muhammad al- 130 , 157–8 , 471–2 , 475 Ieyasu Tokugawa 629 , 630–31 , 632 , 653–4 , 692 , 693–4 iguanas 12 Iki island 224 Imari wares 650 Imhof family and banking house 672 Imma 353 immigration see migration Imperator 885 Imperial Airways 898 Incas 29 , 618 , 635 , 727 incense 71–3 , 122 , 243 see also frankincense ; myrrh Arabian 94 , 115 Assyrian 80 Chinese 286 in Jewish Temple 80 and the ‘Muscateers’ 831 stands/vessels 80 Sumerian 80 Inchcape, James Lyle Mackay, 1st Earl of 884 India Ajanta caves 129 and Armenians 706 , 707 , 708 and the British/English 690–91 , 714 , 851 see also East India Company, English ; and Armenians 707 Buddhist monasteries 118 , 128 Cabral in 542 carpets 548 and China 125 , 137 , 138–9 , 144–6 , 147 , 152 , 161 , 282–3 see also Indo-China cloth see cloth: Indian coastal ethnic/religious diversity in 9th century 183 coins introduced to 102 da Gama in 540–41 and the Danes 712 , 714 , 715 diamonds 703 and Egypt 182–3 , 187–8 da Gama in 543 Goa see Goa Gujarat see Gujarat/Gujaratis as interchange point between trade networks 187 and Japan 152 luxury of elite 188 mail sent with P&O 867 and Malaya 282 and Mediterranean 108 merchant guilds 183 , 184 merchants from see merchants: Indian Mughal invasions 604–5 Muslims in 183 , 261 de Nova in 542 and Oman 831 , 832 and Ottomans 603 , 605 pepper see pepper: Indian and the Portuguese 540–43 , 604–5 , 606 ‘Roman’ merchants and southern India 52 Romans in 118 and silver 188 and Śri Vijaya 161 steamship link with Persian Gulf 868 Tamils see Tamils trade see trade: Indian and Vietnam see Vietnam: and India and West Indies 711–12 wine imports 116 Zheng He in 261 Indian Ocean 43–69 , 103 and Abbasid rise 170 and Alexandria 96 , 103 , 187 and American ‘Red Sea men’ 781–2 and British India Steam Navigation Company 868 and Buddhism 43–6 , 118 control struggle over 594–610 Dias’s discovery of link with Atlantic 514 , 536 , 537 ‘extensions’ xxii ; Red Sea see Red Sea ; South China Sea see South China Sea and the Genoese 703–4 Greco-Roman xviii and Gujarat 602 historic exit points 46–7 and the ‘Indies’ 46 , 99 , 517 and ‘Lascars’ 841 as link between Mediterranean and South China Sea 338 Madagascar as link with Atlantic 758 , 780 Magellan’s experience of 568 maritime network 43 , 90 , 93 , 124 , 125 , 147 , 167–70 , 279 Mediterranean interaction 98 , 116 , 117 , 124 , 167–70 , 338 , 517 Melaka as link with South China Sea 272 , 295 , 569 , 636 monsoons 50 , 51 , 52 , 96 , 102 , 171 , 182 , 546 navigation 117 and Ottomans see Turks/Ottomans: and Indian Ocean Pacific Ocean contrasted with 43 of the Periplous 103–10 , 116 , 119 , 124 , 125–8 , 134 and Persian Gulf see Persian/Arabian Gulf piracy widespread through 707 and Portugal see Portugal/Portuguese: and Indian Ocean Ptolemy’s view of 89 , 105 , 496 , 727 and Red Sea see Red Sea ‘Silk Route of the Sea’ xx , 265 ; and Singapore 281–9 Singapore as link with South China Sea 272 Spice Islands see Moluccas/Spice Islands spices in Indian cuisine 714–15 and Strait of Malacca see Melaka (Malacca): Strait of Malacca tides 103 , 107 trade see trade: Indian Ocean trade routes see trade routes: Indian Ocean and the Turks see Turks/Ottomans: and Indian Ocean and the USA 781–2 , 795 winds 51 , 110 see also monsoons and Zheng He’s voyages 254–5 , 256–69 , 280–81 , 293 ‘Indies’ areas covered by term in Middle Ages 46 , 517 , 523 Columbus and the term 46 , 517 East Indies see East Indies ; Indonesia/Indonesians spice trade see spices/spice trade transatlantic attempts to reach 517 , 522–35 , 537 , 550–64 , 566–8 , 571–2 West Indies see West Indies indigo 107 , 717 , 754 Indiké 120 Indo-China 137 , 147 , 249–50 see also Cambodia ; Vietnam and Fan-man’s conquests 144 Faxien’s voyages 144–6 and Sanskrit 144 Indonesia/Indonesians 6 , 43 , 147 see also East Indies ; Malaya/Malays and Buddhism 166 Bugi pirates 819 , 823 Chola and Indonesian trade 273 and the Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and the East Indies/Indonesia Federation of Malaya and Indonesian Republic 893–4 and Madagascar 132–3 merchants 10 , 132 , 165 Moluccas see Moluccas/Spice Islands and the Portuguese see Portugal/Portuguese: and East Indies/Indonesia and Ryukyu Islands 232 sailings between India and China 125 spice trade with Madagascar 132–3 Sumatra see Sumatra and Vietnam 143 Zabaj 155–8 see also Śri Vijaya, Sumatra Indus River 50 , 53 , 68 , 88 , 106–7 Indus Valley and civilization 53 , 62–9 and Dilmun 66–7 see also Dilmun pottery 62 , 63 seals 63–4 and Sumer 62 trade with Mesopotamia 66–7 , 69 industrialization 861 , 865 , 869–70 , 896 , 907–8 infant mortality 307 Ingolf Arnarson 384–5 ingots bronze 320 copper 60 , 242 gold 156 silver 165 tin 164 Ingstad, Anne Stine and Helge 413 Innocent VIII 513 Inquisition 491 , 592 , 656–7 , 673 , 685 , 699 , 700 , 703 , 705 , 707 , 708 , 730 , 749 , 754 , 769 , 770 , 775 Intan wreck 164–5 Inuit 398 , 399–400 , 404 , 405 , 406–7 , 408 , 411 , 663 Ionia 82 , 85 Ionian Islands 682 , 872 , 873 Ipswich 353 Iran see Persia/Iran Iraq 68 , 85 , 164 , 598 Chinese trade with 185 Ottoman government of 831 Sumer see Sumer/Sumerians Ubaid 53–4 Ireland Bronze Age 316 , 320 circular villages 321 currachs 331 , 382 and the English 767 Irish Free State: and Second World War 888–9 ; and the USA 885 Irish monks 381–3 , 386–7 linen industry 457 migrants fleeing famine 860 monuments 301 and Orkney 311–12 and the potato 752 promontory forts 328 trade 457 and US immigration policy 885 Viking raids 361 , 372 , 379–80 , 381 Irian 280 Irish Channel 312 Irish Sea 313 iron 97 , 104 , 133 , 142 , 158 , 185 , 408 , 807 , 888 aboard SS London 861 early ironmaking 316 and Greenland 398 , 408 , 413 and Iceland 391–2 magnetized 243 and Marianas 619–20 nails see nails and Norsemen 408 ore 242 pyrites 664–5 Spanish 455 steamships 826 , 864 , 868–9 , 882–3 Swedish 724 technology 314–16 irrigation 50 on Hawai’i 25 , 26 Irvine, Charles 723 Isaac the Jew 186–7 Isabella of Castile 464 , 489 , 504–5 , 522 , 527 , 529 , 534 , 582 death 530 , 555 Isadora, Aelia 111 Isbister, Orkney 311 Isfahan 705–8 Isidore of Seville 135 , 409 Isis 122 Iskandar Shah 282 , 285 , 290 Islam/Muslims xx , 94 , 546 Abbasid dynasty 164 , 170 and Africa 500 , 502 Almohads 175 , 468 in Bombay 789 caliphate rivalries in 8th century 170 in China 244 , 258 Christians vs Muslims in Spain 423 , 477 coins 364 and the crusades see crusades dirhams 366 European struggle against Muslim power 46 see also crusades forcible conversion of Jews 181 Indian 183 ; in Calicut 261 and interest payments 837 and Ma Huan 269–70 and Madagascar 759 and Malaya 282 Mamluks see Mamluks and Melaka 291–2 , 293 , 295 merchants see merchants: Muslim ‘Moors’ 292 , 465–7 , 537 , 540 , 541 , 569 , 617 , 707 Muslim fleets 465–7 Muslim pilgrims 866 Muslims of Persian origin in 9th century 184 and Pasai 276 and Portugal see Portugal/Portuguese: and Islam ‘purity of blood’ doctrine and hiding of Muslim ancestry 696 in Quanzhou 244 and Red Sea closure to non-Muslims 187 relationship between Muslim governments and Jews/Christians 836–8 Shi‘ite 173 , 599 in Spain see Spain/Spaniards: Muslim (al-Andalus) spread along trade routes 146 , 166 and Śri Vijaya 147 Sunnis see Sunni Muslims and Tengah/Muhammad 291–2 , 293 and Zheng He 257–8 Íslendingabók 398 Ismail Pasha 849–50 Israel, Jonathan 674 , 686 Israel, Six-Day War (1967) 896 Israelites and incense 80 and Jewish Temple 80 , 81 Italy 115 , 240 see also Sicily ; Tuscany bankers 450 , 454 , 532 , 590 , 703 ; in England 454 French invasion 526 and Germany: landward connections 441 , 442 ; and Second World War 889 Greek towns in northern Italy 334–5 and London 454–5 merchants see merchants: Italian migrants fleeing poverty 860 and Ottomans 601 and Second World War 889 wars with Charles V 611 Zheng He in 254–5 Ivan III of Russia 677 Ivan IV, the Terrible 659–60 , 677 Ívar Bárdarson 403–4 ivory 505 , 547 , 717 , 840 craftsmen 503 elephant 47 , 59 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 76 , 105 , 107 , 118 , 121 , 122 , 153 , 233 , 265 , 278 , 323 , 324 , 398 , 405 , 833 and the Omanis 829 , 831 , 833 and the Portuguese 501 , 504 , 635 and the USA 833 walrus xix , 385 , 391 , 397 , 404 , 408 Izu islands 230 Jackson, Andrew 852 Jacob 782–3 Jacobites 723 Jacobsz, Ariaen 738–9 Jakarta see Batavia/Batavians Jamaica 520 , 530 , 749 , 761 , 769–79 and the English 765 , 768 , 769–79 Jews 773 Miami ferry service 900 and Panama Canal workforce 853–4 , 855 Port Royal 765 , 769–79 silver 777 , 778 and slave trade 777 and the Spanish 771 , 773 sugar trade 777 , 779 Jambi 160 , 273 , 279 , 287 James I of England 690 James II of England 777 James III of Majorca 473 James of Bruges 488 church in Azores 491 Jamestown, Virginia 557 , 766 Jan Mayen Island 396 Jang Bogo see Chang Pogo Jansz/Janszoon, Willem 736 Janus Imperiale 454 Japan/Japanese 6 , 190–209 , 212–29 Ainus 797 archers 211 , 230 armour 211 artists 200 Ashikaga shoguns 219 , 220 , 231 bakufu 212 , 217 , 222 , 223 , 225 , 229 and ‘barbarians’ 847 on Behaim’s globe 525 bonzes (religious teachers) 647 Buddhism see Buddhism: in Japan and Cabot 532 and Carletti 621 , 647 , 648–9 cash 214 Ceremony of National Purification 199 and China 135 , 152 , 188 , 189–90 , 192 , 197 , 198–209 , 212–21 , 228–9 , 235 , 236 , 251 , 287 ; and Hideyoshi’s assault on Korea 650–51 ; Hideyoshi’s conquest plans 646 ; Japanese mercenaries in Manila garrison vs Chinese 626 ; and Philip II’s plan to invade China 627 ; trade 201–2 , 212–20 , 228 , 638 , 647 , 649 and Christianity see Christianity: and Japan coal 846 and Columbus 524–5 , 537 and copper 692 , 847 daimyos (warlords) 644 , 646 , 647 , 650 , 654 and the Dutch see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and Japan early ethnic variety 191 and European technology 847 and European weapons 644 and First World War 883 and Germany, Second World War 887 , 888 and gold 194 , 216 , 221 , 232 , 524 , 847 guilds (za ) 213 Iki 224 imperial court 191 , 193 , 194 , 196 , 197 , 200 , 203 , 205 , 209 , 213 , 214 , 215 , 217 , 222 , 223 , 228–9 and India 152 inflation 214 Inland Sea 199 , 204 , 212 , 218 , 232 , 652 inter-clan battles 219 , 230 and Java 220 junks 628 , 637 kami-kaze pilots 229 kaolin 650 and Korea 190 , 191–9 , 200 , 204 , 223 , 225 , 646 , 649–51 Kyushu see Kyushu island lacquered boxes xix , 216 and Macau 635 , 638 , 639 , 642 , 644 , 654 and Manila 622 , 628–30 , 632 , 633 Meiji regime 847 , 883 , 888 mercenaries 626 , 628–9 merchant fleets 883 , 896 merchants 189 , 221 , 616 , 629 , 630 , 649 and Mexico 630–31 Ministry of Commerce 847 Mongol attacks on 221 , 222–8 paintings 198 paper 200 , 201 , 213 , 743 pearls 216 , 221 peasants 213 ‘People of the Sea’ 213 and Philippines 617 , 622 , 628–30 , 632 , 633 , 648 , 652–3 Polo’s account of 221 and the Portuguese 606–7 , 628 , 630 , 632 , 635–8 , 639 , 642 , 647 , 653 , 654 , 692–3 ; and access to Chinese silk 652 ; and Dutch 692–3 ; and Hideyoshi 646–7 ; and Jesuits 644 , 646–7 ; translation of Portuguese sailing manuals into Japanese 644 pottery see pottery/ceramics: Japanese power fragmentation in 14th century 230 , 231 and rice 808 , 847 and the Russians see Russia: and the Japanese and Ryukyu Islands 229–30 , 232 , 614 sake 212 samurai 223–4 , 225 , 644 , 649 on Schöner’s globe 572 seafaring 199 and Second World War 887–8 , 890 , 891 Shikoku island 218 shipbuilding 212 , 896 ships see boats/ships: Japanese shogunate abolition (1868) 847 Shōsō-in imperial treasury, Nara 194 , 207 , 217 and Siam 220 and silk 194 , 200 , 201 , 628 , 630 , 633 , 847 silver 638 , 641 , 642 , 647 , 801 , 847 and the Spanish 627 , 629–30 , 632 , 633 , 652–3 ; and Dutch 692 Takashima 227 and tea 215–16 , 230 , 649 , 847 trade see trade: Japanese Tsushima see Tsushima island and the USA 846–7 ; and Second World War 888 and Vietnam 632 wakō pirates 218 , 219 , 220 , 222 , 637 , 638 and Waldseemüller 556 and Wallem 872 Japan current xv Japan Sea 6 , 43 , 198 , 200 Jardine, William 824 , 825 , 827 Jarlshof, Shetland 372 Java/Javans 7 , 113 , 154 , 162 , 272 , 279–81 , 287 , 689 , 736 Batavia see Batavia/Batavians and Britain 820 and China 163–4 , 188 , 244 , 260 , 262 , 268–9 , 280–81 , 286–7 and the Dutch 688 and Japan 220 Majapahit kingdom 279–81 , 284–5 , 287 , 290 merchants 292 and Mongols 228 , 272 , 279 and Norway 871 Parameśvara and Javan rule over Sumatra 287 , 289–90 Polo and ‘Great Java’ 272 , 280 , 734 and the Portuguese 578 and Ryukyu Islands 233 ships 285 ; junks 548 , 549 , 606 and Singapore/Temasek 284–5 , 286 , 288 , 289 spice merchants in 250 and Śri Vijaya 159 , 160 , 272–3 , 279–80 , 287 trade 163–4 Jefferson, Thomas 792 Jeffreys, George, 1st Baron 777 Jehosaphat 82 Jelling, Jutland 353 Jenkinson, Anthony 659–60 , 706 Jerónimo de Jesús de Castro 653 Jeronymites 589 Jerusalem 460 , 523 , 531 , 537 Temple 80 , 81 , 728 and Third Crusade 449 Jesuits 628 , 640 , 642 , 643 , 644–7 , 648 , 653 and Franciscans 653 jet 141 jewellery 141 , 265 see also specific gemstones American silver coins melted down for 754 bracelets see bracelets brooches 326 , 353 Crown Jewels 450 Lapita 15 necklaces 56 , 102 Jews 52 , 96 Adeni 181 of Alexandria 99 anti-Semitism 697 , 700 , 855 , 884 in Azores 840 bankers 450 , 855 of Cairo 124 , 536 in China 238 and citron 178 and England 700 , 769–70 , 839 and flax 176 , 178 forced conversion: to Christianity 537 ; to Islam 181 French anti-Semitism 855 of Fustat 176 Genizah documents 174 , 175–6 , 182 , 184 German 422 , 886 Gibraltar settlement 656 impurity laws and eastern drinking vessels 174 , 187 and the Inquisition 699 , 700 in Jamaica 773 Khazars 171 London’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue 700 , 838 Majorcan 480 in Manchester 839 in Mangalore 186 merchants 175–6 , 181 , 183 , 184 , 238 , 354 , 697–702 , 834 , 841 Mizrahi 841 Moroccan 697 , 836–8 , 840–41 Muslim governments’ relationship with 836–8 of Persian origin 184 and the Portuguese 536 , 537 , 697 , 699–700 , 701 , 702 , 717–18 , 772–3 , 838 , 840 see also Christianity: Portuguese New Christians (of Jewish origin) ; children from Portugal sent to São Tomé 493 , 494 ‘purity of blood’ doctrine and hiding of Jewish ancestry 696 Red Sea and Jewish–Christian confrontation 130 , 166–7 Sephardic see Sephardim and silk 176 in Singapore 823 in Spain 698 suspected secret Jews: in the Canaries 697 ; in Havana 592 Tabernacles Feast 178 Yemenite 181 , 182 Jian-wen 251 Jiddah 595 , 598 , 602 Jikaku Daishi (Ennin) 202–9 , 210–11 Jingdezhen 174 João I of Portugal 476 , 477 , 484 João II of Portugal 494 , 496 , 508 , 512 , 513 , 514 , 527 , 537 John, king of England 449 , 469 John I of Portugal 469 John, Prester 46 , 512 , 523 , 536 , 540 Johnson, Lyndon B. 903 Johor 239 , 679 , 818 , 821 Jon Grønlænder 405–6 Jordan 83 Josephus 135 Jourdain, John 689 , 690 Jtj (wife of Parekhou) 77 Juana la Beltraneja 505 Juana the Mad, queen of Castile 555 Julfa 706 see also New Julfan merchants Jungdezhen 649 junks xx , 134 , 137 , 233 , 234 , 575 , 637 Chinese 135 , 217 , 243 , 246 , 247 , 259 , 270 , 278 , 621 , 622 , 623 , 624 , 625 , 628 , 636 , 638 , 781 , 867 Japanese 628 , 637 Javanese 548 , 549 , 606 Melakan 643 and the Portuguese 636 , 637 , 642 , 643 Jutes 344 , 347 , 348 Jutland 685 battle of 882 Ka‘aba, Mecca 163 , 171 Kahiki 25 Kaiana, Hawai’ian prince 814–15 Kaifeng 238 Kalevala 366 Kalinga 288 Kalpe see Gibraltar Kamakura 212 , 214 , 215 , 217 , 223 , 224 , 229 Kamara (Puhar) 119 Kamaran Island 601 Kamchatka Peninsula 800 , 802 , 803 , 807 Kamehameha I of Hawai’i 814 , 815 , 816 , 817 Kamehameha II of Hawai’i 816–17 Kané 123 Kane (god) 26 Kangp’a see Chang Pogo Kanton, near Stockholm 725 kaolin 650 Karachi 63 , 91 Karelians 422 Karl Hundason, king of the Scots 376 Katharine Sturmy 461 Kathāsaritsāgara 143 Kattigara 121 , 143 Kaua’i 25 , 814 , 815 Kaundinya 140 , 141 Kaupang, Norway 353 , 355 , 365 , 390 Kawano Michiari 224–5 kayaks 399 Keats, John 565 Kedah 152 , 161 kelp 196 Kemal Reis 607 , 610 Kempe, Margery 452 Kendrick, John 792 , 793 , 794 Ken’in (Buddhist monk) 202 Kennedy, John F. 903 Kent 360 Ketill the Fool 386 Kettler, Jacob 719 , 720 Khazars 171 Khmer kingdom/kings 140–41 , 158 and Champa 249–50 and Song China 244 Kholmogory 660 Khubilai Khan 221 , 222 , 223 , 224 , 227 , 228 , 247 , 248 , 263 , 272 Ki no Misu 204 Kidd, William 761 Kiev/Rus 365 , 367 , 423 Kilwa 131 , 176 , 543 , 546 , 547 , 568 Kim Yang 211 kingfisher feathers 135 , 139 King’s Mirror 399 , 400 Kingston Bay, Jamaica 771 , 778 , 855 Kiribati Islands 14 , 31 , 614 Kiritimati 31 Kish/Qays 173–4 , 180 Klysma 102 , 117 knives 194 knǫrrs 371 , 385 , 390–91 Koch, John 330 Kodiak Island 793 , 805 Kōfuko-ji monastery, Nara 235 Koguryō, Korea 192 , 194 Kola Peninsula 658–9 Kolkata see Calcutta Kollam 183–4 Komr 158 Kon-Tiki 27 , 28 Kongo slaves 493 , 503 Konstantin of Novgorod 427 Koptos 78 , 111 , 112 , 113 , 116 Korea and Buddhism 166 , 194 , 198 celadon 232 and China 189 , 191 , 192 , 198 , 210 , 236 , 239 , 244 , 245 , 287 , 650 and Christianity 695 House of Li 219 and Japan 190 , 191–9 , 200 , 204 , 223 , 225 , 646 , 649–51 Kim dynasty 193 Koguryō kingdom 192 , 194 Koryō 219 , 222 , 223 merchants 189 , 207 ; merchant communities from Quanzhou 245 and Mongols 222 , 249 navy 650–51 North 193 Paekche kingdom 192 , 194 Parhae kingdom 194 , 197–8 and Red Sea 117 and Ryukyu Islands 232 , 234 ships 206 , 650–51 silk 244 , 247 Silla kingdom 192–3 , 194 , 195 , 197 , 198 , 199 , 204 , 211 slaves 210 tea bowls 649 trade 194 , 198 , 216 , 630 Kōrokan, Japan 196–7 Koryō, Korea 219 , 222 , 223 Kos, Greek island 116 Kosh, Socotra 129 Kosmas Indikopleustes 130 Kowloon 828 Kra Isthmus 137 , 144 , 273 Krakatoa 119 Kronstadt, Baltic 807 , 809 Kruzenshtern, Johann-Anton von 806–9 Kulami 182 Kumiai Indians 28 Kunemura 232 Kupe, Polynesian navigator 32–6 Kuril Islands 797 , 803 , 804 Kurland 715–16 , 719 Kuroshio current xv Kuwait 54 , 67 Kuy (war-god) 26 Kwallŭk 194 Kylsant, Owen Philipps, 1st Baron 883–4 Kylsant Royal Mail 883–4 Kyoto/Heian 212 , 216–17 , 218 , 223 , 228 , 644 Minamoto assault on 230 Tōfuku-ji monastery 218 Kyushu island 191 , 195 , 196 , 197 , 204 , 208 , 215 , 216–17 , 218 , 220 , 652 see also Hakata (Fukoaka) and Hideyoshi 646 Japanese converts to Christianity 654 pirates (wakō ) 218 La Gomera 589 La Isabela 528 , 585–6 , 588 La Navidad 585 La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, comte de 809 , 812 La Tène culture 326 , 330 , 332 , 334 Labrador 464 , 533 , 557 Greenland given name of 534–5 lacquer 220 boxes xix , 216 , 703 Lady Hughes 788 Lady Washington 792 , 793 Lagash 64 , 65 Lagos, Algarve 497–9 , 502 Lancaster, James 687–9 Langdon Bay, Kent 319–20 , 321 Lanzarote 471 , 472 , 473 Laodicea 108 , 122 lapis lazuli 57 , 59 , 62 , 107 , 194 , 202 , 238 Lapita people/culture 11–16 , 19 agronomy 12 boats 15–16 horticulture 12–13 pottery 12 , 14 trade 15 Lapps/Sami 373 , 655 larch 408 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 554 , 582 , 584 , 585 , 591 Las Coles 585 Lasa 265 Latin 111–12 Latvia 420 , 422 peasants 719 Lavenham 453 Lavrador, João Fernandes 534 Lazarus, Emma 860 Le Havre 562 , 564 lead 333 , 640 Leander 807 leather 455 , 839 Lebanon 81 , 91 Ledyard, John 785 Lee Kuan Yew 894 Legázpi, Miguel López de 615 , 616 , 618 Leif Eiríksson (Leif the Lucky) 400 , 407 , 410 , 411 , 413 Leisler, Jacob 782–3 lemons 573 , 752 juice 688 lemurs, giant 133 leopards 99 , 266 skins 323 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 849 , 854 lettuce 643 Leuké Komé 115 Levant Company 691 Levant trade 460–61 Lewis, Bernard 836 Lewis, David 13 Lewis chessmen 397 Liang shu 137 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye 455 Libya/Libyans 73 , 79 , 90 Liefde , De 631 , 691 life expectancy 307 Lima 697 Limahon 625 , 627 limes 573 , 752 limewood 339 Limyriké 109 Lin Feng/Limahon 625 , 627 Lin Zexu 825–6 Lindisfarme 360 , 364 , 372 linen 373 , 444 , 457 , 540 , 548 , 624 Linnaeus, Carl 725 lions 99 , 259 , 266 , 269 , 276 skins 323 liquorice 194 Lisbon xxii , 370 , 468 , 469 , 470 , 476 , 477 , 487 , 510 , 545 , 600 , 606 , 617 , 648 , 676 , 701 , 840 archives 594 , 634 businessmen funding transatlantic voyages 525 Castilian siege of 476 and the Dutch 677 , 682–3 investors 561 , 703 and Madeiran sugar 485 shipbuilding 484 and spices 682–3 , 684 unloading of cargoes in transit to avoid customs in 745 , 751 Litany of Oengus 381 Lithuania 437 , 452 Liubice 423 Liujiagang 268 , 270 Liverpool 864 , 865 , 866 , 868 , 871 , 873 , 874 , 875 , 880 , 885 , 887 air raids 891 post-war recovery of shipping companies 897 and Second World War 891 , 892 Livonia/Livs 420–21 , 441 Livorno 619 , 676 , 682 , 700 , 772 , 838 , 872 Lixus 323 Lloyds 861 Lo Yueh 135 Loaísa, Garcia Jofre de 579 lodestones 243 , 370 Lomellini family 470 London 419 , 438 , 780 , 885 air raids and damage 891 , 892 , 896 and Bensaúde 840 and Bristol cloth 458 cosmopolitanism 455 Genoese in 455 and Greek merchants 872–3 and Hansards 447–8 , 449 , 450 , 453 and Italians 454–5 and Navigation Act (1651) 780 New Christians of 700 , 708 and New Julfans 706 Port of 454 , 839 , 880 , 891 , 892 , 896 , 897 ; docks 904 post-war recovery 897 Royal African Company 760 Royal Exchange 669 Royal Society 792 , 820 and under-sea cables 864 Sephardim 701 Spaniards in 455 Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue 700 , 838 Steelyard and the Hansard Kontor 447–8 , 453 tax exemptions 455 Viking raid on 360 and wool 454 London , SS 860–61 London Missionary Society 813 Long Melford 453 Longe, William 456 longitude, fixing 16 , 731 , 812 Loos, Wouter 740 Lopes Pereira, Manuel 704 Lopez, Fernando 755–6 Lopius, Marcus 793 Lothal 63 , 64 Lotus Sutra 199–200 , 215 Louis the Pious 337 Louis XI 459 Louis XII 559–60 Louis XIV 720 Louisiana , USS 859 Love Boat 900 Low Countries Flanders see Flanders Netherlands see Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch and Portuguese merchants avoiding customs duties 745 Portuguese sugar imports 669 and Spain 673 , 685 see also Netherlands/Holland and the Dutch: and the Spanish Low German language 426 Middle Low German 423 Lu-Enlilla 58–9 , 65 Lu-Mešlamtaë 59 Lu Xun 138 Luanda, Angola 593 , 701 Lübeck 418 , 419 , 422 , 423 , 424–6 , 427 , 429 , 440–41 , 444 , 445 , 447 , 449 , 450 , 452 , 470 Alt-Lübeck 423 Bone-Cutter Rebellions 440 and Hansa Diets 432 , 433 , 436 , 437 herring 430 Lübeckers in England 449–50 marzipan emporium 429 New Council 440–41 salt 430–31 Society of the Circle 440 , 442 Lucca 454 Lucena, Vasco Fernandes de 513 Lucian of Samosata 102 Lucqua (Hong merchant) 808 Luftwaffe 889 Lüneburg Heath 431 Luo Mao-deng: The Grand Director of the Three Treasures Goes Down to the Western Ocean 254 , 259 , 265 Lusitania , RMS 882 luxury goods 58 , 75 , 82 , 139 , 192 , 199 , 215 , 217 , 232 , 349 , 420 , 427 see also specific goods by name Arctic 412 , 414 , 415 Chinese customs rates on 241–2 , 273 European demand from new colonies in mid-16th century 588 exotic luxuries see exoticism: exotic goods, luxuries and foods and German Hansa 420 , 427 and Hawai’i 816 Japan and Portuguese luxuries 647 Mediterranean 672 and Russia 802 Luzon island 616 , 618 , 622 ceramics 652 Lvov 708 lychees 246–7 Lydia 85 Lynn, England 447 , 449 , 451–2 , 462 Steelyard 453 lynx 306 Lyons 562 Ma Huan 256–7 , 261 , 264–5 , 269–70 , 280 Maasvlakte 897 Mabuchi Kamo 847 Macaronesia 481–96 , 745–55 see also Azores ; Canary Islands ; Cape Verde Islands ; Madeira Macassar 10 Macau (Macao) xviii , xxix , 592 , 617 , 627–8 , 634 , 638–42 , 648 , 709 , 725 , 787 , 808 , 826 ‘black ships’ of Macau/Great Ship of Amacon 641–2 , 644 , 645–6 , 647 and the British 806 and gambling 907 and Japan 635 , 638 , 639 , 642 , 644 , 654 Jesuits 645 and New Julfans 706 opium trade 827 and the Portuguese 638–42 , 643–4 , 787 ; New Christians 703 silk 640 and silver 763 and tax 639 and the USA 806 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st Baron 722 mace 611 , 684 , 703 , 781 Macnin, Meir 839 Macnin family 836 Macpherson, W.

…

This area was explored early in the second century AD by a sea captain named Alexander who may well have rounded the southern tip of Malaya, by way of the Strait of Malacca, and have entered the South China Sea, arriving at a place called Kattigara, which will be revisited in the next chapter. Greeks and Romans were not terribly sure where China lay, but they knew it was a source of fine silk, and that was probably the motive for occasional forays towards the South China Sea; an embassy from the court of Emperor Marcus Aurelius may have reached the South China Sea in the late second century, for Chinese records describe the embassy of ‘Antun’ (Antoninus, the emperor’s cognomen , or additional name), though they dismissed it as of little consequence because the goods offered as gifts – or, as the Chinese would prefer to think, tribute – were regarded as commonplace.

…

The impression given by the wreck is that this was a Chinese ship and that it was bound from Guangzhou or another port in southern China for a destination in the South China Sea.59 This evidence for goods being collected from different corners of the South China Sea on sizeable ships affects how one might think about this space. It has often been compared to the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean is not an ideal model, for three large continents meet there, while the southern and eastern rims of the South China, Sea are chains of islands separating the sea from the open spaces of the Pacific; and the mainland to the north has always been dominated by China which, even when fragmented, has possessed an economic and political weight far in excess of anything that rulers over Śri Vijaya could hope to achieve.60 Yet the South China Sea has also been an area in which the great power to the north has taken a relatively passive role in the conduct of trade, compared to the inhabitants of Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand and Vietnam.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

RegionTopicID​=​SCS. 18. On the South China Sea as “China’s Caribbean,” see Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron, 32 –50. 19. Southeast Asian nations began asserting these views with particular intensity following Hillary Clinton’s remarks at the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi. 20. “The South China Sea Arbitration (The Republic of Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China),” Permanent Court of Arbitration, https://​pca​-cpa​.org/​en/​cases/​7/. 21. Katie Hunt, “Showdown in the South China Sea: How Did We Get Here?” CNN, August 2, 2016, http://​www​.cnn​.com/​2015/​10/​28/​asia/​china​-south​-china​-sea​-disputes​ -explainer/. 22.

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Christopher Harress, “Russia and China Begin Mediterranean Military Exercises with Black Sea Port Visit,” IB Times, May 5, 2015, http://​www​.ibtimes​.com/​russia​-china​ -begin​-mediterranean​-military​-exercises​-black​-sea​-port​-visit​-1916868. 288 Notes to Chapters 7 and 8 85. Russia and China began their exercises in the South China Sea on September 12, 2016. These exercises focused on “island seizing,” a particularly controversial topic at the time, since they followed the ruling at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, declaring China’s South China Sea claims null and void. See Sam LaGrone, “China, ­Russia Kick Off Joint South China Sea Naval Exercise: Includes ‘Island Seizing’ Drill,” USNI News, September 12, 2016, https://​news​.usni​.org/​2016/​09/​12/​china​-russia​-start​-joint​ -south​-china​-sea​-naval​-exercise​-includes​-island​-seizing​-drill. 86.

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Robert D. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (New York: Random House, 2014), 41. 17. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that there are some 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas proved and probable reserves in the South China Sea. China’s CNOOC estimated in late 2012 that the area holds some 125 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in undiscovered Notes to Chapter 6 279 reserves. See Energy Information Administration (EIA), “South China Sea,” U.S. Department of Energy, February 7, 2013, https://​www​.eia​.gov/​beta/​international/​regions​-topics​ .cfm​?

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order by Bruno Maçães

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Admiral Zheng, autonomous vehicles, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, cloud computing, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, global value chain, high-speed rail, industrial cluster, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, one-China policy, Pearl River Delta, public intellectual, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, trade liberalization, trade route, zero-sum game

The Road The Vision and Actions document proposed two routes for the Maritime Silk Road. The East Route would start from China’s coast through the South China Sea to the South Pacific. The West Route would pass through the South China Sea and terminate in Africa and Europe. This scheme was slightly modified in a 2017 document entitled Vision for Maritime Cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, where three separate routes are envisioned. First, the China-Indian Ocean-Africa-Mediterranean Sea Blue Economic Passage linking the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor, running westward from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, and connecting the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor (BCIM-EC).

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Even the initial success of the company seemed to anticipate the Chinese economic model of our time, being the result of the combination of the government’s financial support and the merchant managers’ autonomy.21 * * * Maps of the Maritime Silk Road released by the Chinese media have shown the route running through disputed areas in the South China Sea, another hot spot for geopolitical rivalry. The contradiction is that the South China Sea is the geographic area where China has been developing a new, more assertive and confrontational foreign policy, and it lies at the very center of those free and safe shipping lanes evoked by every official document on the Belt and Road. There are two main ways to think about this contradiction.

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Countries such as Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam continue to hesitate between adopting one of the two interpretations of the initiative. In the past China has used economic aid as a powerful tool in advancing its interests in the South China Sea. When President Hu Jintao visited Phnom Penh in 2012 he promised his Cambodian counterpart economic assistance of 450 million yuan. A few months later Cambodia opposed including a mention of the South China Sea dispute in a joint statement tabled by Vietnam and the Philippines. Around the same time, Chinese quarantine authorities reportedly blocked hundreds of container lorries of Philippine bananas from entering Chinese ports.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Admiral Davidson gave a frank assessment of China’s capabilities, and the limitations of the options available to the US Navy. China was in the process of constructing a series of military bases in the South China Sea and beyond, he noted. ‘Once occupied, China will be able to extend its influence thousands of miles to the south and project power deep into Oceania.’ Its forces, furthermore, would ‘easily overwhelm the military forces of any other South China Sea claimants’. His conclusion was as stark as it was clear: ‘In short, China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.’ Even in that event, he added, ‘there is no guarantee that the US would win a future conflict with China’.198 This is despite major investment in naval technology that includes the construction of vessels like the USS Zumwalt, so sophisticated that one of the US Navy’s most senior officers, Admiral Harry B.

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, Eurasia Daily Monitor 15(20), 8 February 2018. 75Farhan Bokhari, Kiran Stacey and Emily Feng, ‘China courted Afghan Taliban in secret meetings’, Financial Times, 8 August 2018. 76Reuters, ‘Pakistan scrambles to protect China’s “Silk Road” pioneers’, 11 June 2017. 77Permanent Court of Arbitration, ‘The South China Sea Arbitration (The Republic of Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China)’, 12 July 2016 at https://www.pcacases.com/web/view/7 78Richard A. Bitzinger, ‘China’s Plan to Conquer the South China Sea Is Now Clear’, The National Interest, 10 May 2018. 79Vu Huang, ‘Vietnam asks China to end bombers drills in Paracels’, VnExpress, 31 May 2018. 80Manuel Mogato, ‘Philippines takes “appropriate action” over Chinese bomber in disputed South China Sea’, Reuters, 21 May 2018. 81US Department of Defense, ‘Remarks by Secretary Hagel at plenary session at International Institute for Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue’, 31 May 2014. 82Ankit Panda, ‘How Much Trade Transits the South China Sea?

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Landing drills by Chinese bombers have led to the formal demand that ‘China put an end to these activities immediately, stop militarisation and seriously respect Vietnam’s sovereignty’ over the islands.79 This was echoed in Manila, where the government of President Duterte took ‘appropriate diplomatic action’ about the presence of the bombers – but resisted calls of senior politicians to take more direct steps ‘to inflict, at the very least, a bloody nose on any attacker who is out to harm us’.80 Seen from the perspective of Beijing, the fortification of the islands is part of a defensive network that is essential to protect rather than enhance China’s position. The South China Sea is so important that in 2014 Chuck Hagel, then US secretary of defence, declared that it was nothing less than ‘the beating heart of Asia–Pacific and a crossroads of the global economy’.81 That is an understatement. While the assertion by many commentators that half of the world’s merchant fleet (by tonnage) passes through the South China Sea each year may be hyperbolic, the volume is nevertheless immense.82 As well as almost 40 per cent of all China’s trade, the waterway carries nearly a third of India’s trade goods by value, almost a quarter of that of Brazil as well as around 10 per cent that of the UK, Italy and Germany.83 This is not ‘a’ crossroads of the global economy.

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

-China Economic and Security Review Commission, September 9, 2020, 3, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/Hayton_Testimony.pdf. 10.Ivan Watson, Brad Lendon, and Ben Westcott, “Inside the Battle for the South China Sea,” CNN, August 2018, https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/08/asia/south-china-sea/. 11.Luc Cuyvers et al., Deep Seabed Mining: A Rising Environmental Challenge (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN and Gallifrey Foundation, 2018), 32. 12.Vo Kieu Bao Uyen and Shashank Bengali, “Sunken Boats. Stolen Gear. Fishermen Are Prey as China Conquers a Strategic Sea,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-12/china-attacks-fishing-boats-in-conquest-of-south-china-sea. 13.Hayton, The South China Sea, 113. 14.Max Fisher, “The South China Sea: Explaining the Dispute,” New York Times, July 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/world/asia/south-china-sea-dispute-arbitration-explained.html. 15.Hayton, “The South China Sea in 2020,” 2. 16.Zachery Haver, “China Trademarked Hundreds of South China Sea Landmarks,” BenarNews, April 13, 2021, https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/philippine/sea-trademarks-04132021172405.html. 17.Yukie Yoshikawa, “The US-Japan-China Mistrust Spiral and Okinotorishima,” Asia-Pacific Journal 5, no. 10 (October 1, 2007): article 2541, https://apjjf.org/-Yukie-YOSHIKAWA/2541/article.html. 18.Norimitsu Onishi, “Japan and China Dispute a Pacific Islet,” New York Times, July 10, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/world/asia/japan-and-china-dispute-a-pacific-islet.html. 19.Hayton, The South China Sea, 262. 20.Sung Hyo Hyun, “The Geomorphic Characteristics and Naming of Undersea Feature in the East Sea, Korea,” in The 14th International Seminar on Sea Names Geography, Sea Names, and Undersea Feature Names (Tunis Ville, Tunisia: Society for East Sea, 2008). 21.F.

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In a world where only a quarter or so of the ocean floor is accurately mapped, knowing more about the uncharted terrain than your enemies still carries a military advantage. In 2021, the $3 billion nuclear submarine USS Connecticut collided with a seamount somewhere in the South China Sea, a hotly contested waterway in the Pacific. China has spent the last few decades building a case for claiming much of the South China Sea as its own, flouting international laws and customs arising during the millennia that Southeast Asian people have shared these waters. The United States regularly sends naval warships through the South China Sea as a way of asserting its commitment to freedom of navigation on the high seas, but the submarine crash revealed that the US Navy is probably doing a lot more than that under the surface.

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Fishermen Are Prey as China Conquers a Strategic Sea,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-12/china-attacks-fishing-boats-in-conquest-of-south-china-sea. 13.Hayton, The South China Sea, 113. 14.Max Fisher, “The South China Sea: Explaining the Dispute,” New York Times, July 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/world/asia/south-china-sea-dispute-arbitration-explained.html. 15.Hayton, “The South China Sea in 2020,” 2. 16.Zachery Haver, “China Trademarked Hundreds of South China Sea Landmarks,” BenarNews, April 13, 2021, https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/philippine/sea-trademarks-04132021172405.html. 17.Yukie Yoshikawa, “The US-Japan-China Mistrust Spiral and Okinotorishima,” Asia-Pacific Journal 5, no. 10 (October 1, 2007): article 2541, https://apjjf.org/-Yukie-YOSHIKAWA/2541/article.html. 18.Norimitsu Onishi, “Japan and China Dispute a Pacific Islet,” New York Times, July 10, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/world/asia/japan-and-china-dispute-a-pacific-islet.html. 19.Hayton, The South China Sea, 262. 20.Sung Hyo Hyun, “The Geomorphic Characteristics and Naming of Undersea Feature in the East Sea, Korea,” in The 14th International Seminar on Sea Names Geography, Sea Names, and Undersea Feature Names (Tunis Ville, Tunisia: Society for East Sea, 2008). 21.F.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

China proposed requiring prior notification of all joint exercises and allowing observer participation—requirements that effectively only applied to the United States as the main state conducting joint exercises, and succeeded in inserting prior notification into the 2002 Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.128 China also called for states to cease surveillance of one another, which again principally applied to US maritime surveillance.129 It used discussions over the South China Sea as “a means to restrict US Naval exercises in the area” by proposing a ban on South China Sea military exercises—targeting recently restarted US-Philippine exercises in particular. China argued that a proposed ASEAN maritime information center be placed in Tianjin, which could have given China influence over information provision.130 China pressured states not to join Washington’s post-9/11 Regional Maritime Security Initiative (RMSI), which involved using US Special Forces, new bases in Malaysia, and high-speed vessels to secure the Malacca Straits from terrorist attack and piracy.131 Seeing this effort as part of a containment plan, China suggested an alternative eleven-nation joint China-ASEAN patrol to secure the sea lines.132 China even suggested that “bilateral agreements between ASEAN countries and outside powers,” such as alliances with the United States, should not supersede multilateral ones made through ASEAN that might limit alliance cooperation or participation in RMSI.133 Finally, China was the first nuclear state to support ASEAN’s interest in nuclear weapons-free zones in Southeast Asia, which if successful, could have complicated US efforts to station strategic nuclear forces or nuclear-equipped vessels and aircraft in the region, thereby limiting US freedom of maneuver without affecting China, which did not deploy such forces abroad.134 Finally, China sought to reassure ASEAN states to prevent its encirclement.

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“From the perspective of what was needed to protect China’s maritime rights and interests, recover Nansha and Taiwan, and deal with other strategic circumstances,” he notes in his memoir, the members “recommended constructing an aircraft carrier.”153 Liu further noted that, without an aircraft carrier, it would be difficult to secure Chinese interests with surface vessels alone, telling the PLA General Staff in 1987 that: “when thinking about maritime formations, we had only considered destroyers, frigates, and submarines; after further research, we realized that without air cover, there was no way these formations would be able to fight outside the radius of shore-based combat aircraft,” and that even within the range of shore-based aircraft, air cover would simply not reach quickly enough in times of crisis.154 The military was convinced carriers were useful not only for conflicts in the distant South China Sea, but also much closer in the Taiwan Strait. Liu wrote that the PLA General Staff looked favorably upon his report and escalated the question of carrier acquisition, all of which suggests that at least as early as 1987, a Chinese focus on narrower local operational contingencies should have included an aircraft carrier. In 1995, Liu in a high-level meeting on aircraft carriers stated that “Defending the South China Sea, peacefully reuniting Taiwan, safeguarding maritime rights and interests—all require aircraft carriers.”155 The fact that China thought carriers would be useful in regional contingencies means that theories of Chinese investment focused on regional considerations cannot account for the delay in building carriers.

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Zhang Yunling writes that joining multilateral organizations allowed China to “demonstrate its benign intentions by exercising self-restraint and displaying a willingness to be restrained” and, crucially, that “this idea has led directly to actions such as not devaluing the Renminbi during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, joining the TAC-SEA [an ASEAN document], and largely letting ASEAN states dictate the norms regarding the South China Sea dispute.”20 Similarly, a book from the Central Party School Press summarizing China’s foreign policy strategy indicates China pursued a policy of self-constraint (自我约束) and “accepting constraint” from others in these bodies (接受约束) to reassure neighbors and confirms that multilateral concessions—like signing an ASEAN South China Sea Code of Conduct—were part of this strategy.21 In another article, Zhang Yunling makes clear that this “good neighbor policy” was part of a grand strategy to blunt American encirclement: China has pursued a strategy of maintaining amicable relationships with neighbors (mulin youhao, wending zhoubian) to hedge against downturns in Sino-U.S. relations.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Just for now, rhetoric was the only weapon China was using in the region, with hostile declarations made at conferences, fierce rhapsodies published in the government press, claims to historical rights, and predictions of a glorious and laowei-free—a foreigner-free—future offered in schools to Chinese children. Yet in the South China Sea (one and a half million square miles of shipping lanes and oil and gas fields and untold seafloor mining possibilities), more than mere rhetoric is being employed, and a flash point is being born, a danger to all. For at the heart of the new South China Sea problem is another demarcation zone made up of scores of tiny islands that constitute what since 1947 has been known to the Chinese as, somewhat bizarrely, the Nine-Dash Line.

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Yet another piece of Chinese sovereign territory is being manufactured in full public view, and one day, in all likelihood, it will be defended at all costs, by all and any means.7 It was once assumed that China’s steady encroachments were predicated on the oil and gas reserves that lie beneath the South China Sea. Such is no longer the principal reason. Nowadays it is much simpler: the Chinese want all the green waters, all of what they call “the near sea” within the First Island Chain, to be free of interlopers. They know also that “might is right,” and with stealth and determination, they can keep away those who are not welcome, and thus protect themselves, creating, as Shakespeare remarked of Richard II’s England, a “fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war.” The Americans dislike the way the South China Sea is currently being carved up, with so much to China’s unilateral benefit.

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CHAPTER 10: OF MASTERS AND COMMANDERS Three books in particular set the scene for the current Chinese expansion of influence in the far western Pacific and the fretfulness it is causing in Washington: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea; Robert Haddick’s Fire on the Water; and, by the always reliable Robert Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron. However, the situation in the region is changing so rapidly that all these studies are in danger of becoming dated—so that interested readers would do well to monitor the near-constant streams of publications from such bodies as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Asia Society, and the International Crisis Group, among others, to keep properly abreast. The International Crisis Group Paper 229 (2012), “Stirring Up the South China Sea,” presents useful background; and for truly ultra-deep background, there are always new editions available of Alfred Mahan’s classic The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783—essential reading for those who might be curious about how these new naval challenges are likely to play themselves out.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Now, keeping the sea lanes into Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and other Chinese ports open and free from piracy or terrorism is something of critical importance to China and its trading partners. All of this makes the South China Sea one of the most strategically important stretches of water in the world, particularly when it comes to the oil tankers and specialised bulk carriers that bring energy resources and other raw materials to China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. As much as a third of the world’s traded crude oil passes through these waters. China says it wants peaceful, cooperative, and mutually beneficial relations with its neighbours in the South China Sea, but rich fishery stocks and potential energy reserves make this area a place of ongoing tension.

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A sample of the rhetoric that prevails comes from this editorial commentary in China’s state-controlled Global Times newspaper on 21 June 2011: Vietnam has been taking risky actions in the South China Sea for some time. It has occupied 29 Chinese islands. It has been gaining the most benefits from undersea natural gas and oil exploitation. It is also the most aggressive in dealing with China . . . China has to send a clear message that it will take whatever measures necessary to protect its interests in the South China Sea. If Vietnam continues to provoke China in this region, China will first deal with it with maritime police forces, and if necessary, strike back with naval forces.8 Vietnam controls the largest number of islands in the Spratlys group, which is situated between Vietnam and the western coasts of the Philippines, Brunei, and Malaysia’s Sabah and Sarawak states on Borneo.

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They dropped pieces of wood in the water directly in front of Impeccable’s path. The incident took place in international waters in the South China Sea, about 75 miles south of Hainan Island. It was preceded by days of increasingly aggressive conduct by Chinese vessels.10 Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu (10 March 2009): China has lodged a solemn representation to the United States as the USNS Impeccable conducted activities in China’s special economic zone in the South China Sea without China’s permission. We demand that the United States put an immediate stop to related activities and take effective measures to prevent similar acts from happening.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

“I second that,” says the air force pilot with a smirk. “So how does that apply to the South China Sea?” I ask. “There’s only so much the US can and should do,” the SEAL says. Some students nod while others shake their heads. “China is a rising superpower and we’re the reigning one. War is inevitable.” “No, it’s not.” This debate continues for a while, until it fizzles. Where else can it go? The conversion turns back to the South China Sea, and everyone looks at the floor, stumped. “The problem is that victory in the South China Sea is like finding a needle in a haystack when every problem looks like hay.”

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Versions of this conversation have echoed across Washington for over a decade. Not much has changed, other than more Chinese islands in the South China Sea. Whatever the United States is doing, it’s not working. China is fighting in the twenty-first century, whereas America is stuck in the twentieth. The Three Warfares strategy conquers with a creeping expansionism designed to remain below the United States’ threshold of “war,” knowing that America will remain inert if at “peace.” By viewing the South China Sea as a traditional military battlefront, the United States falls into China’s strategic trap. Nonwar war is paradoxical to conventional war thinkers, and seeing them contemplate it is like watching a dog trying to pick up a basketball.

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E., 95 CARITAS, 136 “Cartel,” 177 Carter, Jimmy, 212 Cassandra’s Curse, 20 Cathar Crusade, 127 Cesena massacre, 27 Chamber of Commerce, U.S., 66–67 Chechens (Chechnya), 8, 96–97, 207 China legal warfare (“lawfare”), 68–69 media warfare, 67–68 Opium Wars, 180 South China Sea, 37, 56, 63, 65, 71–73, 245 South China Sea incident of 2017, 59–63 “Three Warfares” strategy, 64–70, 73, 203 Tibet annexation, 97 China Central Television network (CCTV), 67–68 China National Petroleum Corporation, 136 Christian militia, 144–45 Churchill, Winston, 240 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) Guatemalan coup d’état, 208–11 Liberian Civil War, 116–17 shadowy manipulations, 211–12 “Title 50” programs, 110 war futurists and, 13–14 Citizenship, 98–100 Citizens United v.

China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

An occasion commemorating the Second World War was being used, in effect, to create new partnerships, while bolstering myths about the old ones. The South China Sea Dispute The South China Sea dispute is probably the single most prominent territorial conflict in which China has been engaged in recent decades. I will not go into the complexities of the dispute here, which continue to be the subject of extensive political as well as academic debate.26 (In broad outline, the argument concerns China’s claim of sovereignty over the majority of the South China Sea and a number of island groups in it, including the Paracel and Spratly Islands, a claim strongly resisted by several Southeast Asian nations.)

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He Na, “New Figures Reveal Chinese Casualties,” China Daily, 15 July 2015, makes the case for thirty-five million casualties (dead and wounded) over a fourteen-year war. 26. See Bill Hayton, The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (New Haven, CT, 2014), for an insightful account of the disputes. 27. Stephen Chen, “China’s Claims in South China Sea ‘Proposed by Continuous Boundary for the First Time,’ ” South China Morning Post, 22 Apr. 2018. 28. Chen Qianping, “The Nationalist Government’s Efforts to Recover Chinese Sovereignty over the Islands in the South China Sea after the End of World War Two,” Journal of Modern Chinese History, 11, no. 1 (2017), 73. 29. China’s resistance was, in some ways, similar to that of France, although Nationalist and Communist China resisted rather longer than the equivalent French states did. 30.

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I will not go into the complexities of the dispute here, which continue to be the subject of extensive political as well as academic debate.26 (In broad outline, the argument concerns China’s claim of sovereignty over the majority of the South China Sea and a number of island groups in it, including the Paracel and Spratly Islands, a claim strongly resisted by several Southeast Asian nations.) One particular element of the dispute, however, relates directly to China’s postwar circumstances: the Nationalists’ drawing up of a line of control in the South China Sea in 1946–1947, sometimes known as the “nine-dash” line because of its original representation as a series of dashes on the map. Discussions about the South China Sea are not generally connected to the history of the Second World War, not least because Japan is not a direct participant in the current controversy. But recent arguments surrounding this dispute have been tied to the territorial claims made by Chiang Kai-shek’s government as it sought to reshape the region after 1945.27 As in other cases, academic historiography has worked in tandem with the changing atmosphere in international relations.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

While it works on this problem it is deploying anti-submarine ships and is busy installing a network of underwater sensors in the East and South China Seas. Between China and the Pacific is the archipelago that Beijing calls the “first island chain.” There is also the “nine-dash line,” more recently turned into ten dashes in 2013 to include Taiwan, which China says marks its territory. This dispute over ownership of more than two hundred tiny islands and reefs is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbors. National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime it could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China.

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All of the states along the strait, and near its approaches, are anxious about Chinese dominance and most have territorial disputes with Beijing. China claims almost the entire South China Sea, and the energy supplies believed to be beneath it, as its own. However, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei also have territorial claims against China and one another. For example, the Philippines and China argue bitterly over the Mischief Islands, a large reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, which one day could live up to their name. Every one of the hundreds of disputed atolls, and sometimes just rocks poking out of the water, could be turned into a diplomatic crisis, as surrounding each rock is a potential dispute about fishing zones, exploration rights, and sovereignty.

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The maps of the region that the Chinese now print show almost the whole of the South China Sea as theirs. This is a statement of intent, backed by aggressive naval patrols and official statements. Beijing intends to change its neighbors’ ways of thinking and to change America’s way of thinking and behaving—pushing and pushing an agenda until its competitors back off. At stake here is the concept of international waters and free passage in peacetime; it is not something that will easily be given up by the other powers. The geopolitical writer Robert D. Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

Remember the overarching theme of this essay: the tightly wound interconnectedness of weakening states and faded empires across Eurasia. The world of the digital age is like a taut web. Tweak one string and the whole network vibrates. This means a flareup in the Baltic or South China Sea is not only about the Baltic or South China Sea. Nothing is local anymore. Connectivity itself magnifies the effect of military miscalculation. The Peloponnesian War that engulfed all of Greece had its origins in relatively minor conflicts involving Corcyra and Potidaea, which helped drive tensions between Athens and Sparta to the breaking point.

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Obviously, transportation infrastructure will not defeat geography. Indeed, the very expense of building such infrastructure in many places demonstrates the undeniable fact of geography. Anyone in the energy exploration business, or who has participated in a war game involving the Baltic states or the South China Sea, knows just how much old-fashioned geography still matters. At the same time, critical transportation infrastructure constitutes yet another factor making geography—and, by inference, geopolitics in our era—more oppressive and claustrophobic. To be sure, connectivity, rather than simply leading to more peace, prosperity, and cultural uniformity as techno-optimists like to claim, will have a much more ambiguous legacy.

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His return route to Venice would take him across the Indian Ocean: through the Strait of Malacca to Sri Lanka, up India’s western coast to Gujarat, and on side trips to Oman, Yemen, and East Africa. If the early-twenty-first-century world has a geopolitical focus, this would be it: the Greater Indian Ocean from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea, and including the Middle East, Central Asia, and China. The current Chinese regime’s proposed land-and-maritime Silk Road duplicates exactly the one Marco Polo traveled. This is no coincidence. The Mongols, whose Yuan Dynasty ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were, in fact, “early practitioners of globalization,” seeking to connect the whole of habitable Eurasia in a truly multicultural empire.

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

* * * · · · “I wish I had never seen it,” said the security guard Som Nang, describing what he had witnessed hundreds of miles from shore. In late 2013, Som Nang embarked on his maiden voyage on a boat that resupplied fishing vessels in the South China Sea. After four days on the water, Som Nang’s ship pulled up alongside a dilapidated Thai-flagged trawler. A Thai fishing ship in the South China Sea At the front of the trawler, a shirtless, emaciated man huddled with a rusty metal shackle around his bruised neck and a three-foot chain anchoring the collar to a post on the deck. The man had tried to escape the boat, the captain of the fishing vessel later explained, so he locked the metal collar on the man and chained him up every time another ship drew near.

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Pudjiastuti’s assault on illegal fishing did not please everyone, least of all China. A major investor in Indonesia, China had become an increasingly aggressive maritime player—not only globally, but especially in the South China Sea, where overfishing had exhausted catches close to shore. Economic growth in China pushed it to look to the sea for new oil and gas reserves. Both of these pressures had led China to claim sovereignty over rocks, shoals, and reefs throughout the South China Sea. Generally, China had tried to avoid armed clashes, relying instead on its civilian maritime force—in other words, its million-boat fishing fleet—to establish its foothold in the region.

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“That is a diplomatic negotiation now,” he said curtly. In the days after the confrontation, I emailed James Kraska, an international law professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island and an expert on the South China Sea. I sent him the coordinates of where the clash occurred and asked him whose waters those were. “Impossible to say,” he replied. Countries have to agree on where to draw these lines, he said. In the South China Sea, Indonesia and Vietnam have never come to such an agreement, he explained. That the borders were such a gray area was a surprise. During the confrontation, Samson had been so confident about the Macan’s location.

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Chinese officials have taken an expansive view of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, resisting attempts to negotiate territorial disputes multilaterally and disregarding rulings by international tribunals. In 2010, during an annual ASEAN security forum, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, stormed out after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenged China’s claims. He returned with an aggressive message for the ASEAN countries: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”7 China’s actions in the South China Sea have been even more alarming than its words. Where the facts on the ground have not suited its position, China has changed the ground.

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Owen Lattimore, “Yunnan, Pivot of Southeast Asia,” Foreign Affairs 21, no. 3 (1943): 476–493. 7. John Pomfret, “U.S. Takes a Tougher Tone with China,” Washington Post, July 30, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/29/AR2010072906416.html. 8. Eleanor Ross, “How and Why China Is Building Islands in the South China Sea,” Newsweek, March 29, 2017, https://www.newsweek.com/china-south-china-sea-islands-build-military-territory-expand-575161. 9. Mission of Japan to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, “Japan’s Cooperation on ASEAN 2025 (Connectivity),” May 2016, https://www.asean.emb-japan.go.jp/asean2025/jpasean-ec03.html. 10. Yukio Tajima, “Abe Softens Tone on Indo-Pacific to Coax China’s ASEAN Friends,” Nikkei Asian Review, November 13, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-Relations/Abe-softens-tone-on-Indo-Pacific-to-coax-China-s-ASEAN-friends. 11.

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Its overland and maritime ambitions converge in South and Southeast Asia, where it faces fierce competition from regional powers. Australia, Japan, India, and the United States are all working to provide alternatives to Chinese investment. Still, China is often its own worst enemy. Where the facts on the ground have not suited its position, it has changed the ground, creating artificial islands in the South China Sea and militarizing them with runways and missiles. Most countries want China’s investment and trade but find its increasingly aggressive behavior alarming. China’s partners might be smaller, but they are no less savvy. Many have far more experience dealing with outside powers than China has experience acting as one.

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

The trite answer one often hears is that China may find itself forced to stop Taiwan from implementing a declaration of independence. When serious analysts weigh the prospects of open conflict with China, however, they see it playing out over the open waters of the South China Sea. The Spratly Islands are not exactly a tourist destination. They are not exactly islands. If all were piled up together, the reefs, sandbars, and rocks in the South China Sea would amount to less than two square miles of land. That two square miles of land is spread out over more than 150,000 square miles of ocean. It’s not the islands that China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei are feuding over, but what is under them and around them.

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U.S. intelligence then learns that the Chinese are loading up their South Sea Fleet for an amphibious landing on disputed islands in the South China Sea. Cyber Command is asked by the Pentagon to buy some time, to slow down the Chinese landings by disrupting the troops and supplies getting ready to load up on the ships still in port. The Chinese South Sea Fleet is headquartered in Zhanjiang, on the Leizhou Peninsula, and its air force supporting operations in the South China Sea is on Hainan, in the Tonkin Gulf. The Fleet Headquarters and the Naval Air Base do not have their own electric grid; they are connected to the public power system.

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Or, if you have a highly rational actor on the other side, they’ll understand that the stakes are getting too high and they stand to suffer even more serious losses if things continue. In Exercise South China Sea, the PLA decided to engage in escalation dominance. In response to a cyber attack on the power grid in southeastern China, they not only hit the West Coast power grid, they disrupted the global Defense Department intranet, damaged the databases of U.S. financial clearinghouses, and sent additional kinetic warfare units into the crisis zone in the South China Sea. As the game continued, the U.S. leadership had to decide quickly whether it stood to lose more than China in the next round of cyber war escalation.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Patrick, “Everyone Agrees: Ratify the Law of the Sea,” The Internationalist (blog), CFR.org, June 8, 2012, http://blogs.cfr.org/patrick/2012/06/08/everyone-agrees-ratify-the-law-of-the-sea/; and Thomas Wright, “Outlaw of the Sea: The Senate Republicans’ UNCLOS Blunder,” ForeignAffairs.com, August 7, 2012, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/oceans/2012-08-07/outlaw-sea. 12. It is for this reason that China’s rejection of the ruling administered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration on the South China Sea in July 2016 was to be expected. See “Press Release: The South China Sea Arbitration,” The Hague, July 12, 2016, Permanent Court of Arbitration, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2990864/Press-Release-on-South-China-Sea-Decision.pdf; and “Full Text of Statement of China’s Foreign Ministry on Award of South China Sea Arbitration Initiated by Philippines,” Xinhua, July 12, 2016, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-07/12/c_135507744.htm. 11.

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Campbell, Xi Jinping on the Global Stage: Chinese Foreign Policy Under a Powerful but Exposed Leader, Council on Foreign Relations Special Report No. 74 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2016). 8. Fu Ying and Wu Shicun, “South China Sea: How We Got to This Stage,” National Interest, May 9, 2016, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/south-china-sea-how-we-got-stage-16118. 9. Basic information about the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank can be found at its Web site, www.aiib.org. 10. See Xi Jinping, The Governance of China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014), 306–8; and Fu Ying, “The US World Order Is a Suit That No Longer Fits,” Financial Times, January 6, 2016, www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c09cbcb6-b3cb-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html. 11.

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Greece and its various creditors were having difficulty arriving at a formula by which new loans could be extended; the risk was a crisis that would begin but not necessarily be contained within Greece and the Eurozone. The prospect of Brexit raised existential questions for the future of both the United Kingdom and Europe. Seventy years after the end of the war in the Pacific, China was expanding its claims in the South China Sea amid growing nationalism and tensions in a region characterized by numerous territorial disputes and much historical bitterness. Internally, Chinese authorities, fearing the political fallout of a slowing economy, were cracking down politically and intervening in currency and stock markets alike.

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short by David Archibald

Bakken shale, carbon tax, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), means of production, Medieval Warm Period, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, peak oil, price discovery process, rising living standards, sceptred isle, South China Sea, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Added into that mix are the nuclear weapons of Pakistan (a future failed state) and the ones that Iran is intent on making. China is a more formidable threat. A recent Pentagon report described China’s claim to the South China Sea as “enigmatic.” It is nothing of the sort. The claim is China’s way of grabbing its neighbors’ traditional fishing grounds and asserting hegemony in the region. China has become nasty and aggressive. It is the schoolyard bully who wants to pick a fight in order to get respect. Now the Chinese, having warned that they will seize any ships that cross the South China Sea without prior permission, can’t back down without losing face. Blood will be shed before the situation is resolved.

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Their view of the world was confirmed by the global financial crisis of 2008, during which the Europeans begged to be bailed out of their predicament with Chinese money. That sealed the deal in terms of their contempt for foreign cultures that are far more self-indulgent than China’s. In fact, China’s harsher tone toward the West dates from 2008. THE SOUTH CHINA SEA China has attempted to seize the South China Sea as far south as the Natuna Islands, part of Indonesia. The Chinese claim bumps up against the coast of Borneo. The area has been almost completely uninhabited because there was nothing worth staying for. No fishing settlements were there, so the fishing cannot be that attractive.

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In short, there are no natural resources worth losing blood over. The claim is purely political. China plans to enforce its claim by building a large fleet of naval vessels badged as coast guard vessels. The United States does not recognize the Chinese claim and has stated that it will send naval ships through the South China Sea as usual. The practical effect for the nations of the South China Sea littoral—Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines—apart from loss of traditional fishing grounds, is a great inconvenience for shipping. A vessel sailing from Hanoi to Japan would have to travel a further 3,000 kilometers to avoid being seized in the Chinese claim area.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

John Hurley, Scott Morris and Gailyn Portelance, ‘Examining the Debt Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative from a Policy Perspective’, Center for Global Development, Policy Paper 121, March 2018, <https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/examining-debt-implications-belt-and-road-initiative-policy-perspective.pdf>. 17. ‘5 Things About Fishing in the South China Sea’, Wall Street Journal, 19 July 2016, https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2016/07/19/5-things-about-fishing-in-the-south-china-sea/ 18. ‘How China Rules the Waves’, Financial Times, 12 January 2017, <https://ig.ft.com/sites/china-ports/>. 19. ‘Beijing Rejects Tribunal’s Ruling in South China Sea Case’, Guardian, 12 July 2016, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wins-south-china-sea-case-against-china>. 20. ‘Priority Policy for Development Cooperation FY2017’, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, April 2017, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/files/000259285.pdf>. 21.

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In the book, he emphasised the strategic and maritime significance to the US of what he called the ‘rimland’, or the countries and islands on the rim of the continental powers of the US, Europe and what was then the USSR. The geography of the rim ran from southern Europe and the Maghreb, east through the Persian Gulf, into the Indian Ocean, across to the South China Sea and up to Japan and the north west of China. Drawing attention to the population residing in the Asia-Pacific region in particular, along with its resources and industrial development potential, Spykman argued that whoever controlled this rimland would rule Eurasia, and the destiny of the world.

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In any event, few companies are likely to establish majority stakes in Chinese financial companies soon, if at all, and most of the big trade deals announced were non-binding, and those that could happen will take years of negotiation. Sino–US relations, book-ended by these high-level meetings, became frostier. The US resumed arms sales to Taiwan, and periodically sent naval warships close to contested islands in the South China Sea. The relabelled Comprehensive Economic Dialogue ended without any substantive agreement, or the usual joint policy statements and press conferences. When the new vice premier and overall head of economic and financial affairs, Liu He, visited Washington in early 2018, partly to restart the dialogue talks, he returned home empty-handed.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Asia is therefore much more than just “China plus.” Asia’s future is thus much more than whatever China wants. China is historically not a colonial power. Unlike the United States, it is deeply cautious about foreign entanglements. China wants foreign resources and markets, not foreign colonies. Its military forays from the South China Sea to Afghanistan to East Africa are premised on protecting its sprawling global supply lines—but its grand strategy of building global infrastructure is aimed at reducing its dependence on any one foreign supplier (as are its robust alternative energy investments). China’s launching the Belt and Road Initiative doesn’t prove that it will rule Asia, but it does remind us that China’s future, much like its past, is deeply embedded in Asia.

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In 1995, fearing Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui’s independence aspirations, China mobilized forces in Fujian province and conducted missile tests and amphibious exercises in the Taiwan Strait, with the United States responding by sending two aircraft carrier battle groups to compel it to back down. China did, however, regain sovereignty over Hong Kong from Great Britain in 1997 and Macao from Portugal in 1999, marking the formal disappearance of colonialism in Asia. During the mid-1990s, China also became more assertive in the South China Sea, prompting ASEAN to establish the ASEAN Regional Forum to bring China, the United States, Russia, Australia, and other powers under one diplomatic umbrella. ASEAN also expanded to include Vietnam in 1995 and Laos and Myanmar in 1997. Despite the tense regional atmosphere, China and South Korea began a dialogue with isolated North Korea, which had lost its Soviet patron.

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When it comes to migration, colonialism’s lasting legacy has been to make Asia even more Asian. European empires from the Portuguese to the British moved Malay and Indian merchants and slaves by the millions across the greater Indian Ocean realm. Steamship ferry services across the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea galvanized regional migration. At the same time, the pan-Asian anticolonial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inspired Asians to rediscover a common spatial and political understanding of Asia. Though colonialism was a humiliating experience, it nonetheless provided a common layer on which Asians are now building a post-Western future.

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

The continued existence of the most sophisticated Western military equipment (robots, cyberweapons, and fighter planes, including the US’s supreme F-35 stealth jet) also partly depends on China’s goodwill. This has US intelligence leaders concerned, especially as one high-ranking US army officer states that ‘only war can now stop Beijing controlling the South China Sea’.19 This latest scramble for resources is already heightening tensions over ownership of the most abundant deposits, sparking territorial conflicts in peaceful backwaters apparently of interest to no one. Fuelling this thirst for rare metals are a burgeoning global population set to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, the boom in new modes of high-tech consumption, and the growing convergence of Western and emerging economies.20 By seeking to break free from fossil fuels and turn an old order into a new world, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new and more potent dependence.

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Either way, as stated by Peter Leitner, ‘The Clinton administration was heavily predisposed toward approving almost anything the Chinese wanted.’ Leitner also left me with an open question — one that would take months of investigation to clear up: were rare-earth magnets the essential thread in this tangle of corruption, cynicism, and a thirst for power? South China Sea: access denied Peter Leitner did make one thing clear: ‘The Chinese targeted Magnequench in order to advance their ability to produce long-range cruise missiles.’ The question is whether the technology they acquired formed part of the two ballistic missiles that were first revealed to the world during a spectacular military parade in Beijing in 2015: the Dongfeng-26 ballistic missile, capable of reaching the US base on the island of Guam, and the Dongfeng-21D anti-ship ballistic missile.

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The question is whether the technology they acquired formed part of the two ballistic missiles that were first revealed to the world during a spectacular military parade in Beijing in 2015: the Dongfeng-26 ballistic missile, capable of reaching the US base on the island of Guam, and the Dongfeng-21D anti-ship ballistic missile. Nicknamed the ‘aircraft carrier killer’ and operational since 2010, the DF-21D has been central to Beijing’s policy of prohibiting access to the South China Sea these past few years. Having control over this strip of ocean running from its coasts to the south of Vietnam would increase China’s strategic leverage, and give it access to prodigious quantities of offshore hydrocarbon resources, as well as an eye on the comings and goings of half the world’s oil.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Today, though, China: Vince Beiser, “The Secret Ingredient to China’s Aggression? Sand,” New York Times, July 31, 2018. “Great Wall of Sand”: “A ‘Great Wall of Sand’ in the South China Sea” (editorial), Washington Post, April 8, 2015. ignore the claim: Sam LaGrone, “PACOM Harris: U.S. Would Ignore a ‘Destabilizing’ Chinese South China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone,” USNI News, February 26, 2016. “as its maritime empire”: Geoff Ziezulewicz, “U.S. Warship Sails Contested Waters in South China Sea After White House Rejects Maritime Claims There,” Navy Times, July 14, 2020. “unless Washington plans”: Mark Hanrahan, “China’s Global Times: Are Paper’s Warnings of War with U.S.

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China’s strategy is similar to adverse possession, which we discussed in Chapter 2: lay claim to the newly inhabitable lands, then bootstrap that claim with attachment for the surrounding waters. U.S. Admiral Harry Harris has mocked the manufactured islands as the “Great Wall of Sand,” but it is no laughing matter. The South China Sea has rich fishing areas as well as oil and natural gas reserves. Perhaps most important, it provides one of the world’s most active shipping lanes, with over $5 trillion worth of goods passing through annually. The United States has warned China to stop creating islands in the South China Sea and repeatedly sent warships to the area. While no shots have been fired, the war of words between the United States and China has been escalating.

…

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raised the possibility of a naval blockade of the manufactured islands—an action usually interpreted as an act of war. Three years later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that “The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire.” The Chinese government-controlled newspaper, Global Times, has made the stakes clear, warning that “unless Washington plans to wage a large-scale war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent Chinese access to the islands will be foolish.” Manufactured islands—plus expansive claims to attachment—are changing the global balance of power. Boo Boo, Dockers, and Tulip Attachment reaches not only above, below, and to the side, but also deeply into your home, as Natore Nahrstedt discovered to her dismay.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT 5. Befriending China’s Government In late 2013 a fleet: Various blogs have published the position of the Tian Jing Hao in the South China Sea in late 2013 and into 2014, citing ship’s positioning data analyzed by IHS Jane’s. See garudamiliter.blogspot.com/​2014/​06/​world-news-china-goes-all-out-with.html. For a description of the vessel and its ownership, see Charles Clover, “South China Sea Island-Maker Seeks Foreign Flotation,” Financial Times, June 11, 2015. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The respected Jane’s Defence Weekly: James Hardy and Sean O’Connor, “China Completes Runway on Fiery Cross Reef,” IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, Sept. 25, 2015.

…

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In all, 702 people: “公司召开‘十三五’战略咨询视频会” (Company holds thirteenth five-year-plan strategic consulting video conference), China Communications Construction Company, Sept. 29, 2015, www.ccccltd.cn/​xwzx/​gsyw/​201509/​t20150929_41727.html [inactive]. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In one incident: Luis Martinez, “Chinese Warship Came Within 45 Yards of USS Decatur in South China Sea: US,” ABC News, Oct. 1, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A Washington think tank: Michael Forsythe, “Possible Radar Suggests Beijing Wants ‘Effective Control’ in South China Sea,” New York Times, Feb. 24, 2016. The think tank is the Center for Strategic and International Studies. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “China, with its authoritarian system”: “SECNAV Nominee Del Toro’s Written Statements to the Senate,” USNI News, July 13, 2021.

…

Among the ships was the Tian Jing Hao, the largest dredger in Asia, capable of sucking more than a million gallons of sand an hour from the seafloor. Over two years, satellite photos tracked the reef’s transformation from an uninhabitable outcropping barely poking above the water’s surface into a 677-acre island. China’s government insisted that Fiery Cross, and a clutch of neighboring reefs turned islands in the South China Sea, wouldn’t be militarized. But on September 25, 2015, the world learned otherwise. The respected Jane’s Defence Weekly, using satellite photos, reported the completion of a 3.1-kilometer-long airstrip on the reef capable of handling long-range Chinese bombers. Missile systems would soon follow.

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein

business climate, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, glass ceiling, high net worth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income per capita, indoor plumbing, job-hopping, Maui Hawaii, middle-income trap, price stability, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional, zero-sum game

They are demanding a more muscular Chinese military presence that is willing to flex its muscles to demonstrate to its neighbors and the rest of the world there is an end to American hegemony and a new world order. In 2011 China launched stealth airplanes and an aircraft carrier, and took a more aggressive and nationalistic stance in disputes with Japan and in the South China Sea with the Philippines and Vietnam. Although China historically does not have a history of straying far beyond its borders in military exercises, preferring to stay closer to its orbit, a meek, inwardly focused China is not a foregone conclusion as threats to its stability from internal issues diminish while threats from the outside rise.

…

One retired senior politician from America told me, “If China is increasing its trade volumes around the world, shouldn’t it be securing its own shipping lanes?” He was irritated because he felt China was freeloading on the U.S. Navy’s protection of maritime trade routes, but was taking an increasingly muscular stand in the South China Sea, causing anger in Vietnam and the Philippines. AMERICA On a trip to the United States in early 2011 to give a speech at the Wharton School of Business, I took my three-year-old son, Tom, to New York to see Times Square. I had heard about a major advertising campaign the Chinese government had launched on electronic billboards there to improve its image with the millions of tourists who pass through each year.

…

China as a new hegemonic power: One key element in the rise of any superpower is how it will enforce and display its newly acquired power. Will China try to force its ideology on the rest of the world, as most great powers, like the United States, try to do? Does its recent aggressive posturing with its neighbors, like the Philippines in the South China Sea and Japan, foreshadow a return to war, or are China’s words and military maneuvers simply a jockeying for power in a new world system, much as kids duke it out on the playground at the start of a school year? 2. Economic growth hitting a wall: Will China’s soaring economy ever stall? More and more analysts, even relatively bullish ones, wonder whether its economy can sustain its 10 percent annual growth.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Today many coastal nations claim exclusive economic zones stretching two hundred nautical miles from their shores, with dozens of overlapping claims causing legal friction and naval skirmishes. In navigating global waters for commercial gain, China is a reminder of Grotius and the Dutch. But when it comes to the South China Sea, China uses an audacious term even Selden would have blushed at: “blue soil.” While China has come late to the South China Sea waters in search of energy resources, it has been clever to focus its attention on areas already identified—and auctioned—by PetroVietnam to Exxon as well as Indian, Russian, and other companies that have long been operating under Vietnamese licenses.

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Either way, if we opt for the tropical route, we’ll speed southward along the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network into mountainous Yunnan and its capital, Kunming. From there, we can cross directly into Laos and take in Vientiane before crossing into Thailand toward Bangkok, or take a coastal route along the South China Sea via Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and through Phnom Penh in Cambodia to Bangkok. Now the options narrow with the geography: we speed on down the Malay Peninsula to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, the southernmost point on mainland Asia. But water hasn’t stopped us so far, so let’s continue by train through a tunnel under the strategic Strait of Malacca onto Indonesia’s largest island of Sumatra, then over the Sunda Strait bridge to reach the capital, Jakarta, on Java, the world’s most populous island with more than 150 million people.

…

It would be like America claiming the entire Caribbean to Venezuela’s coast as its own—which was indeed the gist of the early twentieth-century Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. But China’s aggressive maps and aerial defense identification zones are meant not to deny others’ usage of the South China Sea but rather to position itself to better harvest as much as possible of the estimated thirty trillion cubic meters of natural gas and ten billion barrels of oil deposited under disputed waters. China’s “use it or lose it” approach also involves installing brick-and-mortar airstrips, lighthouses, garrisons, signals stations, and administrative centers on neglected or abandoned islands in the Spratly and Paracel chains.*3 Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands has become the epicenter of what some call an “island factory” where large-scale sand dredging and land reclamation are used to build up and connect separate shoals into larger islands.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

A very different route to territorial conflict occurs when land people did not care about—land that nobody bothered to lay firm claim to—suddenly becomes valuable. And nowhere has this been more true than in the archipelago of the South China Sea. Chances are good that if you look up from this book and gaze around, you will see several items that, in whole or in part, have passed through the South China Sea. Half of the world’s merchant fleet tonnage and a third of its crude oil passes through this waterway. That’s more than $5 trillion in shipborne trade per year. As goods make their way through the sea, they pass the coasts of Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore, the same waterway traversed by the Santa Catarina when it was captured by Jacob van Heemskerck in 1603.11 The hundreds of tiny islands your goods passed were once close to worthless, rocky shoals that offered refuge to little more than resting wildlife and the occasional exhausted fisherman.

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Even taken together, however, these losses were small: Italy’s noncolonial losses totaled just over 7,000 square kilometers—a small sliver of what was forfeited by those vanquished in the First World War. Japan, meanwhile, lost its colony of Korea, which it had held since 1910 and which became an independent state under joint U.S. and Soviet administration. Japan also withdrew its claims to a number of islands in the South China Sea (claims that had long been contested by its neighbors). Japan and Italy were far from alone in losing their colonial holdings, of course. Shortly after the war, France relinquished its claims to Syria. As the mandate that had been granted to the United Kingdom expired, Israel declared its independence—the first of what would soon become a tidal wave of such declarations by former colonies.

…

War raged in Korea from 1950 to 1953 and in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. Genocidal conflicts erupted in Yugoslavia (now the former Yugoslavia) and Rwanda in the 1990s, and civil war ravaged Sudan for more than two decades. In 2014, the United States and China began playing a high-stakes game of chicken over islands in the South China Sea and many fear a war with China in the near future. And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine.1 Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

Five of us—one pilot, one sailor, two port executives, and me, ever the hapless, bespectacled journalist—shout at one another over the roar of the engine and the wind. We race a lazy current carrying lilies and the occasional glob of trash, tracing the river’s sinuous curves, headed for its terminus in the South China Sea. Jan Bandstra, a vigorous, middle-aged Dutchman who speaks “six or seven” languages and has managed ports in as many countries, observes that this must have been the same view American GIs had as they patrolled in PT boats, exchanging machine-gun fire with Vietcong hidden in the dense jungle that still lines both shores.

…

For Jeff, who is in some ways just a human fail-safe for automated systems that usually require no intervention, leaving Cai Mep is a change of tempo. It’s also the beginning of the most dangerous and hair-raising part of his regular circuit around the world. “There are no other places in the world that are busier than the South China Sea,” says Jeff. Here, the captain and every officer on watch must all be on high alert. Fishing boats, cargo ships of every size—from rusting old bulk carriers to the largest container ships afloat, “Post-Panamax” vessels carrying nearly twice the cargo on the Brussels—and assorted other flotsam litter the ship’s radar, the horizon, and all the sea between the sky and the bow of the ship.

…

Partly this is because many ships below a certain size do not have things like AIS to make plain where they are and where they’ll be in the near future. This means that, aside from showing up on radar, these ships are invisible to the electronic systems designed to connect ships to one another and to shore. Hence, on watch in the South China Sea, Jeff is constantly scanning the horizon with an old-fashioned pair of binoculars. As soon as he spots a ship—be it an unregistered derelict fishing vessel with unlicensed crew who are likely to be refugees conscripted into forced labor by unscrupulous employment agents, or a barge, or a pleasure craft—Jeff switches his attention to the radar, identifies which blip on the screen corresponds to the ship he’s spotted, and lets the onboard computer do the work of calculating the ship’s CPA, or closest point of approach, and the time it will occur.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

The first big hint of an impending Sino-American showdown came at Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearings for Secretary of State in January 2017. He broke with long-standing policy on the contested South China Sea by saying the US would deny China access to the disputed islands it claims – and on many of which it has built formidable military installations. This was a big rupture in America’s position, which had maintained formal neutrality in the South China Sea disputes but kept up freedom of navigation patrols through the sea’s international waters. Tillerson ripped all that up. China’s ‘access to those islands is not going to be allowed’, he told senators.

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Looking back on it, of course, the war now seems to have been inevitable. Though Trump reluctantly endorsed a ‘One China’ stance a few weeks after taking office, and welcomed Xi Jinping to his ‘Winter White House’ at Mar-a-Lago two months after that, the genie was already out of the bottle. Indeed, with a US destroyer at the bottom of the South China Sea and large-scale US strikes on China’s naval bases, we can feel lucky it did not turn into a global conflagration. We have Vladimir Putin to thank for that. Who else had the credibility in both Beijing and Washington to broker a cessation of hostilities? Regardless of what we think of Putin’s ways, no one would begrudge Russia’s president the Nobel Peace Prize.

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From now on, the Pentagon would split its assets equally between the Atlantic region and the Asia Pacific region. America’s global deployments had previously been distributed 60:40 in the Atlantic’s favour. The US would open new bases in Darwin, Australia, and the Philippines. Washington would also take a more robust stand on the disputed islands in the South China Sea – what Beijing calls the first island chain. Obama adopted a zero-sum position that set the US and China on a collision course. America would be committed to resolving the sovereignty dispute through international law. China would be just as committed to enforcing its unilateral claims to the islands.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Chinese legal scholars argue that: ‘a judicial fact must be appreciated in the light of the laws contemporary with it, rather than the laws in force at the time when a dispute arises.’92 This gives force and legitimacy to history rather than the present, to the laws that prevailed during the era of the tributary system rather than the present international legal system. Map 11. Chinese Claims in the South China Sea In 1984 Deng Xiaoping suggested ‘the possibility of resolving certain territorial disputes by having the countries concerned jointly develop the disputed areas before discussing the question of sovereignty’.93 In other words, the question of sovereignty should not necessarily delay moving forward on other issues. Deng’s remark has frequently been cited by Chinese sources in the context of the islands in the South China Sea, where his approach has in practice been followed, and in relation to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea that are disputed with Japan; it has also been suggested in connection with Taiwan.94 While insisting on their ultimate sovereignty over the latter, the Chinese have offered to shelve the matter more or less indefinitely, providing Taiwan does not seek to declare independence, illustrating the flexibility with which the Chinese are prepared to approach the issue.

…

The Qin dynasty - which, prior to its triumph, roughly coincided with the present north-west province of Shaanxi - eventually emerged victorious over six other kingdoms and succeeded in expanding its territory sixfold.21 During the 2,000 years that followed the Qin victory, China expanded southwards to the South China Sea, northwards to incorporate much of the steppe lands, and westwards into Central Asia. Far from this enormous geographical expansion being characterized by a natural process of fusion, peace and harmony, it predictably entailed much conflict and many wars.22 The growth of China is the story of the outward expansion of the northern Chinese.

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At the ASEAN-China summit in 2003, China formally acceded to ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation - which committed China to the core elements of ASEAN’s 1967 Charter - the first non-ASEAN country to do so (India has since followed). In 2002 it also signed the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, which rejected the use of force in resolving the disputes over the Spratly and Paracel islands.27 These had been a serious and continuing source of tension between China on the one hand and Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei on the other, culminating in military conflict with Vietnam28 and the Philippines.29 The agreements between ASEAN and China were to have a major impact on the political dynamics of East Asia.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

During this period, China offered multi-billion-dollar trade and investment deals, largely focused on infrastructural development, and pushed for “joint-development” schemes in the South China Sea’s disputed geographical features, culminating in the tripartite Joint Maritime Seismic Undertaking agreement between the Philippines, China, and Vietnam. In a cable entitled “Joint Seismic Survey in South China Sea Makes Progress,” the American Embassy in Manila cautiously welcomed the agreement as a timely confidence-building measure on the part of disputing parties: The first phase of a joint seismic survey for hydrocarbon deposits undertaken by the national oil companies of the Philippines, China, and Vietnam in an 143,000 square kilometer zone of the South China Sea is near completion.

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Eager to enhance strategic ties with Indonesia, Washington supported Jakarta’s integration into the G-20, arguably the world’s leading decision-making forum, and lavishly praised the Southeast Asian state’s status as a booming emerging market and vibrant Muslim democracy.32 In light of growing territorial tensions between Beijing and its Southeast Asian neighbors, the Obama administration found an opportunity to enhance its regional influence among countries that had been rattled by China’s rising territorial assertiveness. Washington formally supported a “regional” solution to the South China Sea disputes, and, crucially, announced that the “freedom of navigation” in international waters constituted an American national interest—signaling Washington’s indispensable role in and commitment to ensuring regional stability. To demonstrate its solidarity with ASEAN, Washington encouraged the establishment of a binding code of conduct in the disputed areas, in accordance with the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea and the relevant provisions of international law, specifically the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

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Singapore also played a crucial role in facilitating China’s efforts to improve relations with ASEAN countries, with Singaporean leaders repeatedly emphasizing the benign aspects of China’s rise and downplaying concerns with its opaque political system and rapid military modernization program.36 In a diplomatic cable titled “Singapore Takes Notice as China Becomes More Assertive,” the American embassy in Singapore, after extensive discussions with leading local academics and journalists, aptly reflects the shifting regional attitude toward China in recent years: Singapore hopes the United States will not back down in the face of Chinese pressure because that would encourage China to become increasingly assertive in its dealings with other countries on issues such as its claims in the South China Sea. However, Singapore also fears a continued escalation of tensions between the United States and China, which Singapore believes would only be bad for the region … Singapore is concerned that if China’s new assertiveness causes the United States to back down, China might take a harder edge in its dealings with individual ASEAN countries, especially in its effort to press its claims in the South China Sea. [10SINGAPORE166] Over the succeeding years, as the Obama administration’s policy of pivoting toward Asia gained pace, other Southeast Asian states such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and even Thailand, expressed their growing concerns—both in confidence and publicly—with China’s territorial assertiveness and diplomatic inflexibility, despite Beijing’s continued economic engagement with the region.37 CONCERTED COORDINATION ON “ROGUE STATES” In addition to China, the cables also reveal constant US efforts to coax and cajole its Southeast Asian allies and strategic partners into pressuring “rogue states” such as North Korea, Myanmar, Sudan, and Iran.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, disinformation, Easter island, financial innovation, Google Earth, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, polynesian navigation, seigniorage, South China Sea, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The depth and range of the list makes perfect sense for the most heavily frequented sea route in use before the arrival of the Europeans in the 1500s. As information about foreign countries traveled alongside goods, the Chinese learned more about Southeast Asian geography. The Guangzhou gazetteer’s author divided the waters of the South China Sea into the Small Western Ocean (the section of the South China Sea near the Malay Peninsula), the Small Eastern Ocean (the Sea of Sulu east of Borneo), and the Large Eastern Ocean (the Java Sea), and explained which countries were located near each body of water. As knowledgeable as Chinese mariners were about the geography of Southeast Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa, they didn’t venture east of the Philippines into the Pacific because they believed that the world ended there.

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Other contemporary rulers also hoped to build large empires, but they focused on the sea, not land, and used ships rather than horsemen, as we’ll see in the next chapter. CHAPTER SEVEN Surprising Journeys Mapmakers divide the waters between Africa and Japan into different seas—the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Pacific Ocean—but in actuality these formed one continuous waterway, which mariners traveled along by hugging the coastline. Their early voyages took advantage of the monsoon winds to explore and to transport goods from the Arabian Peninsula to India and later to China.

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There, boatbuilders hewed planks from trees, carved knobs on the interior of the planks, drilled holes into the knobs, and tied the planks together with cord. This is called the lashed-lug technique. Manguin reasons that the sailors going from the Malay Peninsula to Madagascar used vessels whose wooden planks were joined together in this way. With multiple masts and sails, these vessels have been archeologically recovered in the South China Sea and Southeast Asian waters. The Phanom Surin shipwreck, the largest boat of this type found so far, measured some 115 feet (35 m) long. At present we have no way of knowing whether these early sailors used double canoes or larger boats with multiple sails. We are certain that Polynesian navigators ventured east into the Pacific at the same time as the Malay voyages to Madagascar.

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.” Eric Talmadge, “As Ice Cap Melts, Militaries Vie for Arctic Edge,” Associated Press, April 16, 2012. Areas of future hostilities over oil include the Strait of Hormuz, South China Sea, and Caspian Sea basin. Michael T. Klare, “Danger Waters: The Three Top Hot Spots of Potential Conflict in the Geo-Energy Era,” TomDispatch.com, January 10, 2012. On drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, see note 3, chap. 1. 2 In 2005, while deep-water drilling in Angola, an Exxon spokesperson said, “All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found.

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It’s been a kind of a hassle, also hasn’t been discussed much in the United States—but is discussed quite a lot in China, about control of the seas in China’s vicinity. Their navy is expanding, and that’s discussed here and described as a major threat. What they’re trying to do is to be able to control the waters nearby China—the South China Sea, Yellow Sea, and so on—and that’s described here as aggressive intent. The Pentagon just released a report on the dangers of China. Their military budget is increasing; it’s now one-fifth what the US spends in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is of course a fraction of the military budget. Not long ago, the US was conducting naval exercises in the waters off China.

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India, on the other hand, is playing it pretty cool. They’re also improving their relations with China. President Obama recently secured military basing rights in Australia and formed a new free-trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. Is this move related to the South China Sea? Yes, in particular that, but it’s more general. It has to do with the “classic security dilemma” that I mentioned before, referring to the strategic analysis literature. China’s efforts to gain some measure of control over nearby seas and its major trade routes are inconsistent with what the US calls “freedom of the seas”—a term that doesn’t extend to Chinese military maneuvers in the Caribbean or even most of the world’s oceans, but does include the US right to carry out military maneuvers and establish naval bases everywhere.

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

Taiwan also lives daily under a huge military threat from the mainland, including over 1,200 short-range ballistic missiles aimed at the island twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.3 In Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei are all embroiled in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. This multilateral dispute has strained Beijing’s bilateral relations with each country, as well as collectively with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Cambodia is as close to being a client state of Beijing’s as exists in Asia, but even there the country is beginning to show signs of choking under Beijing’s smothering economic embrace and diplomatic pressure.4 Myanmar experienced the same suffocation until it drew back from Beijing’s grasp in 2011; since then a variety of bilateral frictions have continued to fray relations.

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The Chinese distinguish between “near seas” () and “far seas” (), the former being contiguous to China’s coastline and the latter being open-ocean “blue water” operations. The White Paper indicated that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) “will gradually shift its focus” from the former to the latter.10 As the White Paper starkly said, “The traditional mentality that land outweighs sea must be abandoned.” China’s island-building in the South China Sea has also caused further wariness among China’s southern neighbors, as its East China Sea claims have done in Japan. Beijing’s unilateralism and dismissiveness of these concerns is further fueling regional anxieties. Polls of Asian nations conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2014 and 2015 revealed widespread concerns across the region that China’s territorial disputes could trigger conflict (Figure 5.2).

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Finally, China’s sustained decades-long military modernization program, which has been fueled by 12 percent average annual budget increases,24 is altering the security environment in the Asia-Pacific region where the United States has enjoyed unrivaled preeminence since 1945. China also regularly rhetorically denounces the U.S. alliance system in the region, and its assertive moves to enforce its disputed maritime claims are changing “facts on the ground” (indeed, they are literally creating ground from submerged atolls it controls in the South China Sea) and directly challenging key American allies. Hence, all three of the core premises that have undergirded more than four decades of American China policy are unraveling and coming under increasing criticism in Washington. In Beijing too, the United States is explicitly viewed as a subversive threat to Communist Party rule and an existential threat to China’s security.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

In its ‘near abroad’ this former colony and ally of the West is the main power and is respected, but not loved; in the wider region it is one of several major powers and a potential ally or enemy. Strategically, most of Australia’s focus is to its north and east. As a first line of defence it looks up to the South China Sea area, below that it views the Philippines and the Indonesian archipelago, and then the seas between it and Papua New Guinea. To its east it focuses on the islands of the South Pacific such as Fiji and Vanuatu. It does have some advantages: Australia would be difficult to invade – not impossible, but difficult.

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It is also a major market for Australia’s iron ore, gas, coal and gold. But China’s wider interests in the region, its attempts to expand its territorial claims and influence, don’t always align with Australia’s. The region off China’s coastline is a complicated place. China claims geographical and historical rights over 80 per cent of the South China Sea. A quick look at the map suggests that might not be entirely fair, as Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei are always ready to point out. They hold different geographical and historical views which explain their often-overlapping territorial claims. But Beijing is still busy pouring concrete onto small rocks sticking out of the water more than 1,600 kilometres from the mainland, calling them islands, and then constructing runways, radars and missile batteries on them.

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There China cannot make territorial claims, nor, without provoking conflict, can it go in for island-building and military construction. What it can do, though, is use its economic muscle to try and gain a foothold, but that’s where it runs into the region’s only major power. Australia can’t feasibly prevent China from dominating the South China Sea, but it can try to ensure Beijing has limited influence when it comes to the South Pacific. Battle has commenced. Australia is the largest aid donor to the Pacific Islands, but China has been increasing financial aid and loans and, as it did elsewhere, was quick to move in when the Covid-19 virus struck.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

We Won’t Accept That Terrorists Take Control of Any Part of Syria,’” Global Research, October 7, 2016, https://www.globalresearch.ca/president-al-assad-interview-the-moderate-opposition-is-a-myth-we-wont-accept-that-terrorists-take-control-of-any-part-of-syria/5549743. 215 a Bellingcat investigation: Waters, “Finding Bana.” 215 her English-literate mother: Ibid. 216 “use force to unify Taiwan”: Ben Blanchard and Faith Hung, “South China Sea? For Beijing, Taiwan Is the No. 1 Security Issue,” Reuters, January 17, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-election-security/south-china-sea-for-beijing-taiwan-is-the-no-1-security-issue-idUSKCN0UV064. 216 “Even if no grass”: Peter Navarro, “Senkaku Suicide Scenarios: China vs. Ameripan,” HuffPost, December 6, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-navarro-and-greg-autry/senkaku-suicide-scenarios_b_9583586.html. 216 censors and state media: Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, “After South China Sea Ruling, China Censors Online Calls for War,” Tea Leaf Nation (blog), Foreign Policy, July 12, 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/12/after-south-china-sea-ruling-china-censors-online-calls-for-war-unclos-tribunal/. 216 “Stop boasting”: Ibid. 217 “Gone are the days”: Thomas J.

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In discussions with its neighbors over disputed islands, the common tone on Chinese social networks has been conveyed in messages like this: “Even if China is a graveyard, still need to kill all Japanese. Even if no grass grows in China, still need to recover Diaoyu Islands.” Following an international court ruling that rejected China’s sweeping territorial claims to the South China Sea, Chinese social media erupted with hundreds of thousands of furious comments, many calling for war. The anger, which had originally been stoked by the government, quickly spooked senior party officials; in response, censors and state media worked overtime to restrain the very forces they had helped unleash.

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utm_term=.rbRkqQAqZ2#.bpyjaROaGN. 16 dueling “Facebook militias”: Francisco Perez, “Graphic Campaign Puts Violence in Kashmir in Social Media Fore,” Deutsche Welle, July 26, 2016, http://www.dw.com/en/graphic-campaign-puts-violence-in-kashmir-in-social-media-fore/a-19428356. 16 launching online “expeditions”: Anne Henochowicz, “Minitrue: Trolling Tsai Ing-Wen Beyond the Great Firewall,” China Digital Times, January 22, 2016, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/01/minitrue-trolling-tsai-ing-wen-beyond-great-firewall/. 16 constantly pushing: Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and Fergus Ryan, “‘Stop Boasting and Fight,’” Tea Leaf Nation (blog), Foreign Policy, October 27, 2015, https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/27/china-south-china-sea-nationalism-united-states-navy-lassen/. 16 Attending a U.S. military: Chinese crisis simulation, Washington, DC, 2016. 16 limiting leaders’ options: Roundtable (not for attribution), Washington, DC, 2016. See also Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Global Security Forum 2013: A Simulated Crisis in East Asia” (Washington, DC, November 6, 2013). 17 “continuation of political intercourse”: Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans.

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Leavenworth, ‘Website chronicles China’s massive effort to control internet content’, McClatchy, 9 April 2015, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24782851.html 19‘Xiao Qiang’, MacArthur Fellows Program, 2001, https://www.macfound.org/fellows/671/ 20S. Wade, ‘Minitrue: delete reports on call to ease internet control’, China Digital Times, 7 March 2017, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/03/minitrue-delete-reports-call-limit-internet-censorship/ 21A. Ramzy, ‘KFC targeted in protests over South China Sea’, The New York Times, 19 July 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/world/asia/south-china-sea-protests-kfc.html 22S. Wade, ‘Minitrue: do not hype illegal demonstrations’, China Digital Times, 19 July 2016, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/07/minitrue-not-hype-illegal-demonstrations/ 23‘’, Xinhua, 19 July 2016, http://military.china.com/important/11132797/20160719/23092151_all.html 24Q.

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The censors’ reaction was immediate: “All websites, please find and delete reports and posts on Luo Fuhe’s ‘proposal to improve and increase speed of access to foreign websites’ as soon as possible,” said a leaked order.20 Similar commands are issued for protests and demonstrations, even when their motivation is patriotic and in support of Party goals. After China lost a landmark international court ruling in July 2016 over its sprawling territorial claims in the South China Sea, spontaneous protests broke out targeting the Philippines – the other party in the case – with calls for boycotts of Filipino products and of KFC, which served as an easy representative for the US, Manila’s main ally.21 As the protests threatened to get out of control, however, with some calling on the government to take military action to enforce its claims, a leaked censorship order told website owners “for the near future, do not hype or spread information related to illegal rallies and demonstrations.

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After China lost a landmark international court ruling in July 2016 over its sprawling territorial claims in the South China Sea, spontaneous protests broke out targeting the Philippines – the other party in the case – with calls for boycotts of Filipino products and of KFC, which served as an easy representative for the US, Manila’s main ally.21 As the protests threatened to get out of control, however, with some calling on the government to take military action to enforce its claims, a leaked censorship order told website owners “for the near future, do not hype or spread information related to illegal rallies and demonstrations. Pay close attention and delete inflammatory information.”22 In the wake of this order, according to Weiboscope, a monitoring service at the University of Hong Kong, the phrases ‘KFC’ and ‘South China Sea’ were heavily censored on social media. When censorship alone is not enough to stymie calls for collective action, state media can be drafted in to help. During the anti-Philippines protests, a Xinhua editorial said that while feeling anger over the ruling was “the embodiment of patriotic feeling … if that feeling leads to illegal behaviour that destroys social order, then it is mistaken to label it ‘patriotic’”.23 That Xinhua would be used in this fashion is no surprise.

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

It is no coincidence that the land component is called an economic belt: a road is just a transport link between two points, a belt is a densely occupied economic corridor for trade, industry and people. The Maritime Silk Road is designed to go from China’s coast to Europe through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean in one route, and from China’s coast through the South China Sea to the South Pacific in the other. At sea, the initiative will focus on building smooth, secure and efficient transport routes connecting major sea ports. Together, the land and sea components will strive to connect about sixty-five countries. The preferred abbreviation in China for the combined project is – unsurprisingly – the Belt and Road, 带一路.

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From the perspective of Chinese Go, it looks like the kind of strategy one might adopt of going after an opponent’s more exposed and isolated pieces before turning to its stronghold.8 If this can be achieved without giving rise to a more powerful Russia or Europe, then China will, ipso facto, emerge as America’s equal. Every instance of American retrenchment moves China closer to this goal. It does not really matter if it happens in the Middle East, in the South China Sea or in Ukraine. In this connection, it is worth noting that the countries of the Gulf Co-operation Council now export three and a half times as much to the Japanese, Korean, Indian and Chinese markets as to the European Union and the United States combined. Indian and Chinese conglomerates are also involved in major infrastructure projects, such as the high speed train link connecting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia and the construction of two of the Riyadh Metro lines.

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One Chinese analyst describes the 244 islands that constitute the Andaman and Nicobar archipelagos as a ‘metal chain’ (铁链) that could lock the western exit of the Malacca Strait. More generally, Chinese observers foresee the emergence of a powerful rival aiming to control the Indian Ocean, the mirror image of the Eurasian landmass to the north. For them, India is developing its overall capacity to ‘enter east’ (东进) into the South China Sea and the Pacific, ‘exit west’ (西出) through the Red Sea and Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, and ‘go south’ (南下) toward the Cape of Good Hope and the Atlantic.10 In 2016 news emerged that India and Japan were secretly planning to install a sea wall of hydrophones between Indira Point in the Nicobar Islands and Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia, aimed at tracking undersea movement and effectively plugging the entry to the Indian Ocean for Chinese submarines.

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

Even the mere perception of reduced risk among decision makers would also increase U.S. freedom to act around the 132 • THE POWER SURGE world. The national security benefits of greater flexibility would be real and potentially large. But many worry there will also be big national security costs stemming from a transition away from oil. O n September 7, 2010, in the choppy waters off a string of uninhabited islands in the South China Sea, a Chinese fishing boat found itself in trouble.75 If you ask the Japanese, the islands are the Senkaku, under Tokyo’s control since 1972.76 According to Beijing, they are the Diaoyu, a Chinese possession for many centuries before.77 The dispute meant both countries plied the waters, and on that Tuesday the Chinese boat struck two Japanese coast guard ships.

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See automobiles Carter, Jimmy, 11–12, 51 Chavez, Hugo, 78 Chesapeake Energy, 2–3, 47 China climate change and, 105–106 coal and, 96 economic development in, 17, 96, 130, 187–188 energy consumption by, 68, 75, 105–106, 130, 184 globalization and, 187–188 natural gas and, 32–33, 204 nuclear energy and, 173 oil production in, 69 rare-earth metals and, 132–134 solar energy and, 149–150, 157, 166–167 South China Sea confl ict and, 132–134 U.S. relations with, 78, 183–186, 201 Chrysler, 109, 116 Clayton, Blake, 78 clean energy. See renewable energy; solar energy; wind energy Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) summit, 148 climate change Arctic ice and, 84, 86, 91 biofuels and, 111, 138–139 cap-and-trade and, 97, 101, 155, 171, 206 carbon dioxide emissions and, 85, 87, 89–100, 102–103, 136, 139 carbon tax and, 101, 155, 202 clean energy standard (CES) and, 101, 155, 202 coal and, 97–101, 170, 182, 194 Copenhagen climate summit and, 104–106 deforestation and, 85, 91, 105, 140 geoengineering and, 193–194 globalization and, 188 international treaties and, 104–107, 204 introduction to the science of, 84–88 methane and, 102 mountain pine beetles and, 83–84, 87–88 natural gas and, 97–103, 107, 155, 177, 200, 204, 208 nuclear energy and, 97–99, 101, 173, 175 oil and, 80, 83, 85–86, 88–90, 93–97, 101, 107–108, 110, 136–137, 182, 194, 196, 200 renewable energy and, 170, 178, 194, 196–197 social cost of carbon, 89–90 Clinton (Pennsylvania), 161–162 Clinton, Bill, 15, 116 coal carbon capture and sequestration and, 100, 158, 172 China and, 96 climate change and, 97–101, 170, 182, 194 land use and, 22, 175–176 power plants and, 3, 17, 88, 98–100, 103, 107, 141, 153, 158, 160–161, 168, 170, 196 Coal Question, The (Jevons), 137 cobalt, 133 Colbert, Stephen, 48 Cold War, 10, 16, 64, 169, 185 Colorado climate change in, 83–85, 87–88 mountain pine beetles in, 83–84, 87–88 252 • INDEX Colorado (Cont.) natural gas production in, 102–104 tight oil in, 51, 56, 61, 80, 93–94 Columbus (Ohio), antifracking protest in, 3–4, 22, 92 compressed natural gas (CNG), 37–39 Congo, 133 Copenhagen climate summit, 104–106 Dawe, Justin, 170–172 Day, Roger, 62 Dearing, Becky, 26 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 52, 56–58 defense spending, innovation and, 169, 201 deglobalization, 189–190, 194 Delaware, 56 Department of Defense, 169, 200–201 Department of Energy, 15, 115, 146 Detroit automakers, 5, 18, 109–110, 113–116, 118–119, 122–123, 129–130, 136 Deutch, John, 24 Diaoyu Islands, 132 Dix, Bill, 20–22, 25, 46, 48 Dukakis, Michael, 14 E.ON, 32 Eagle Ford shale (Texas), 55 Earth Summit (1993), 15 earthquakes, natural gas production and, 44–45, 47 economic development natural gas and, 27–29, 47, 49, 192 oil and, 74–75, 127, 192 renewable energy and, 147, 162–163, 166, 191–192 Economides, Michael, 41 Edelstein, Paul, 129–130 EGL Oil Shale company, 51, 62 el-Badri, Abdallah Salem, 69 electric cars, 5, 114, 116, 118–119, 132, 135, 141–142, 200 electricity.

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See also energy security; national security Arab-Israeli War (1973), 7, 76 Cold War, 10, 16, 64, 169, 185 globalization and, 35, 186–190, 194, 204–205 Gulf War (1991), 13–14, 76, 112 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 7, 13, 66–69, 90, 95–96 sea lanes and, 78, 183–184, 205 South China Sea confl ict, 132–134 Germany, 156, 173, 183 global warming. See climate change globalization Asian tiger economies and, 187 China and, 187–188 climate change regulation and, 188 254 • INDEX globalization (Cont.) deglobalization, 189–190, 194 energy trade and, 35, 188–190, 204–205 Great Depression and, 187 multinational corporations and, 187–188 trade agreements and, 186–187 United States and, 186 Gore, Al, 96–97, 146 Grant County (Kansas), 24 Grape, Steven, 54 Great Depression, 187, 190 Great Illusion, The (Angell), 183 Great Recession climate change initiatives and, 206 Congressional Budget Office projections and, 190–191 natural gas production and, 23, 25–26, 28 oil consumption and, 110 oil prices and, 16 renewable energy and, 145–146, 191 unemployment and, 190–191 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 52, 56–58 oil production in, 3, 56–57, 180 Gulf War (1991), 13–14, 76, 112 Halliburton, 4, 24 Hamilton, Jim, 70 Hammond, Allen, 9 Hanergy, 167 Hansen, James, 82, 92 Hart, Gary, 10 Herrington, John S., 14 Honda GX, 38 Horizon Wind, 170 horizontal drilling, 23–24, 47, 52, 54 Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Friedman), 163 House, Kurt Zenz, 170–172 Howarth, Robert, 101–104 Hubbert, M.

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, War on Poverty

Under the slogan “Denunciation of the Communists,” Diem set out to destroy the Viet Minh wherever its cadre and their sympathizers could be found. Tens of thousands of citizens were eventually imprisoned. Most were dedicated communists, but included among them were many people whose only crime had been having criticized Diem’s regime. Hundreds were sent to Con Son Island, a former French prison two hundred miles offshore in the South China Sea. Shackled prisoners were taken there by boat. Two paths led from the landing to the prison. One was named Ngo Dinh Diem Road, the other Ho Chi Minh Road. Those who chose the Ho Chi Minh Road were poorly fed, beaten, tortured, and chained inside so-called tiger cages. More than twenty thousand are believed to have died there between 1954 and 1970.

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The clandestine communist radio promised that U.S. servicemen would soon have to “pay more blood debts,” and on February 10 the Viet Cong blew up a hotel in Qui Nhon, killing twenty-one Americans and pinning twenty-three more beneath the rubble. The president called for the evacuation of more than eighteen hundred American dependents and ordered a second airstrike. This time, one hundred U.S. Navy fighter bombers, based on carriers in the South China Sea, as well as Air Force planes based in Thailand and South Vietnam, hit more North Vietnamese military targets—ammunition depots, supply depots, and assembly areas. Anxiety about what seemed to be happening spread around the world. France, which had spent nearly a century in Vietnam, called for an end to all foreign involvement there.

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One hundred tons of Chinese and Soviet arms were found freshly unloaded on the beach—rifles, grenades, explosives, mortar rounds, and a million rounds of small-arms ammunition. Still more supplies were quietly being smuggled into the Mekong Delta—among them the weapons that had helped make the communist victory at Ap Bac possible. To deny the North Vietnamese further access to the South China Sea coast, the U.S. Seventh Fleet launched a massive naval patrolling campaign called Operation Market Time, while a second naval operation, Game Warden, employed patrol boats to close off the Saigon River and the multiple river mouths of the Mekong Delta. Hanoi was forced to alter its plans for resupply.

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

He has appealed for China’s cooperation and welcomed Beijing’s support for the Paris climate change accord as well as its continued backing of the Iran nuclear deal after Trump pulled out. At the same time, he recognizes that China poses a serious challenge to the international order, and not just on trade and investment issues. China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea and its threats to freedom of navigation have prompted Macron to expand France’s naval presence in the Indo-Pacific region and upgrade its defense relationships with Australia, India, and Japan. Macron is acutely aware that France needs to be joined by the rest of Europe in concerted efforts to acquire sufficient leverage to deal effectively with the China challenge.

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The strategy paper noted that China had impeded Europe’s fight against climate change as a major exporter of coal-fired power plants. It also criticized China’s human rights policies, which had taken a dramatic turn for the worse under Xi’s presidency, for instance, in its treatment of Chinese lawyers and journalists. The paper cited China’s “large military maneuvers” as a new source of anxiety for Europe, not just in the South China Sea but also in Europe’s own neighborhood, including the Arctic region. China had conducted joint military exercises with Russia in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Baltic Sea, including missile tests off the coast of Kaliningrad, to the consternation of Poland and three Baltic states that are EU and NATO members.

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In 2018, Greece blocked an EU statement in the United Nations criticizing China’s human rights record, and Hungary rejected an EU letter denouncing the torture of detained lawyers in China. Hungary, Greece, Croatia, and Slovenia—all beneficiaries of China’s investments—also softened an EU statement condemning China’s actions and legal claims in the South China Sea. In contrast to the criticism he often hears from his EU partners, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is clearly pleased that he does not receive any lectures from China about his illiberal policies that threaten democratic values. Nor does Orbán feel that he needs to apologize to Macron or anybody else for his country’s “Eastward Opening” toward China.

Dispatches by Michael Herr

air freight, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, “Scream a lot, and all the time.” Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into their car ashtrays; the joke went, “What you do is, you load all the Friendlies onto ships and take them out to the South China Sea. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink the ships.” A lot of people knew that the country could never be won, only destroyed, and they locked into that with breathtaking concentration, no quarter, laying down the seeds of the disease, roundeye fever, until it reached plague proportions, taking one from every family, a family from every hamlet, a hamlet from every province, until a million had died from it and millions more were left uncentered and lost in their flight from it.

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What did anybody ever expect those people to say? No matter how highly placed they were, they were still officials, their views were well established and well known, famous. It could have rained frogs over Tan Son Nhut and they wouldn’t have been upset; Cam Ranh Bay could have dropped into the South China Sea and they would have found some way to make it sound good for you; the Bo Doi Division (Ho’s Own) could have marched by the American embassy and they would have characterized it as “desperate”—what did even the reporters closest to the Mission Council ever find to write about when they’d finished their interviews?

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(A Paris-Match photograph showed Flynn and a French photographer carrying him on a door, his face half covered by bandages, “Tim Page, blessé à la tête.”) His friends began trying to talk him into leaving Vietnam, saying, “Hey, Page, there’s an airstrike looking for you.” And there was; it caught him drifting around off course in a Swift boat in the South China Sea, blowing it out of the water under the mistaken impression that it was a Viet Cong vessel. All but three of the crew were killed, Page took over 200 individual wounds, and he floated in the water for hours before he was finally rescued. They were getting worse each time, and Page gave in to it.

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

A precious, eclectic seascape that encompasses the whole of Europe—including its Orthodox and Muslim aspects—is about to become planetary, as the new and vast maritime empire of China threatens to overwhelm all of these European associations that I have sketched herein, making this journey a mere period piece, a tour-ender in old foreign correspondents’ lingo. For the Adriatic is about to be linked with the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean as key elements of a burgeoning global trade, from Hong Kong to Trieste by way of Hambantota, Gwadar, and other Indian Ocean ports. Then there is the battle over new natural gas discoveries in the eastern Mediterranean, and the struggle over oil in war-torn Libya. More than half a dozen littoral countries are involved in both intense negotiations and military positioning to see which consortium controls these envisioned pipelines, some of which may enter Europe through the Adriatic.

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By boring deep into the historical and aesthetic peculiarities of each place, rather than losing the texture through some bland and abstract, formulaic global approach. In the early years of the twenty-first century I traveled throughout the greater Indian Ocean, in anticipation of its christening as the “Indo-Pacific” by the Pentagon. At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century I journeyed through the South China Sea, in anticipation of that region’s future in news headlines. And in the middle of that second decade, in 2016, I began traveling throughout the Adriatic, in anticipation of its possible destiny as the western maritime terminus of China’s Belt and Road. But my aim has not been to theorize on global geopolitics in light of China’s and Russia’s return to great power status.

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The West—namely the political and economic prominence of Europe throughout modern history—was, again echoing Oakley, as much a process as an inheritance: meaning its permanence cannot be taken for granted. The West may be quite transitory; the ground is always moving beneath our feet. Again, I think of the Chinese, who want to make Trieste part of the same maritime geography as the South China Sea, connecting Trieste more with the Indian Ocean than with many other parts of Europe. Nobody probed this transitory aspect better than Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher who shocked the intellectual world with his The Decline of the West, published in two volumes in 1918 and 1922. Spengler found no special position for the West in world history, interacting and fusing as it does with other cultures and civilizations, and maturing and disintegrating as they do.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Its diminished credibility has reduced it from its status as the ultimate guarantor of Asian stability to a more minor role as Japan and Taiwan’s protector and troubleshooter of crises from Malaysian-Indonesian naval skirmishes to the North Korean nuclear standoff.11 By 2001, China stopped referring to the United States as a “hegemon” in East Asia not out of politeness, but simply because America had ceased to be able to function as one. Not only is China encroaching on Mackinder’s heartland, but its vast Pacific coastline makes it the largest nation on Spykman’s Rimland as well. Just as the Silk Road is the land route from China to the West, the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca are the region’s sea lines of communication (known as SLOC), the maritime passageway to the energy resources and markets of the Persian Gulf and Europe. The East Asian strategic picture is thus evolving on the sea, with China working tirelessly to co-opt Southeast Asia’s littoral states through trade pacts and naval cooperation.

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An inside-out Asian strategic culture has emerged, governed by a consultative diplomacy (known as musyawarah) that identifies common interests likely to yield face-saving decisions while marginalizing controversial or outside (read: U.S.-imposed) topics.12 “What we have now is a Chinese ‘Monroe Doctrine,’” the Malaysian analyst declared. “We should get it over with and accept this Chinese order. That way we can peacefully resolve the problems of Taiwan, North Korea, and the South China Sea.” Could a benign Chinese hierarchy prevent rivalries from escalating beyond the psychological and economic level? Even though serious disputes remain over land and sea boundaries, as Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani points out, “guns have fallen silent” in the region due to a “tidal wave of common sense” by which Asians are rejecting the Western historical pattern of militarism in favor of shared prosperity.

…

American military contractors are selling the country hardware and satellites, while Intel’s microchip plant has graduated Vietnam from shoe manufacturing to the high-tech arena. While the waxy, embalmed body of triumphant “Uncle Ho” Chi Minh still inspires awe in his grand Hanoi mausoleum, Uncle Sam has been invited back by both the economic and defense establishments. Though it is much harder to draw lines in water than in sand, the South China Sea is a tripwire for exposing any Chinese transgressions toward its maritime neighbors—but also the best venue to witness China’s maritime “smile diplomacy” at work. The potentially oil-rich Spratly and Paracel island clusters are claimed in whole or part by Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

PIVOTING TO THE HOTSPOTS The battle for influence in the Pacific is not really about economics at all: it is instead about power in what is still, potentially, a very unstable region. From a domestic US or European perspective, it is all too easy to believe that the world’s territorial disputes are over. Yet for many other parts of the world, that simply isn’t true. In East Asia there is no shortage of hotspots. In the South China Sea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and Brunei all make territorial claims over the Spratly Islands, which offer plenty of fish and potentially bountiful supplies of oil and gas. China has been in the process of establishing ‘facts on the ground’ – or, more accurately, ‘facts on reclaimed reefs’ – through the construction of airstrips, the provision of a mobile phone network and even the erection of a lighthouse.

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Plummer, The Economic Effects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: New estimates, Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper 16-2, Washington, DC, January 2016. 12.The US offers Trade Adjustment Assistance, but the jury is out regarding its effectiveness. 13.The nine-dash line was originally an eleven-dash line that first appeared on Taiwanese maps in 1947. The People’s Republic of China thereafter adopted a similar approach: both cases in effect make territorial claims on disputed parts of the South China Sea. 14.The press release accompanying the ruling can be found at https://pca-cpa.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/175/2016/07/PH-CN-20160712-Press-Release-No-11-English.pdf 15.Tibetans might well disagree, but while the Tibetan landmass is huge, it is sparsely populated: at the last count, there were around 3.2 million inhabitants, of whom 90 per cent were ethnically Tibetan.

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(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Byzantium (i) Cabinet (UK) (i) California (i), (ii) caliphates (i), (ii), (iii) Callaghan, Jim (i), (ii) Cameron, David (i) Canada a reputable country (i) Asian Development Bank and (i) closes gap on US (i) Irish emigrate to (i), (ii) North America Free Trade Agreement (i), (ii) TPP (i) Cape of Good Hope (i) capital, mobility of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also cross-border capital flow Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) (i) capitalism communism and (i) free-market capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Fukuyama’s disciples on (i) Steffens and Shaw on (i) US economic model and (i) Caribbean (i) Carter, Jimmy (i) Castillon, Battle of (i) Castro, Fidel (i) Catherine of Aragon (i) Catherine the Great (i) Catholics (i), (ii), (iii) Caucasus (i), (ii) Central African Republic (i), (ii) Central America (i) Central Asia (i), (ii), (iii) see also Asia central banks (i), (ii) see also bankers inflation targets (i) Kosmos (i) price distortion (i) printing money (i), (ii) quantitative easing (i), (ii), (iii) zero interest rates and (i) Chad (i) Chechens (i) checks and balances (i), (ii) Chile (i) China (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) 1980 emergence (i) ageing population (i) attracting Western investment (i) balance of payments surplus (i) boom to slowdown (i) Brazil and (i) British in (i) Coca-Cola and (i) demand for German goods (i) Deng Xiaoping (i) Disney and (i) economic resurgence (i), (ii) excess capital in US (i) foreign capital for (i) iPhones (i) Japan and (i) living standards (i) military spending (i) OECD and (i) per capita incomes (i), (ii) ratifies Paris climate deal (i) rise of renminbi (i), (ii) Russia threatens (i) South China Sea and neighbour disputes (i) TPP and (i) treaty ports (i) Trump’s protectionism and (i) US tries to contain (i), (ii), (iii) Chongqing (i), (ii) Christianity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Churchill, Winston (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n1 CIA (i) Ciudadanos (i) Cleveland, Grover (i) climate change (i), (ii) Clinton, Hillary 2016 campaign (i) Bernie Sanders opposes (i) concerns of supporters (i) rejects TPP (i), (ii) Syria (i) wins Democrat nomination (i) clubs (i), (ii) Cobden, Richard (i), (ii), (iii) Coca-Cola (i) ‘coffin ships’ (i) Cold War binary rivalry, a (i) economic differences (i) end of (i), (ii) globalization and (i) NATO and (i) Soviet living standards (i) collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) (i) Collins, Philip (i) Columbus, Christopher (i), (ii), (iii) commodity markets (i), (ii), (iii) common sense (i) Commonwealth (i) communism Berlin Wall and (i) capitalism and (i) Cuba (i) Marx’s stages (i) Shaw extols (i) Soviet Union collapse and (i), (ii) Como, Lake (i) Comptoir National d’Escompte de Paris (i) Concert of Europe (i) Congo (i) Congress (US) 1933 banking crisis (i) American public’s confidence in (i) Bush Jnr on terrorism (i) Immigration Act 1917 (i) Japanese sanctions (i), (ii) Smoot–Hawley tariff (i) Congress of Vienna (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Connally, John (i) Conolly, Arthur (i) Conservative Party (i), (ii) Constantinople (i), (ii) Constitutional Tribunal (Poland) (i) ‘Convention of Peking’ (i) Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (i) Corbyn, Jeremy (i), (ii) Córdoba (i), (ii) corporate scandals (i) Corroyer, Edouard (i) Court of Cassation (Egypt) (i) Crécy, Battle of (i) Creole languages (i) Crimea (i), (ii) Crimean War (19th century) (i) crop yields (i) cross-border capital flow allocation of resources and (i) emerging markets and (i), (ii) extraordinary growth of (i), (ii), (iii) globalization dominated by (i) inequality and (i) Varoufakis tries to limit (i) Cuba (i) Czech Republic (i) Czechoslovakia (i) Darius the Great (i) Darwin, Charles (i) Davos (i), (ii) de Gaulle, Charles (i), (ii) debt (i) Africa (i) China (i) debt to income ratios (i) government debt (i) Latin America (i) low inflation and (i) deflation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Delhi (i) demand management (i), (ii) Democratic Party (US) (i), (ii) Democratic Republic of the Congo (i) Denfert-Rochereau, Eugène (i) Deng Xiaoping (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Denmark (i), (ii) Department of Housing and Urban Development (US) (i) deposit insurance (i) devaluation 1930s (i), (ii), (iii) dollars, gold and (i) Eisenhower and Britain (i) franc (i) right conditions for (i) Diaoyu (i) Disney (i), (ii) Doha Round (i) dollar (US) see American dollar Dow Jones Industrial Average (i) Draghi, Mario (i) Duisburg (i) Duterte, Rodrigo (i), (ii) DVDs (i) East Africa (i) see also Africa Eastern Europe EU and its effects (i) importing democracy (i) joining the EU (i), (ii) Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (i) New World emigration (i) Ottoman Empire and (i) Soviet communism and (i), (ii), (iii) ‘Economic Theory of Clubs’ (James Buchanan) (i) Ecuador (i) Eden, Anthony (i), (ii) Edison, Thomas (i) Edison Electric (i) educational attainment (i) Edward VI, King (i) Egypt (i), (ii), (iii) Einstein, Albert (i) Eisenhower, Dwight D.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Accessed March 7, 2017. http://www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_project/media/downloads/publications/ASB2016.pdf 6. Flash flooding: “Nigeria Floods Kill 363 People, Displace 2.1 Million.” Reuters, November 5, 2012. 7. Eko Atlantic: The development has a glitzy website, which includes a virtual tour of the site: http://www.ekoatlantic.com/ 8. South China Sea: Gordon Lubold. “Pentagon Says China Has Stepped Up Land Reclamation in South China Sea.” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2015. 9. Singapore: “Such Quantities of Sand.” The Economist, February 26, 2015. 10. Tokyo Bay: Ibid. 11. satellite data: Alister Doyle. “Coastal Land Expands as Construction Outpaces Sea-Level Rise.” Reuters, August 25, 2016. 12.

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Specifically, the amendment allows foreigners who invest over $1 billion to own land, provided that at least 70 percent of the land is reclaimed from the sea. Indian officials are concerned that this is an invitation to the Chinese, who have already launched a massive land reclamation project in the South China Sea. Unnamed Indian officials said they are “concerned” that China now plans to do the same in some of the Maldives’ 1,200 islands, which are located strategically in the Indian Ocean. Eva Abdulla, one of just fourteen parliamentarians in the Maldives who voted against the amendment, said, “This will make the country a Chinese colony.”

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What’s happening in Lagos is part of a larger trend of combating sea-level rise with old-fashioned engineering muscle. On coasts and in shallow bays around the world, enormous dredging machines are pumping sand and gravel out of the bottom of the sea and creating new land. You can see it in the South China Sea, where China is rapidly turning coral reefs into islands to support military bases, airstrips, and port facilities. Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has expanded its size by almost a quarter, from 244 square miles to 277 square miles. Japan has reclaimed more than 100 square miles of land in Tokyo Bay alone.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

A similar degree of uncertainty attends discussion of how to treat warbots—for example, what should you do if an adversary scoops up your underwater drone in international waters, and carts it off for inspection/reverse engineering? That’s already happened, when in 2016, the Chinese navy retrieved an American experimental submersible in the South China Sea, right under the nose of the ship that had launched it. Provocative, yes, but an act of war? Not in the view of the US military on that occasion. That drone was later returned to the Americans, after diplomatic protests. What about the sort of cyber hacking the Russians were accused of? There’s no clear answer—states are feeling their way forward in new circumstances.

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If it gets either of those wrong, there is the danger of applying the wrong amount of violence (too much, or too little) against the wrong target. So the brain of the warbot is, predictably, its key feature. But what attributes can we expect it to exhibit, five years from now, in the Syrian border lands, the heavily defended airspace of the South China Sea, or under the polar icecap? By now you’ll be familiar with the broad parameters—AI’s speed, pattern recognition and accurate recall. Set against that are its familiar weaknesses—its brittleness and its narrow, domain-specific skills. And also its lack of ‘common sense’ and the difficulty of representing knowledge to it in a way that we can be confident fully captures our intentions.

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A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

The crew of one vessel were found to have booked local hotel rooms a month before a supposedly accidental explosion stranded them off the coast. From the Gulf of Guinea, the outbreak spread to the Middle East before arriving in Asia. In the late 1970s, so many cargo ships were going down in the South China Sea that the Lloyd’s market took the unprecedented step of ordering an inquiry, to be led by the specially appointed Far Eastern Regional Investigation Team, or FERIT. In typical Lloyd’s style, FERIT’s report was kept confidential and was not to be shared with nonmembers, although several historians have written about its contents.

…

(A port official became suspicious when he noticed that the shipment lacked the distinctive odor that normally accompanied nine hundred tons of spice.) Sometimes the cargo had already been removed and sold in secret before an insurance claim was made. In a few cases it had never existed at all. The cost to the London market of the South China Sea claims alone was estimated at $100 million. FERIT’s most significant finding was that the scuttling craze was linked to organized crime groups operating out of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They seemed to have access to shipwrecking specialists. A welding contractor, for example, was hired to cut four half-meter holes in a vessel’s hull and then seal them with metal panels that could be removed when the time came.

…

Vandenberg, 99–100 Georgoulis, Dimitrios, 108 Goffman, Erving, 11 Gonzaga, Noe, 17, 229 as captain of Brillante Virtuoso, 11 found tied on deck, 22 interviewed on Philippine Sea, 26 orders Marquez to allow pirates on board, 19–20 taken by pirates, 21 testimony of, 218–21 Great Britain, 4 Greathead, Henry, 101 Greek shipping industry, 147–50 Liberty ships and, 148 Lloyd’s of London, relationship with, 109–10 Niarchos, Onassis and, 149–51 oil trade and, 148–49 tramp shipping and, 148 Green, Peter, 42 Gulf of Aden, 14 Gulf of Guinea insurance fraud cases, 105 H Hanks, Tom, 15 Heath, Cuthbert, 41 Hegestratos, 100 Hellas Helvetia, 192 Hellenic Register of Shipping, 152 High Risk Area, 15 Hill, Ginny, 78 Hiscox, 136 HMS Lutine, 43 HMS Tireless, 123 Hodgson, Godfrey, 37, 40, 101, 105 Holt Global, 33 hull insurance, 38–39, 40–41, 127–29 I Iliopoulos, Antonis, 153 Iliopoulos, Ioannis, 153 Iliopoulos, Marios, 150–55 arrest on fraud charges, 160–61 authors’ attempts to speak with, 243–44 continues to do business at Lloyd’s, 230–31 Despina Andrianna and, 229–30 disclosure stonewalled by, 145–46 education and racing career of, 151–52 Elli and, 114–15, 118, 129, 154 Flaux’s ruling on Iliopoulos counterclaims against insurers, 161–62 fraud accusations by insurers, 137–38 Greek privacy protection violations and money laundering accusations against Zavos and Norton Rose, 143 identified as Brillante owner, 114, 115 Iron Antonis and, 152–53 lack of consequences for, 162–63, 228–29 lifestyle of, 184 oil trade and, 154 purchase of passenger vessels during COVID-19 pandemic and, 230 quantum trial and, 133, 135 Ritsona rally race and, 183–84 Seajets and, 153–55, 228–29 shell companies of, 154 “Ship of the Year” won by Seajets ferry, 228–29 summons to testify in Brillante case, 147, 155 testimony of, 157–60 Zavos’ team security breach and, 142–43 Iliopoulos, Panagiotis, 151, 153 insurance bottomry, 100 cargo insurance, 35, 42, 117–18, 127–29 foenus nauticum (maritime interest), 100 hull insurance, 38–39, 40–41, 127–29 industry refusal to comment on Brillante story, 238–39 war risk insurance, 39, 116–17 See also Lloyd’s of London; maritime insurance fraud Iron Antonis, 152–53 J Jull, Malcolm, 127–29 K Karite Shipmanagement, 154 Kiourani, Varvara, 153 Komiseris, Stylianos, 104, 105 Kulukundis, Elias, 149 L Lallis, Gerry, 143–45, 238 Lallis Voutsinos Anagnostopoulos, 143 Larsen, Jakob, 34 letters of marte (marque), 38 Liberia, 30, 32, 103, 150 Liberopoulos, John, 164, 166 Liberty ships, 148 Livanos, Tina, 149 Lloyd, Edward, 37 Lloyd’s List, 37, 228 Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit (MIU), 39 Lloyd’s of London, 35–43 amount of money passing through, 41 corporate conglomerates and, 111 COVID-19 pandemic liabilities of, 231 declined to comment on Brillante story, 239 Greek shipping community, relationship with, 109–10 history of, 37–38 Iliopoulos continues to do business with, 230–31 as insurance marketplace, 36–37 Loss Book, 43 maritime insurance fraud and, 101–12 Names as financiers of, 111 Open Form salvage contract, 85, 86 reinsurance and, 41–42 Salvage Arbitration Branch, 85 underwriting practice at, 40–41 working practices at, 39–40 Loss Book, 43 Lutine Bell, 43 M Maersk Alabama (ship), 15, 29–30 Magellan, 230 Maritime Affairs Authority (MAA), 58–59 maritime insurance fraud, 101–12 casualty rates for Greek-owned ships, 109–10 coffin ships and, 102 earliest documented cases of maritime insurance fraud, 100–101 enforcement, difficulties in, 103–4 lack of financial incentive to tackle, 103 Lloyd’s market and, 101–12 Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 and, 102–3 Michael scuttling and case, 104–5 Salem fraud, 106–9 South China Sea claims, 1970s, 105–6 tanker glut of 1970s and, 105 in Victorian era, 102–3 maritime interest (foenus nauticum), 100 Marquez, Allan, 175–82 background and training of, 10–11 City of London detective interview of, 240 duties of, 12–13 gives account of Brillante attack to Veale, Conner, and Zavos, 179–82 identifies and alerts of approaching danger, 17, 18 interviewed by authors for story appearing in Bloomberg Businessweek, 177–78, 239–40 joins crew of Brillante, 11 ordered to allow pirates on board, 19–20 threatened by Tabares and Iliopoulos to amend his story, 177, 180–81 Marshall Islands, 31, 32 Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, 102–3 Metal Mickey.

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

Now, standing on the back end of the Ford on the Tidewater waterfront in the spring of 2014, Nasty Manazir envisioned the squadrons he could deploy with his new launch-and-recovery systems—F-18s and the new super-stealthy next-generation F-35 combat jets, as well as large drone aircraft the ship could send out to much greater distances than it could currently, to spy or bomb. All this would make the vessels less vulnerable to attack from enemies in the South China Sea or the halls of Congress. AAG and EMALS provided another benefit, as well: boosting the launch and trap rates would speed up operations in general, what the navy called the sortie rate. The faster the sortie rate, the more effective a carrier’s aircraft in combat. Navy and shipyard designers searched for other ways to boost that rate, and they found them—ranging from rather simple in-deck refueling stations to more exotic advanced weapons elevators (AWEs), which moved more weapons faster from the belowdecks magazines to aircraft being readied for launch.

…

I have also never been more proud of the shipbuilders who had made that sight possible.” Many travelers regard December as one of the best months to visit Hainan Island, China’s largest tropical island, roughly the size of Taiwan, which sits just south of the Qiongzhou Strait, which separates the Gulf of Tonkin from the South China Sea. Perched at China’s southernmost point, Hainan features a tropical climate that attracts beachgoers from all over the country and Southeast Asia to the seaside luxury hotels of its southern city of Sanya. But Chinese president Xi made a trip to Sanya on December 17, shortly after the Kennedy flooding, to check on the progress of his own carrier at the naval base there.

…

Such a mind-set usually bodes well for Newport News Shipbuilding, particularly when the impetus for the concern during that early fall of 2020 became China and its shipbuilding programs, as well as Chinese missiles developed to take out US carriers. China test-fired two missiles in September into the South China Sea, including a “carrier killer” DF-21D rocket into an area between the southern island province of Hainan and the Paracel Islands—a notable feat, although much easier than actually hitting a moving, protected carrier, an ability China has yet to prove. Still, China apparently recently built a stockpile of two hundred DF-26 missiles, compared to about sixteen as of three years earlier.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

True, China’s military has become more assertive, even aggressive, in East Asia in recent years. In 2011, the Vietnamese and Philippine governments accused Chinese patrol boats of firing warning shots and even threatening to ram energy exploration vessels operating in or around disputed territory in the South China Sea. No one seems to know for certain who within the Chinese leadership authorized these actions, but it’s evident that the country’s armed forces want to expand their (already considerable) influence within the governing bureaucracy and to test their regional room for maneuver. And China is working to build a blue-water navy capable of operating far from its shores.

…

The G-Zero is a period of great transition, and significant changes in the international balance of power stoke both competition among would-be regional powers and anxiety among those who fear they aren’t yet ready to compete. Whether the competition involves the kind of posturing we’ve seen in the South China Sea—as China, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, and others stake claims to disputed territory—or the risk of cyberattack from states looking to frustrate potential rivals at minimum cost, companies that offer governments new offensive and defensive capabilities will find lots of new opportunities.

…

., 121 NGOs, 135 Nigeria, 48, 72, 177, 182 Nile, 106 Nixon, Richard, 44, 49–50 Noda, Yoshihiko, 20 North Africa, 18, 48, 136, 139, 175, 187 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 17, 19, 30, 117, 133–34, 192 North Korea, 70, 91, 123, 125, 152, 154, 165, 208n nuclear program of, 15, 57, 58–59, 124, 158, 161 Norway, in Arctic Council, 96–97 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 57–59 Obama, Barack, 8–9, 11, 64, 65, 100, 113, 190, 202n oil, 3, 22, 23, 30–31, 37, 47–49, 58, 61, 114, 116, 117, 120, 125–26, 127, 141–42, 147, 160, 181–82 in Arctic, 97 OPEC’s embargos of, 48–49, 50 as priced in dollars, 81–82 oilseeds, 100 Oman, 71 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 48–49, 50, 100 Paine, Thomas, 185 Pakistan, 14, 57, 70, 115, 161, 182, 183 food riots in, 98 India’s conflict with, 25, 70, 152, 158, 165–66 U.S. drone attacks in, 111 Palestinians, 17, 25, 136, 158 Pan Am Flight 103, 139 Panetta, Leon, 73 PayPal, 75 Peace Corps, 90–91 Pearl Harbor, 187 People’s Action Party, Singapore, 121 People’s Liberation Army, 146 Peru, 177 Petrobras, 125–26 Pew Research Center, 13 Philippines, 23, 51, 70, 114, 129, 194 pivot states, 115–20, 136, 140–41, 155, 165, 177, 178–79 Poland, 55 pollution, 104–5 population growth, 104 Portugal, 17 power grids, 169, 171 protectionism, 77–79 protectors, 128–30 Prussia, 167 Putin, Vladimir, 24, 54, 82, 137, 141, 182 Qatar, 48, 71 Rapaport, 132 Raytheon, 129 Reagan, Ronald, 65 “Red Dragon Rising: The Coming War with China” (board game), 170–71 referees, 133–35 regional development banks, 38 Research in Motion (RIM), 33 Resolution 1973, 192 Roach, Stephen, 12 rogue states, 123–25, 138–39 Roosevelt, Franklin, 42–43 Rosneft, 127 Royal Dutch Shell, 97 Rudd, Kevin, 203n Russia, 24, 28, 30, 54, 55, 69, 73, 77, 84, 102, 121, 122, 125, 141, 168, 169, 170, 177, 183, 203n in Arctic Council, 96, 97 climate change and, 94 default on debt in, 37 energy exported by, 30 Georgia’s war with, 32, 141 grain exports banned by, 102 Internet in, 88, 89, 91, 92 nuclear program of, 59 oil prices and, 141 Peace Corps unwelcome in, 90–91 state capitalism in, 78 suspicions of U.S. in, 91 Ukraine’s ties with, 54, 137–38, 141 water security in, 105 Russian Empire, 167, 182 Rwanda, 32, 106 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 9, 38 Sata, Michael, 119 Saudi Arabia, 26, 30, 33, 48, 67, 69, 71, 114, 128, 155, 182 foreign land purchased by, 102 grain production in, 104 Internet in, 92 local hegemony of, 175–76 oil of, 114 state capitalism in, 78 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 18 Schengen Agreement, 18, 176 Schularick, Moritz, 158 Scowcroft, Brent, 163 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 13, 32, 64, 188 Serageldin, Ismail, 104 shadow states, 136–38 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 122 Shaw, George Bernard, 37 Shi Lang, 23 Siemens, 127 Sierra Leone, 130 Singapore, 51, 71, 120, 121–22, 194 Singh, Manmohan, 26 smart grids, 72, 73 Social Security, 12, 189 Somalia, 14, 183 Sony, 75 Soreq Nuclear Research Center, 207n South Africa, 10, 26, 28, 72, 131, 177 biofuel production in, 100 South Asia, water scarcity in, 104 South China Sea, 23, 129 Southeast Asia, 59, 102 urbanization in, 99 Southern African Development Community, 120 South Korea, 15, 51, 55, 70, 71, 114, 129, 165, 173, 208n foreign land purchased by, 102 U.S. beef banned by, 103 sovereign wealth funds, 125 Soviet Union, 39, 44, 45, 47, 52, 53, 54, 72–73, 138, 168, 173, 186 coup attempt in, 92 efforts at reform in, 179–80 nuclear program of, 57 post–World War II reconstruction needed in, 39–40 shifting borders of, 182 Spain, 17, 169 separatist movements in, 181 Spiegel, Der, 8 Spielberg, Steven, 119 Splinternet, 90 Standard Chartered Bank, 3 State Development & Investment Corporation (SDIC), 129, 140 state-owned companies, 78–79, 119, 125, 139–40, 160 in China, 59, 61, 86, 144, 148 Stoltenberg, Jens, 9 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), 59 Strategy & Tactics, 170–71 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 27 Stuxnet, 56, 72–73 Sudan, 32, 106, 119 Sweden, in Arctic Council, 96–97 Syria, 48, 69, 112, 117, 123, 175, 183 Taiwan, 51, 114, 129, 172–73 as exposed state, 136 Tanzania, 106 tariffs, 79 Tata Group, 128 TD-SCDMA, 86 tech bubble, 64 telecommunications standards, 33, 83–94 terrorism, 3, 70, 93, 116, 128, 170, 183 Texas, 47, 48 Thailand, 51, 71, 114, 124, 168–69, 194 collapse of currency in, 37 multinationals in, 80 water security in, 105 3G mobile phone standard, 86 Three Gorges Dam, 105 Tiananmen Square, 53, 59, 148, 163 Time, 75 trade, global, 68, 70–71, 76–80, 178, 193–95 protectionist trend in, 77–79 trade balances, 32 trade routes, 15, 24, 59 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 71 Treasury Department, U.S., 38 Tunisia, 19, 69, 112, 175 Turkey, 3, 25, 26, 55, 69, 76, 141, 148, 155, 161, 166, 179, 187 as pivot state, 117 Turkmenistan, 54 Twitter, 91 Uganda, 72, 106 Ukraine, 54, 141, 177 as shadow state, 137–38 United Arab Emirates, 26, 48, 71 United Nations, 44, 89, 97, 104, 131 Food and Agriculture Organization, 100, 103 General Assembly of, 21, 44 Security Council of, 3, 25, 44, 57, 192 World Food Program of, 103 United States, 16, 21, 25, 30, 39, 44, 47, 50, 122, 148–49, 170, 182 in Arctic Council, 96–97 as Asian power, 70–71 beef production in, 103, 105 biofuels produced in, 100 United States (cont.)

Amazing Train Journeys by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, country house hotel, Donner party, high-speed rail, megacity, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, trade route, urban sprawl

% Go in search of the dining car as the skyscrapers of HCMC disappear from view. % Sunbathe by the South China Sea in resort towns like Nha Trang. % Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) % Binh Thuan % Nha Trang % Dieu Tri % Quang Ngai © MATT MUNRO | LONELY PLANET © MATT MUNRO | LONELY PLANET % CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Martyrs’ Monument near Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake; train drivers enjoy the ride; a woman sells flowers. PREVIOUS PAGE: A railway guard on the Reunification Express line. % skirting cliffs beside the South China Sea, diving in and out of the tunnels as green hills rise above and turquoise waves break far down below.

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As Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are served by numerous international flights, many visitors fly into one city, make a one-way journey on the Reunification Express and depart from the other. Many nationalities will need to obtain a visa to enter Vietnam. OS Breathe in as the train squeezes through narrow alleyways approaching Hanoi. Thanh Hoa Ninh Binh Hanoi © MATT MUNRO | LONELY PLANET Hugging the coast of the South China Sea just north of Hai Van Pass, between Hue and Hoi An. Mandalay to Lashio MYANMAR (BURMA) The Myanmar’s colonial-era railways may be creaking under the weight of time, but that’s rather the appeal. The hill railway cutting northeast from Mandalay rattles and shakes across the precarious Gokteik Viaduct, defying the centuries above a seemingly bottomless valley, on its way from the British-era hill station of Pyin Oo Lwin to Lashio, the wartime terminus of the Burma Road.

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, failed state, family office, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, Global Witness, high net worth, junk bonds, low interest rates, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Virgin Galactic

Chapter 38 Losing Control Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, March 2014 The 1MDB board of directors started their afternoon meeting with a recitation of the first seven verses from the Qur’an, known as the Al-Fatiha, for the crew and passengers of MH370, the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 jet that had gone missing in early March over the South China Sea. The plane, with 239 crew and passengers on board, was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, but just an hour after takeoff the pilot stopped making contact with air traffic control and, moments later, the plane disappeared from civil aviation radar screens. In the weeks since, Beijing’s official media had slammed Malaysia for leading a chaotic search effort, first focusing efforts on the South China Sea, north of Malaysia, before military radar showed the aircraft had gone missing over the Andaman Sea, to the west of the country.

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Now, Obama was finally in Malaysia as part of a tour that also included close allies like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. His deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, who was also on the trip, called Malaysia a “pivotal state” in the region—a code for a bulwark against China. In recent months, Beijing had been taking a militarist approach toward enforcing its territorial claims to the entire South China Sea. President Obama, keen to balance this aggression, promised in a joint statement with Najib to help train and equip Malaysia’s navy. The statement also stressed the two leaders’ support for a vibrant civil society. For some State Department officials who had counseled against the visit—given Najib’s government was busy locking up opposition politicians—this last pledge was derisory.

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It was no surprise then that Najib turned away from President Obama, who had lost faith in Malaysia as a model Islamic democracy, and looked instead to China’s authoritarian rulers. Under President Xi Jinping, Beijing was extending its influence outside of its borders, whether through more aggressive territorial claims to islands in the South China Sea, or via a softer diplomatic approach, offering to build infrastructure like highways and ports in neighboring countries. Najib was quick to claim victory, saying the deals, and the end to Malaysian investigations, put the fund’s problems behind the country. The National Audit Department had finished its probe into 1MDB, but the government classified it under the Official Secrets Act, attempting to bury its contents.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Russia still really would like to break up the NATO alliance—just as NATO still really does see the most important part of its mission today as containing any possible Russian aggression. China really would like to see the United States retreat from the South China Sea and shrink its power profile in Asia generally; the United States really does believe that its role in maintaining the openness of global sea lanes requires making certain that China doesn’t alone write the rules of the road for the South China Sea, let alone the Pacific. And both Russia and China still have nuclear weapons targeting America—and the rogue state of North Korea clearly aspires to have the same. The power of all of them has to be balanced by a strong American nuclear deterrent.

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That is, the traditional great-power competition, primarily among the United States, Russia, and China, is back again (if it ever really went away) as strong as ever, with the three major powers again jockeying over spheres of influence, along golden-oldie fault lines such as the NATO–Russia frontier or the South China Sea. This competition is propelled by history, geography, and the traditional imperatives of great-power geopolitics, and is reinforced today by the rise of nationalism in Russia and China. Its contours will be determined by the balance of power between these three big nation-states. This story has been well documented, and is not my main focus.

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If China, for its part, were to collapse into disorder, it would negatively impact everything from the cost of the shoes on your feet and the shirt on your back to the mortgage on your house to the value of the currency in your wallet. China may be America’s rival, but, in today’s interdependent world, its collapse would be far more threatening to America than its rise. Probably the worst thing a rising China might do is bully all its neighbors into toeing its line, take over more islands in the South China Sea, or demand more economic concessions from foreign investors. But a falling China could melt down the U.S. stock market and trigger a global recession, if not worse. While this high degree of interdependence poses one set of new challenges, the rising risk of state failure in a number of countries poses another.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Still, to underline those claims, a Chinese submarine went down to the deepest part of the sea, where its crew planted a Chinese flag.5 Energy resources are an increasingly important part of the argument. Substantial oil and gas resources are produced around the South China Sea, notably in Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia. Estimates of the undiscovered oil in the South China Sea range between 150 billion and 200 billion barrels, which is more than enough to stir competition, although far from proven. Although China and Vietnam have worked out some joint-production agreements, they are at odds over ownership of other exploration areas.

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In November 2003, seven months after the invasion of Iraq, President Hu Jintao reportedly told a Communist Party conference that the country had to solve what became known as the Malacca Dilemma. This referred to China’s reliance on the Malacca Strait, the narrow waterway connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and through which passes more than 75 percent of China’s oil imports. “Certain powers have all along encroached on and tried to control navigation through the strait,” Hu is said to have declared. “Certain powers” was an obvious euphemism for the United States.2 The growing attention to risk was reinforced by what happened in 2004: the unanticipated jump in both Chinese and global demand for oil and the consequent rapidly rising prices.

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Despite an extensive and growing economic relationship in the years that led up to August 1914, Britain and Germany were driven apart by rivalry and the suspicions aroused by their naval race, by anxiety over control of sea-lanes and access to resources, by competition over who would have what place in the sun—and by growing nationalistic fer vor. Echoes of the Anglo-German naval race can be heard in today’s arguments. Controversy over the South China Sea has already created some tension between the United States and China. That sea’s 1.3 million square miles are bounded on the west by China, Vietnam (which calls the region the East Sea), and Malaysia, down to Singapore and the Strait of Malacca; and then, coming up on the east, by Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, and at the top, by Taiwan.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

If not, Chile will be one of the few developing countries to choose to protect its natural environment over short-term financial gain. It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening in poorer, one-party Laos. In the steamy hills of South East Asia’s Golden Triangle, on the Thai–Burmese border, I take a slow boat into tropical Laos, beginning a journey along the Mekong River that will end 2,600 kilometres downstream in the South China Sea. The Mekong is the planet’s twelfth longest river and one of its richest biodiversity sites, supporting over 1,300 varieties of fish and the world’s biggest inland fishing industry. The river basin is home to some 60 million people in six nations, who depend on it for food, water and transport.

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‘But we eat fish, not electricity,’ he smiles. But you would be compensated, I say. ‘The problem is, we need fish to eat, not money,’ he repeats. The Mekong is second only to the Amazon in terms of fish diversity. And uniquely, more than 70% of its fish are migratory – some species migrating annually from the South China Sea in Vietnam as far as Tibet.7 These include the world’s largest freshwater fish, the incredible Mekong giant catfish, measuring more than three metres long and weighing as much as 300 kg – whose numbers have already declined by an estimated 90% in the last twenty years through overfishing. If the Don Sahong hydrodam gets built it will mean certain loss of a number of commercially important fish, but perhaps more importantly, it will risk the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people who depend on the fisheries for their daily food, such as the sardine-sized carp, known as the trey riel.

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In the early morning, I slip down a rain-slicked muddy bank of the Mekong to board a rusty ferry downriver to Vietnam. There are few other passengers – most people are using the new highway. How different the river is now from the liquid crease folded into the mountains of northern Thailand. Here, the Mekong is fat and deep and hurtles along to the South China Sea like a migrating fish on its urgent journey south. At the border the river splits into islands and channels – the Vietnamese call the Mekong the dragon with nine tails. People here live closer than ever to the Mekong, in stilted houses that reach the bank via wobbly boards tied together with ropes.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

There was also something ominous, though. Whereas past Chinese leaders spoke about China’s “core interests” (a euphemism for interests that would never be compromised and could lead to conflict) with respect to issues like Tibet and Taiwan, Xi’s definition was broader and included the entire South China Sea—maritime borders that absurdly snaked around the coastlines of several Southeast Asian nations and encompassed vast natural resources. Sizing up Xi’s ambition, Obama set to work getting him focused on climate change as an issue on which Xi could demonstrate global leadership by dealing with the air pollution that was becoming a more dangerous phenomenon in China.

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To address China’s more assertive approach in Asia, Obama accelerated an effort to consolidate a bloc of countries committed to a set of rules and norms for commerce that could be translated into geopolitics through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that included traditional U.S. allies as well as nations like Vietnam and Malaysia who were threatened by China’s claim to the South China Sea. A Vietnamese official once pointed out the importance of TPP to me as a signal of America’s presence in Asia: “We have hated the Chinese for a thousand years, but they are right here,” he said, pointing to China’s border with Vietnam. “They are going to be here. The question is: Are you?” Obama had some success in appealing to Xi’s ambitions while trying to shape how they evolved.

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Ultimately, this shift in the center of the world’s gravity doesn’t just shape particular transactions and policies; it begins to shift how we behave, in a version of how a totalitarian government exerts control over the behavior of its citizens. For rich countries, big corporations, and prominent individuals who want access to Chinese markets or investments, there is increasingly an explicit cost in return. Do not meet with people like the Dalai Lama. Do not oppose China’s position on matters like the South China Sea. Do not investigate or even inquire about what is happening in Xinjiang. Do not comment on anything that is taking place within China’s borders. * * * — In the aftermath of Tiananmen, at the height of American leverage over global affairs, George H. W. Bush moved quickly to make amends with the Chinese Communist Party, and Bill Clinton followed suit—welcoming China into the World Trade Organization and the lucrative club of nations that agree upon a set of rules for international trade, even though China routinely broke them.

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

Notions of universal empire, a new ‘culture of travel’, and millenarian rumours and fantasies circulated around the huge land mass between Spain and the Bay of Bengal.11 Geographical location in Asia or Europe begins to look much less important for social and cultural change than a position astride Eurasia’s trunk lines of trade, or in the arid belt where long-distance travellers did not have to toil through forest, jungle or marsh.12 A similar change of emphasis can be seen among historians writing the new ‘global history of material progress’. As van Leur had suggested, the facile conclusion that Europeans had galvanized a somnolent Asia after Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India in 1498 was a travesty of the facts. A dense mercantile network already linked ports and producers between the coast of East Africa and the South China Sea. Asian merchants were not passive victims of a European takeover. Whatever their shortcomings, Asian governments were more than the predatory despots of European mythology who crushed trade and agriculture by penal taxation and arbitrary seizure. In different parts of Asia, there were market economies where the division of labour, specialized trades and urban development (the hallmarks of growth as Adam Smith had described it) looked very similar to those found in Europe.

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Secondly, it was brutally clear that without the union of north and south the pattern of regional exchange that drove the commercial economy would function poorly at best. That meant exerting effective control over a much larger land area than any other state in Eurasia was able to rule continuously. Thirdly, it was North China’s acquisition of the vast, rich hinterland stretching away to the South China Sea that allowed it to meet its main geopolitical challenge – although not all the time. The Chinese Empire, with its highly evolved agrarian culture, confronted the nomad empires that erupted volcanically in the Inner Asian steppe. Indeed much of North China was dangerously close to the epicentres of nomadic energy – which usually formed where the steppe and the ‘sown’ came closest together.

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The major states of South Asia mostly looked inland. Maritime trade was left to coastal merchant communities that lacked social prestige and political influence.8 So the Portuguese were able to enforce their naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean with comparative ease. East of the Malayan peninsula it was a different story. In the South China Sea or near Japan, the Portuguese were much more cautious. Here they found a niche as long-distance traders, convenient middlemen for a Ming Empire that disliked overseas activity by its own subjects and refused direct commercial relations with Japan. As a result, the Estado modulated gradually from a crusader-predator into a loose-knit network of Portuguese communities, largely made up of casados, or settlers, and the local peoples with whom they intermarried.

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

Military power and geographical reality created an economic reality. Other countries have lost time recovering from wars. The United States has not. It has actually grown because of them. Consider this simple fact that I'll be returning to many times. The United States Navy controls all of the oceans of the world. Whether it's a junk in the South China Sea, a dhow off the African coast, a tanker in the Persian Gulf, or a cabin cruiser in the Caribbean, every ship in the world moves under the eyes of American satellites in space and its movement is guaranteed—or denied—at will by the U.S. Navy. The combined naval force of the rest of the world doesn't come close to equaling that of the U.S.

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PHYSICAL SAFETY AND GUARANTEE CONTROL OVER THE INTERNATIONAL TRADING SYSTEM The fact that the United States emerged from World War II not only with the world's largest navy but also with naval bases scattered around the world changed the way the world worked. As I mentioned previously, any seagoing vessel—commercial or military, from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea to the Caribbean—could be monitored by the United States Navy, who could choose to watch it, stop it, or sink it. From the end of World War II onward, the combined weight of all of the world's existing fleets was insignificant compared to American naval power. This highlights the single most important geopolitical fact in the world: the United States controls all of the oceans.

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Additionally, there will be the question of Japanese respect for Chinese sovereignty and the question of self-determination for maritime Russia. On a deeper level, the United States will be alarmed by Japan's rapidly growing maritime power, including sea-based and space-based military systems. Japan, still importing oil from the Persian Gulf, will be increasing its power in the South China Sea and in the Strait of Malacca. In the early 2040s, the Japanese will be concerned with the stability of the Gulf and will begin to probe and patrol in the Indian Ocean in order to protect their interests. Japan will have well-established, close economic ties with many of the island chains of the Pacific, and will begin to enter into agreements with them for satellite tracking and control stations.

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

Scientists have analyzed a trove of stashed-away plankton samples, collected off the coast of Scotland since the 1960s, and found a significant rise in microfiber contamination over the decades—a sad echo of Jennifer Brandon’s sediment samples.53 Others have taken water samples off Antarctica and found zooplankton tangled up in microfibers.54 Biologists not only find petroplankton and biological plankton mingling together in water samples taken from different depths but also find the particles mingling in the stomachs of captured zooplankton: baby salmon that (eventually) feed bears and humans, the crustaceans that feed fish and birds, the krill that feed whales.55 A survey in the South China Sea tested fish larvae, jellyfish, shrimp, and predatory worms and found microplastics in them all.56 Adult fish that feed on zooplankton, or on smaller fish that feed on zooplankton, then assume the particles: a sampling in the remote South Pacific turned up microplastics in 97 percent of fish species, including mahi-mahi, red snapper, and barracuda57—one foot-long Pacific chub was burdened with 104 pieces of plastic in its gut.

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“Ingestion of Microplastics by Zooplankton in the Northeast Pacific Ocean.” Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 69:320–30. https://doi.org/10.1007 /s00244-015-0172-5. 56. Sun, Xiaoxia, Qingjie Li, Mingliang Zhu, Junhua Liang, Shan Zheng, and Yongfang Zhao. 2017. “Ingestion of Microplastics by Natural Zooplankton Groups in the Northern South China Sea.” Marine Pollution Bulletin 115 (1–2): 217–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2016 .12.004. 57. Markic, Ana, Clarisse Niemand, James H. Bridson, Nabila Mazouni-Gaertner, Jean-Claude Gaertner, Marcus Eriksen, and Melissa Bowen. 2018. “Double Trouble in the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre: Increased Plastic Ingestion by Fish in the Oceanic Accumulation Zone.”

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See also tires roots, 99 row covers, 90–91 Royer, Sarah-Jane, 18–19 rubber, 11, 77 ryegrass, 98–99 salmon, 56, 77–80 San Francisco Bay, 81–83 sand temperature, 44–45 Sargasso Sea, 41–43 scrubbers, 13 Sea of Plastic, 92–93 sea salt, 104 sea spray, 118–120 sea turtles, 44, 65 sea urchins, 65–66 seafloor sediments, 45, 48–49, 51 shellac, 9, 11 shipping industry, 47–48 side chains, 16–17 sin taxes, 161 single-use packaging, 164 sinkers, 53 6PPD, 77–80 size of microplastics, 24–28 slicks, 62–63 sludge, 85–89, 157 Smit, Joost, 147–148, 150, 154 soccer fields, 83 Society of the Plastics Industry. See Plastics Industry Association socks, 139, 164 soils, 6, 93–98, 118 Soltani, Neda Sharifi, 126 South China Sea, 56 South Pacific Gyre, 56–57 Spain, 92–93 spices, 104 stool, human, 109–110 index stormwater runoff, 77–83 surface area, 18–19 surface tension, 34 Sweden, 86 sweeping, 126 Szaky, Tom, 160, 161 taxation, 161, 164 teabags, 108 Tedori River, 89–90 Texas, 29 textile production, 132 thale cress, 100–102 Thomas, Larry, 157 Thompson, Richard, 60 Three Gorges Reservoir (China), 107 tire-core particles, 115–117 tires atmosphere and, 114–118 coho salmon and, 77–80 overview of issues with, 2, 162–163 toothpaste, 13 translocation, 70–74 Trasandre, Leonardo, 141–142, 166 trash wheel barges, 81 trophic transfer, 55–57, 72 Tunnell, Jace, 29, 30 turbulence, 43 turtles, 44, 65 Tyre Collective, 116 undercounting, 28 upwelling, 43 urban areas, tire-core particles and, 115–117 vacuuming, 126 vertical migration, 54 Vibrio bacteria, 58 vinyl chloride, 133 Walker, Imari, 22, 166 Wang, Zhanyun, 146 waste management companies, 160 wastewater disposal, 45–46 wastewater treatment, 31–32, 35, 39, 110, 157–158 water supplies, 4, 105–110 weathering, 24 Weddell Sea, 47 Westerink, Remco H.S., 152, 154 whales, 64 wheat, 100–102 wildlife, 93–97.

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

Even in parts of South America, where the Bolivarian assault on global capitalism and its priorities has been the strongest, no systemic break has occurred. There is no major capitalist or hybrid state that even wishes to challenge US global power: China, Russia, leave alone the servile European Union, may have their quibbles, but even serious disputes (Ukraine, South China Sea) within the capitalist family of nation states seem far from developing into any frontal political challenge, or military confrontation, with Washington.3 This being the case, is there a convincing alternative explanation of the global struggle being waged by the United States today, other than to maintain mastery of the world?

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Chinese military doctrine, according to Martin Jacques, is rooted in Sun Zi’s writings: it sets much greater store on seeking to weaken and isolate the enemy than on actually fighting him. Thus China relies exclusively on trade to expand its influence. Despite its vast economic investments, it has yet to acquire a single foreign base (although it is investing in maritime facilities in Pakistan and Myanmar, in case trade routes in the South China Sea become blocked). Many have argued that the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq to seize the region’s energy resources, or to secure pipelines. However, the real beneficiary of both wars has been China. It has not only obtained some of the biggest contracts in Iraq, it recently also won a $3.4bn contract – the largest in Afghan history – to mine copper in Logar province.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

If those in power in Beijing, to take an example not at all at random, were to perceive some national benefit in deploying cloud-brightening technology in the South China Sea, why would they not act on that perception, given that China already seeds clouds from Xinjiang to Guangdong? The fact that others dispute China’s dominion over that sea might simply add to the appeal; how better to express your dominion than to commandeer the sky? And further justification could be found, as we have seen, in the fact that China is already cooling the South China Sea, along with much else, by means of the power-station aerosols that drift east from the mainland. It would be Crutzen’s stratosphere–troposphere trade-off achieved by other means: the unintentional effects of pollution replaced by intentional engineering that preserves perceived benefits while causing less harm.

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The chance may remain small; the ability of policy makers not to think about such things even when researchers are aware of them is, as the IMO has demonstrated, quite well developed. And that could be a good thing. Such ironing-out obviously offers the possibility of conflict (especially when it comes to the South China Sea, where more or less everything offers the possibility of conflict). As with global approaches, changes that are to one country’s advantage might be to another’s detriment. At the same time – indeed, as a direct result of those risks of conflict – there is a possibility that national desires to make intentional regional changes might bring about serious strategic discussions about what could be acceptable.

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., 100 sky: brightness, 97; colour, 39, 62–3; veilmaking’s effect on appearance, 111 Slingo, Tony, 273 smallpox, 227 Smil, Vaclav, 195, 212 smoke, 306–7, 319, 323 Smuts, Jan, 77 snowmaking, 270–1 sociology, 129 Socolow, Robert, 1, 28, 249 Soddy, Frederick, 209–11, 212–13, 214–15, 230, 313–14, 318 soil erosion and conservation, 185–6, 264; see also fertilizers, synthetic solar power: development of industry, 11–12; and direct-air capture, 28; inadequacy as replacement for fossil fuels, 9; as percentage of world’s energy used, 3; pros and cons, 17–18; and veilmaking and volcanic eruptions, 98, 111; see also renewable energy solar-radiation management see clouds: brightening; veilmaking soot: and climate, 297; and clouds, 279; emissions at sea, 282; and nuclear war, 307, 320; production, 274–5; self-lofting, 320, 342; warming effects, 73, 146, 279, 307 Soufrière Hills, 100, 108 South Africa, 16, 271 South America, 230, 252, 254 South China Sea, 296, 297 Southern Ocean, 252–3, 255, 257 Soviet Union see USSR space colonies, 339 space missions, 57, 60, 62, 77, 212–13, 353; interstellar, 139, 150 Spaceship Earth concept, 75–8 SpaceX, 353 Spain, 180 Spufford, Francis, 344 Stakman, E. C., 191 Stanford University, 236, 237 Star Wars programme, 156, 334 stars, twinkling effect, 39 steam power, 236 steam turbine technology, 212 Steel, Duncan, 332 strategic missile defence see Star Wars programme stratosphere: and nuclear fallout, 43–7; overview, 35–56; and volcanic eruptions, 84–6, 89–99; see also ozone layer; veilmaking Strauss, Lewis, 316 the sublime, 41, 101, 123, 300, 337–8, 345 Suess, Eduard, 44 Suess, Hans, 44 sulphur and sulphates: cooling effects, 84–5, 89–99, 107, 275–80; cutting emissions, 282–3; and global warming, 279–80; sulphur cycle, 274–5; and veilmaking, 107–12, 280–1 the sun, 97, 216 sunlight: and climate change, 65; effects, 62–5; historical changes in pattern, 222–3; and plant growth, 97; reflectivity by clouds, 273–4, 283–8, 292; reflectivity by Earth’s surface, 71–2, 289–93; regional methods of reflecting, 289–93; and sunsets, 268; see also clouds: brightening; scattering; veilmaking sunsets, 86, 268 sunshine geoengineering see clouds: brightening; veilmaking supernovae, 316–17, 321–2 Sutton, Mark, 207–8 Tambora, Mount, 86, 93, 108, 122, 127–8 Tansley, Arthur, 74, 76–7, 81 Taubo, 93 Teller, Edward: and asteroid impact avoidance, 331, 334–5; background, 136, 148; and environmental warfare, 136, 340; and GCMs, 317; life at Livermore, 148–9, 317; and nuclear explosives, 319–20; and nuclear weapons, 136, 148, 312; and veilmaking, 149, 151, 154 Texas, 248 Thailand, 271 thallium, 178 thermodynamics, 65–6, 74–5, 80, 245–6; second law, 214, 215 thermosphere, 41 thermostats, 129, 151, 164 Thomas, Jim, 369 Thompson, George, 134 Thoreau, Henry David, 134, 268 Three Mile Island accident (1979), 15 Titan (moon), 37 Titley, David, 116 Toba, 93–4 Toon, Brian, 89–90, 307–8, 323 trees: and carbon dioxide, 224–5, 233, 234, 236, 259–61; and Earth’s reflectivity of sunlight, 72, 130, 260 Trenberth, Kevin, 66, 96, 283 Trenberth diagram, 66–8, 73–4, 79 tropopause, 46, 111 troposphere, 46, 85, 199–200 tsunamis, 340 TTAPS, 307–8, 323–7 Turco, Richard, 307–8, 323, 326 Turner, Frederick, 177–8 Turner, J.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

He insisted they A milliner weaves topis and bonnets from alang-alang grass, the better to keep off the sun and the flies. stay and become part of his new community – offering them (unlike his fellow Dutchmen) the right to trade privately, and to take pepper and birds' nests and sea-cucumbers, all of which were readily available in Java, back to their homes across the South China Sea without interference from the monopoly of the Company. ‘They are an uncommonly clever, courteous, industrious and obliging people,’ wrote one of Coen's colleagues. ‘There is nothing you can imagine that they do not undertake and practise… Many keep eating-houses or tea-houses… or earn money fishing or carrying or conveying people.’

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His inn possessed a large wooden veranda overlooking the sea, and he and his guests would come of an evening to sit in lounge chairs there. A remarkably lovely spectacle was spread out before them: the island-filled, mountain-ringed, sunset-spectacular Sunda Strait, with the seemingly endless passage of ships sailing (or steaming: this was 1883, after all) along it, on their various ways between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. This last was what convinced the Lloyd's Committee that Schuit was the ideal man for them in the town where they particularly needed to employ one of the best. He was fascinated by the passing trade, and so were his guests. He bought and mounted a large brass telescope under his porch, so that he could identify the more distant vessels.

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.: Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects 396–7 Simla, India 144 Singapore 157, 158, 168, 187, 189, 190, 191, 200, 231, 233, 264n, 265, 278 Singapore Cricket Club 153 Sinkara Lake 126 Sir Robert Sale (British vessel) 230 Skerl (translator) 75 Skopje 378 slavery in Batavia 42, 44–5, 46 on Rodriguez 261 Smith, William 69 Smithsonian Institution, Washington 287n, 312 Snider-Pellarini, Antonio 72n Socoa, near Birritz 280, 281 sodium 304 Soenda Straits xv solfataras 303, 326 Solferino, battle of 195 Solo, Java 2, 124, 127, 133, 153 Solo, sultan of 124 Solomon Islands 384n Solor fort 29 South Africa 281, 287, 289 South America 67, 71, 72, 74, 308 South American Plate 308 South Atlantic 111 South China Sea 43, 161n, 182 South Georgia 274, 281 South Pole 74, 76, 84, 85, 281 Southampton 172n South-East Asia 52, 224n maps xiii, xiv Southern Africa 197 Spaan, Mr van 211n Spain, Spanish 13n, 14, 22, 29n Spanish Netherlands 29n Speenhof, Mr 46 Spice Islands, Islanders 33, 60, 297n Spice Route 11, 13n spiders, ballooning 356–9, 357, 361–2 Spitsbergen 87 Sri Lanka see Ceylon stabilists 107–8 Steers Island 314, 347n Sterling, Edward 194n Stockholm 80 Stokes, Sir George 273n Stonyhurst College 288 Stonyhurst weather observatory 270 Strachey, General Richard 271, 273n stratosphere 285, 286, 313 stratospheric ash, cloud of 289–91 Sturdy, E.W. 220n subduction 111, 112, 113, 154, 318, 319,388 subduction factories 307, 308–9, 320 subduction zones 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 171, 308, 309, 312, 317, 319,388 Sudan 335n Suez 191 Suez Canal 143, 183 Sufi movement 334, 337 Sukarno, General 145–6, 380 Sukarnoputri, Megawati 376 Sukhumi 190 Sulawesi 24, 55, 64, 66, 137 sulphur 302 sulphur dioxide gas 243, 388, 389 Suma Pars. 27 Sumatra 1, 6, 20, 26, 31, 48, 49, 55, 61, 78, 126, 169, 309, 374 Islamicized 17, 40 mapping 22, 24, 171 van Linschoten on 25 British colonial intentions 34 volcanically unstable 114–15 splits from Java 126, 155 and P'u-tei 132 earthquakes 154 and gutta-percha 188 warnings of forthcoming eruption (1883) 207 sky completely darkened (August 1883) 234 deaths from tephra 242–3, 245 plate tectonics 317 Islam in 342 rain forest 355 Sumbawa Island 294 sun blue 287, 289 colorations 288 white corona 288 sun-compass 86 sun-gauges 267 Sunda country 125, 126 Sunda Kelapa, Jakarta 136–7, 147 Sunda (steam ferry-boat) 157, 168 Sunda Strait 3, 6, 22–3, 25–7, 45, 50, 111, 115, 119, 127, 148, 149, 155–8, 161n, 164–7, 170, 173, 175, 182, 183, 200, 204, 207, 210, 213, 219–21, 223, 226, 231, 233, 237–9, 241, 245, 249, 253, 258, 260, 272, 275, 278, 282, 298, 319, 338, 342, 345, 354, 355, 367n, 372, 376, 378–81 Sundanese 332, 333, 335 sunsets 287–93 supercontinents 73, 74, 88 Surabaya, Java 17, 153, 168, 172n, 278 Surapati 45 Surtsey Island, off Iceland 384n, 385 survival of the fittest 61–2 S.W.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

When asked in polls in 2007 whom they trusted to wield global power, respondents in countries like Thailand and Indonesia, traditional U.S. allies, chose China over the United States. Even in Australia, favorable attitudes toward China and the United States are evenly balanced. Until recently, memories of China’s revolutionary foreign policy—which in practice meant using the Chinese diaspora to foment trouble—lingered. Beijing’s invasion of Vietnam, its claims in the South China Sea, and its border disputes with Russia and India had given China the image of a prickly and troublesome neighbor. By the late 1990s, however, China had adopted a very different regional policy, which became especially clear from its constructive role in the region after the East Asian crisis of 1997.

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What if that hegemony is waning? America no longer has the only large market in the world. The dollar is unlikely to retain its totemic position forever as the reserve currency, yielding to a basket that is largely composed of euros and dollars but includes other currencies too. In certain areas—the South China Sea, for example—U.S. military force is likely to be less relevant than that of China. In international negotiations, America will have to bargain and compromise with others. Does all this add up to instability and disorder? Not necessarily. Two hundred years of Anglo-American hegemony has in fact created a system that is not as fragile as it might have been in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Petersburg, 83 Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), 13 salwar kurta, 88 samba, 95 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), 221 saris, 88 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 252–53 Saudi Arabia, 8, 11, 13–14, 32, 38, 55, 125, 168, 232–33, 248n, 264, 278 savings rate, 25, 50, 104, 137–39, 151–52, 216–19, 233, 283 Schumer, Chuck, 220–21 Schwab, Klaus, 147 Schwarz, Benjamin, 37 scientific research, 68–70, 98, 123, 192, 198, 199, 200–202, 208–12, 218–19 Securities and Exchange Commission, 48 Security Council, UN, 40, 101, 118, 131, 165n, 254, 272 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, xi, 6, 10–11, 14, 16, 17, 246, 247, 265, 271, 272, 277, 278 service sector, 43, 148, 151, 230–31 Setser, Brad, 48, 55 Shah Jahan, 70 Shakespeare Wallah, 94 Shanghai, 34, 102–3, 109, 118, 150, 185, 211 Shanghai Stock Exchange, 109–10, 118 Shanmugaratnam, Tharman, 210–11 sharia, 16 Sharma, Ruchir, 179 Sherif, Abdul-Aziz el-, 15 Shia Muslims, 11–12, 263 shopping malls, 3 Shultz, George, 265 Sicily, 37 Sikhs, 180 Silicon Valley, 48, 215 Singapore, 3, 26, 32, 115–16, 132, 153, 185, 195–96, 200, 209, 210–12 Singh, Manmohan, 159, 160, 162, 169 Sino-African summit (2006), 130 Sky News, 96 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 268 slavery, 79 Slovakia, 223 “smiley curve,” 203 socialism, 23, 24, 120, 144, 157, 161, 173, 178, 197 Social Security, 235 Socrates, 123 “soft power,” 121, 186, 259 Somalia, 185, 223 South Africa, 3, 4, 53, 98, 132, 188–90, 257, 258 South America, 78–79 South Asia, 21n, 52, 60 South China Sea, 133, 267 South Korea, 2, 20, 26, 40–41, 55, 84, 93, 95, 98, 104, 112, 115, 116, 132, 157, 171, 214 Soviet Union: Afghanistan invaded by, 13, 101, 284 Chinese relations of, 133, 137, 142 collapse of, 9, 23–24, 53, 243, 244–45, 284 Communist regime of, 23–24, 120 Czechoslovakia invaded by (1968), 252 expansionism of, 10, 173, 256, 284 space program of, 71, 232 as superpower, 10, 101, 120, 173, 256, 266, 284 technology sector of, 71 U.S. relations with, 4, 8–9, 20, 38, 141, 143, 144, 163–66, 196, 199, 244–45, 247, 252, 254, 255–56, 274, 275, 277, 284 in World War II, 37 see also Russia space program, 71, 232 Spain, 17, 116, 187, 239–41, 278, 280 Spanish language, 96 special interests, 234, 236 Speer, Albert, 103 Speer, Albert, Jr., 103 Spence, Jonathan, 124 Spiegel, 251 Spielberg, Steven, 105 Sputnik launching (1957), 232 Sri Lanka, 157, 165 Stalin, Joseph, 37, 196, 254, 275, 277 Starbucks, 105 state-directed capitalism, 32 state socialism, 144 “stealth reforms,” 160 steel, 103–4 Steingart, Gabor, 50 Stiglitz, Joseph, 139–40 stocks, 43, 109–10, 222 sub-Saharan Africa, 80 Sudan, 31, 38, 41, 131, 188, 273 Suez Canal, 20, 168, 186, 195 Suez Canal crisis (1956), 20, 168 suicide bombings, 14–15 Summers, Lawrence, 246 Sunni Muslims, 11–12, 263 Sun Yat-sen, 84, 86 Sun Zi, 143 Sweden, 24, 116, 200 Switzerland, 200 Syria, 6, 8, 157 Taiwan, 2, 20, 26, 35, 112, 116, 118, 119, 132, 135–36, 137, 141, 142, 165n, 214, 263, 264 Taiwan Strait, 20 Taj Mahal, 70–71 Talbot, Strobe, 107 Taliban, 13, 172, 241 Tamil Nadu, 180 tariffs, 40, 197 Tata Group, 148–49, 153 Tata Motors, 230 Nano of, 229–30 taxation, 40, 64, 72, 75, 83–84, 107–8, 223, 235, 236, 262 Tay, Simon, 259 technology, xiii, 9, 36, 43, 58, 60–61, 87, 92–93, 113, 135, 142, 148–49, 161, 198, 199, 200–212, 215, 217, 224–26, 228–32, 233 Tehran Conference (1943), 254 telecommunications industry, 161 television, 95, 96 tennis, 219–20 terrorism, 5, 6, 9, 10–19, 29, 34, 59, 241, 246, 247, 264, 269–70, 271, 272, 276–80 textile industry, 28 Thailand, 28, 132 Tharoor, Shashi, 165n Thatcher, Margaret, 24, 197, 225, 244, 245 Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party (1978), 101–2 Third World, 10, 39, 102, 161, 177, 229, 232 Thirty Years’ War, 123 Thornton, John, 114 Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), 27, 137, 274–75 Tibet, 165 Time, 96 Times (London), 96 Times Higher Educational Supplement, 207 Tojo Hideki, 37 Tokyo, 91–92 totalitarianism, 112–17, 274 Toynbee, Arnold, 185, 197 Toyota, 225–26 trade balance, 21, 36, 57–58, 104–5, 216 traditional culture, 90–99 “treasure ships,” 62–63 treasury bills, U.S., 138 Treasury Department, U.S., 11 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), 208–9 Truman, Harry S., 253, 255–56 Tsongas, Paul, 245 tsunami disaster (2005), 155 Tunisia, 209 Turkey, 4, 8, 17, 28–29, 84, 115, 273–74, 278 Turkey bombings (2003), 17 Twain, Mark, 271 Ukraine, 3, 260 unemployment, xi, xiii, 2, 227 unemployment rate, 212, 217, 226, 284 unilateralism, 59, 246–55, 264, 267–69 “uni-multipolarity,” 53 unipolar order, 1–5, 39, 52, 233, 240–42, 243–50, 266–67, 274–75 United Arab Emirates, 3 United Nations, 40, 41, 101, 118, 131, 157, 165n, 213, 240, 244, 250, 253, 254, 264, 268, 272 United Nations Human Development Index, 157 United Nations Population Division, 213 United States, 239–85 African policy of, 270–71, 273 alliances of, 243–50, 270–75 Asian policies of, 90, 241–42, 245, 259–60, 266, 267, 273–74, 280–81 automobile industry of, 192, 225, 230, 244 British Empire compared with, 185–86, 189–90, 197–99, 237, 261–63, 266, 268 British relations of, 168, 189, 194–97, 241, 254, 261, 274 budget deficits of, 139, 219, 241–42, 244 capitalism in, xi, 23, 28, 47, 60, 120, 200–202, 223–24 China compared with, 100, 103, 108, 193, 200, 242, 263 Chinese relations of, 100, 104, 105–6, 108, 118, 136–44, 176–77, 190, 236, 254, 260–61, 263, 264, 266, 269, 280–82 colonial period of, 65, 194 culture of, xi, 1–5, 36, 90–91, 93, 94, 204, 212–16, 223–26, 271–72, 275–85 democratic ideals of, 141, 167, 232–38, 264, 274–75 demographics of, 212–16 diversity of, 212–16, 278, 283–84 domestic market of, 224, 241, 267, 283 economy of, xi–xiii, 18, 20, 22, 25–26, 29, 43–49, 50, 56–57, 86–87, 118–19, 120, 140, 152, 182, 186, 191, 192, 197–99, 212–19, 233–34, 237–38, 241, 244, 245, 255, 275, 282–83 education in, 48, 58, 200, 204–12, 215, 218–19, 225, 233 elections in, 245, 251, 276, 278–79 energy needs of, 38, 232–33 engineers trained in, 204–8 European relations of, 244–45, 251–55, 273–74 family values in, 93 film industry of, 90, 94 financial markets of, 217, 219–22 foreign investment in, 219 foreign policy of, 8, 42, 52, 59, 125, 130, 131, 132, 140, 142–44, 167–68, 189–90, 223, 235–85 foreign trade of, 20–21, 36, 57–58, 104, 200, 216, 217, 280–83 French relations of, 251, 252–53 future development of, 1–5, 94–99, 199–203, 204, 239–85 German relations of, 244, 245, 251 global influence of, see post-American world gross domestic product (GDP) of, 18, 104, 118–19, 191, 196, 198–99, 200, 207–8, 215, 217, 218, 219n, 255 growth rate for, 212–16, 233–34, 243 health care in, 225–26, 233n, 283 immigration to, 61, 87, 167, 212–16, 233, 272, 277, 278, 280, 282 income levels of, 212, 216, 217–18, 219 India compared with, 155–56, 200, 226–27 Indian relations of, 54–55, 144, 160, 166–68, 173, 174–78, 182, 249–50, 263, 264, 266, 269, 271, 274, 283 industrialization of, 2, 20, 65, 193, 200, 204, 217, 218 infrastructure of, 152 insularity of, 223–26, 275–85 Japanese relations of, 245, 266 labor force of, 225–26 legal system of, 225 manufacturing sector of, 202–3 middle class in, 226–32 Middle East policies of, 8, 31, 52, 274 military forces of, xi, 48, 54, 140, 142–43, 174–78, 182, 185, 198–99, 241, 254, 259–63, 265, 267, 269–71 military spending of, 18, 105n, 142, 198–99, 241, 262 Muslim population of, 272, 276, 278 national debt of, 138, 140, 217–19, 241–42 nationalism in, 36–39 nuclear weapons of, 140, 142, 174–78, 265 oil needs of, 38 political system of, 186, 216, 232–38, 275–85 population of, 22, 50–51, 100, 200, 212–16 productivity of, 200, 281, 282, 283 United States (continued) religious attitudes in, 122 rhetoric of fear in, 275–85 Russian relations of, 54, 190, 241, 247, 260, 266, 269 savings rate of, 216–19, 233, 241, 283 scientific research in, 198, 199, 200, 218–19 Soviet relations of, 4, 8–9, 20, 38, 141, 143, 144, 163–66, 196, 199, 244–45, 247, 252, 254, 255–56, 274, 275, 277, 284 special interests in, 234, 236 as superpower, 4, 49–61, 117, 120, 142–44, 182, 223–85 taxation in, 108, 223, 235, 236, 262 technology sector of, xiii, 58, 61, 198, 199, 200–212, 215, 217, 224–25, 228, 233 terrorist attacks against, 6, 10–11, 13, 16, 17, 29, 59, 241, 246, 247, 265, 270, 271, 272, 276, 277–80 unemployment in, xi, 227 unemployment rate in, 217, 226, 284 unilateralism of, 59, 246–55, 264–65, 267–69 as UN member, 118, 254, 264, 272 wage levels in, 229 in World War II, 36–37 urbanization, 102–3, 106, 110, 150, 153–55, 160, 167 U.S.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Hainan Island is home to the Lingshui signals intelligence facility and the Third Technical Department of the Government of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Established in the 1960s, and upgraded substantially in the 1990s, the signals intelligence facility is staffed by thousands of analysts, and its primary mission is to monitor U.S. naval activity in the South China Sea. (It’s a big island, to be sure, but that a signals intelligence facility of some renown happens to be located there is intriguing.) The tool used to hack into government agencies, media outlets, and others, was a trojan called Ghost RAT that gave the attackers the ability to remove any file from the computers under their control.

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Despite the outrage after the release of our report and the condemnation levelled at Skype for colluding with Chinese authorities, four years later the same system is still in place. In fact, it is now more elaborately designed and frequently updated, sometimes on a daily basis in response to current events like the ongoing dispute with Japan over islands in the South China Sea, or the controversy around disgraced Communist Party official Bo Xilai. In fact, all Internet companies operating in China – Baidu, Sina, Tencent QQ, Youku, and others – are required to stop the “spread of harmful information” over their networks. The policing is typically undertaken through filtering and surveillance of the type TOM-Skype engages in, enforcing the use of real names in registration processes (to eliminate anonymous postings), and even direct intervention by paid officials in forums warning users not to engage in unwelcome, perhaps even illegal, discourse.

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Like those of many other countries, China’s military planners have fully integrated cyber warfare into their military doctrine and operational plans. Because the U.S. has a military alliance with Taiwan and Japan, in the event of a regional war – say, over Taiwan or the disputed islands of the South China Sea – the People’s Liberation Army would be hard pressed not to deploy its cyber warfare assets to confuse, deter, and even disable American military and civilian assets. As the Stuxnet worm aptly demonstrated in 2010, a menacing virus or trojan horse can be used to sabotage critical infrastructure.

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

Yimou Lee, David Lague, and Ben Blanchard, “Special Report: China Launches ‘Gray-Zone’ Warfare to Subdue Taiwan,” Reuters, December 10, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/hongkong-taiwan-military-idUSKBN28K1GS. 28. Karen Leigh, Peter Martin, and Adrian Leung, “Troubled Waters: Where the US and China Could Clash in the South China Sea,” Bloomberg, December 17, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-south-china-sea-miscalculation/. 29. David Crawshaw and Miriam Berger, “China Beat Back Covid-19 in 2020. Then It Really Flexed Its Muscles at Home and Abroad,” Washington Post, December 28, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/12/28/china-2020-major-stories/. 30.

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In October 2020, China broadcast a video showing a simulated invasion of Taiwan, and sent fighter jets threateningly close to its airspace. China had long sought to “reclaim” Taiwan, ever since anti-communist forces were given control of the island in October 1945 and the Chinese Communist Party took power in mainland China in 1949.27 Throughout 2020, China undermined international law by claiming large swathes of the South China Sea, where it harassed American, Indian, Vietnamese, and other countries’ naval vessels.28 As China continued to strengthen its vast censorship apparatus, it imprisoned a tycoon and two professors who criticized Xi Jinping’s leadership and China’s response to Covid-19.29 In November, retaliating against Australia, China imposed tariffs of up to 212 percent on Australian wine, cutting off the industry’s biggest export market.

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

THE CHALLENGES TODAY: EAST ASIA Beginning with the “American lake,” some eyebrows might be raised over the report in mid-December 2015 that “an American B-52 bomber on a routine mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials said, exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing.”9 Those familiar with the grim record of the seventy years of the nuclear weapons era will be all too aware that this is the kind of incident that has often come perilously close to igniting terminal nuclear war. One need not be a supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake.”

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Schlosser, Eric School of the Americas Schoultz, Lars Science secrecy Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) separation of church and state Serbia settler-colonial societies Shalit, Gilad Shamir, Yitzhak Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Sharon, Ariel Shenon, Philip Shiites Shin Bet Shoigu, Sergei Shultz, George Sinai Peninsula Sisi, Abdul Fattah al- slavery Smith, Adam Smith, Lamar Snowden, Edward Solow, Robert Somalia Sourani, Raji South Africa South America South China Sea Southeast Asia South Korea South Vietnam Soviet Union collapse of Cuba and Israel and nuclear weapons and Spanish-American War Stalin, Joseph Stalingrad, Battle of Stark, USS, attack State Department Policy Planning Staff terrorist list Stearns, Monteagle Stern, Sheldon Stiglitz, Joseph Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Story, Joseph Strategic Air Command (SAC) Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) strategic primacy Sudan Suharto Summers, Lawrence SWAPO Sykes-Picot agreement Syria Tacitus Taliban tariffs taxation Taylor, William teachers Temple, Henry John (Lord Palmerston) terra nullius terrorism.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Which does cast a climate shroud over the prospect, now so much taken for granted among the Nostradamuses of geopolitics, of an Asian century. Whatever the course of climate change, China will surely continue its ascent, but it will do so while fighting back the ocean, as well—perhaps one reason it is already so focused on establishing control over the South China Sea. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s major cities are on the coast—not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice paddies—and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high.

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The drowning of American navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, and the melting of the Arctic promises to open an entirely new theater of conflict, once nearly as foreign-seeming as the space race. (It also positions the country primarily against America’s old rivals the Russians, now revived as adversaries.) Given the right war-gaming cast of mind, it is also possible to see the aggressive Chinese construction activity in the South China Sea, where whole new artificial islands have been erected for military use, as a kind of dry run, so to speak, for life as a superpower in a flooded world. The strategic opportunity is clear, with so many of the existing footholds—like all those low-lying islands the United States once used to stepping-stone its own empire across the Pacific—expected to disappear by the end of the century, if not before.

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The Center for Climate and Security, a state-focused think tank, organizes the threats from climate change into six categories: “Catch-22 states,” in which governments have responded to local climate challenges—to agriculture, for example—by turning toward a global marketplace that is now more than ever vulnerable to climate shocks; “brittle states,” stable on the surface—but only by a run of good climate luck; “fragile states,” such as Sudan, Yemen, and Bangladesh, where climate impacts have already eaten into trust in state authority, or worse; “disputed zones among states,” like the South China Sea or Arctic; “disappearing states,” which they mean literally, as in the case of the Maldives; and “non-state actors,” like ISIS, which can seize local resources, such as freshwater, as a way of applying leverage against the nominal state authority or the local population. In each case, climate is not the sole cause but the spark igniting a complex bundle of social kindling.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Trying to respond to all the images at once will produce not a coherent or sophisticated policy but a stream of spastic reflexes, as we have seen in the Obama administration. It blandishes the Chinese for silly and insincere commitments to carbon dioxide abatement one day and the next dispatches warships to the Spratly Islands to discourage land reclamation projects on reefs in the South China Sea. Denunciations of the Chinese for trumped-up charges of currency “manipulation” are followed by obsequious entreaties to participate in expanded Pacific trade or climate change treaties. Silly tough-guy postures and blind monotheories can be found on the Right as well. Does the incendiary sage David Stockman, President Reagan’s budget director, really mean it when he describes the country as “the Great China Ponzi” or as “an entire nation of 1.3 billion . . . gone mad building, borrowing, speculating, scheming, cheating, lying and stealing”?

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See also stagnation seigniorage, 12, 34, 67, 80 Shanghai, 30, 42–43, 48 Shannon, Claude, 64, 133, 138–40, 143, 168, 173–74 Shell, 158–59 Shelton, Judy, 162–63 Shelton bonds, 163 Silicon Valley, xvii, xxii, 18, 50, 70, 87, 115, 117–20, 122–25, 127–29, 149, 164, 169, 171 Singapore, 106 Skousen, Mark, xv, 32–33 Smith, Adam, xx socialism, socialists, xviii, 5, 20, 25, 31, 150, 152–53 Social Security, 15, 55 Solyndra, 123 Sony, 158 Soros, George, 89, 96–97, 110 South China Sea, 40 Southwest Airlines, 9 Soviet Union, 42, 156. See also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Spain, 55, 57, 94, 117 Spratly Islands, 40 stagnation, xiii–xv, 31, 84, 87, 91, 96, 117, 129, 134, 149, 152, 162, 164. See also secular stagnation Stiglitz, Joseph, 89 stimulus, xiii, xviii, 14, 150, 171 Stockman, David, 40, 48, 50 Stone Age, 19, 169 Summers, Lawrence “Larry,” 3, 7, 56, 114, 134, 150 Sun Microsystems, 119 Swanson’s Law, 18 Sweden, Swedes, 5, 36 Szabo, Nick, 64, 72–76, 160 T Taiwan, Taiwanese, 30, 46–48, 106 Tamny, John, 11 tax cuts, xiv, 12, 151, 153 Taylor, John, 35 Taylor Rule, 35 technology, xi, xviii–xix, xxi–xxii, 2–3, 5–9, 12–13, 19, 41, 43, 45, 56–58, 63–67, 70, 83, 90, 92, 100, 143, 158, 171 Tel Aviv, 118 Texas, 55, 99 Thailand, 110 Thiel, Peter, xi, 14, 56 third world, the, 6, 118, 152 Tiananmen Square, 29, 43 Troubled Asset Relief Program, 55 Trump, Donald, 40, 113 Turing, Alan, 64, 138, 168, 174 Turing machine, 138 Turner, Adair, 88–96, 110 Turner-Piketty thesis, 93, 96 Tversky, Amos, xx Twilight of Sovereignty (Wriston), 101 U UBS, 127 unemployment rates, xi–xiii, 35, 55, 100, 150, 152 Unenumerated, 73 “unicorns,” 50, 87, 119–23, 171 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 42.

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing by Niels Jensen

Alan Greenspan, Basel III, Bear Stearns, declining real wages, deglobalization, disruptive innovation, diversification, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, fixed income, full employment, Greenspan put, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, inflation targeting, job automation, John Nash: game theory, liquidity trap, low interest rates, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, passive investing, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, South China Sea, total factor productivity, working-age population, zero-sum game

As a natural consequence of falling risk tolerance, the threat power is also in decline. Under President Obama, the US made an unusually low number of credible threats (ISIS kept them busy), and a very risk-averse Europe made virtually none. Meanwhile, China was busy making credible threats in Asia. In 2011, China collided with Japan in the South China Sea and, only a few years later, the Chinese played silly games again – this time with the Philippines being the counterparty. Finally, as far as coalition power is concerned, there appears to be a growing perception in the West that perhaps we shouldn’t rely on our traditional coalition partners the way we have done for many years.

…

As we entered the new millennium, total debt-to-GDP in China was around 120%. As the Global Financial Crisis hit in 2008, debt-to-GDP was already over 200%, and now it is almost 350%, and many Chinese banks are in the danger zone. One final point on China – it is not only when dealing with macroeconomic numbers that the Chinese cheat. Take the crisis in the South China Sea, where China first had a territorial dispute with Japan, and then one with the Philippines. Despite the international court in The Hague ruling against China, it chose to simply ignore that ruling. That sort of behaviour clearly weakens China’s coalition power, and could potentially turn the entire world against it.

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Maps The World in the Age of Empire The Mediterranean The Siege of Tyre The Athenian Empire Ancient Athens Rome and Carthage during the Second Punic War Venetian Bases and Caravan Routes The Battle of Lepanto The Dutch Empire Rhodes The Portuguese Empire The British Empire The South China Sea ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As any manuscript heads for publication authors return to the beginning, to reflect on the debt they owe to others, fellow scholars, students, family and friends, delightfully loose categories reflecting the reality that the first and last are often one and the same. Furthermore, as a historian I am acutely conscious of my debt to those who have gone before, a debt we honour by reflecting on works written long go, for very different audiences.

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Eliminating the ungoverned oceanic space which enabled that choice would pave the way for a global state, leaving seapower identity to tertiary operators, superpower clients. Yet whichever great continental power became the universal monarchy there would soon be maritime barbarians hammering at their sea gates. The South China Sea Chinese and Russian responses to the challenge of seapower culture echo those of older continental hegemons: censorship, command economies, denial strategies and the continentalisation of maritime space with legal restraints, physical barriers, land-based weapons and strategy. While China has found new tools for this mission, notably in the extension of territorial jurisdiction far out to sea, using international legislation to restrict the free use of the sea, it contains powerful echoes of Catherine II’s ‘Armed Neutrality’ of 1780, which her son revived in 1801, and successive Russian attempts to close the Baltic to British warships.

…

Mahan, The Problem of Asia, Boston: Little, Brown, 1900, p. 38. Corbett concurred in ‘The Capture of Private Property at Sea’, The Nineteenth Century (June 1907), reprinted in A. T. Mahan, ed., Some Neglected Aspects of War, Boston: Little, Brown, 1907. 3. This is also, misleadingly, referred to as the ‘South China Sea’. 4. A. Patalano, ‘Japan as a Maritime Power: Deterrence, Diplomacy and Maritime Security’, in M. M. McCarthy, ed., The Handbook of Japanese Foreign Policy, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 155–72. I am indebted to Dr Patalano for an advance copy of his important paper. Conclusion 1. The Oxford English Dictionary ignores the issue of identity.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

America’s strategy of engagement assumed economic liberalization would pave the way for political liberalization. But political reform had not occurred, and even economic openness was a one-way street. Internationally, China’s “peaceful rise,” as its leaders had claimed, was turning out to be anything but. In the 2010s, China began an aggressive campaign to militarize the South China Sea, threatening the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia and destabilizing the region. Tensions rose across the Taiwan Straits, as U.S. leaders feared China was building a military option to absorb democratic Taiwan. Washington had, for a while, been patient with various tensions in the relationship, confident that time was on their side, but by the time President Trump came to office, the stage was set for a “reckoning” with China.

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Schmidt explained, “China and the United States have many common goals,” citing AI safety and climate change. “Both countries have benefited from trade between the two countries for a long time.” Three decades of engagement has meant that the American and Chinese AI ecosystems are strongly connected, yet China’s militarization of the South China Sea, bullying of its neighbors, and “predatory economics” led the U.S. government to declare China a “strategic competitor” in 2018. China’s mass detention of over one million Uighurs in Xinjiang, eroding Hong Kong’s freedoms, and unwillingness to change its illiberal economic practices further hardened views in Washington.

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Even AI systems that retained a human “in the loop” for lethal decision-making could cause harm if they gave faulty recommendations and humans acted on them. While nations are responsible for their own test and evaluation processes, one country’s failure to adequately test its AI systems could undermine other nations’ security. Accidents could lead to unintended escalation, for example if a drone went awry in a tense geographic area, such as the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait. While nations hardly have an incentive for helping their competitors’ systems to work well, they would want to know that an adversary’s military forces remain under control. The possibility that an autonomous system could be malfunctioning could introduce a dangerous element of ambiguity into crises, with nations unsure whether an adversary’s drones’ actions are the result of an accident or a deliberate human decision.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

What has changed in recent years is that a larger share of the money is going towards imports: in contrast with the 2000s, when the West’s armies undertook the bulk of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, many nations sucked into this decade’s disputes lack military muscle and have no domestic industry capable of building it up. With America less eager to be the world’s policeman, they see a greater need for buying their own kit. Vietnam, which borders the South China Sea, imported three times more weaponry in the period from 2012 to the end of 2016 than in the previous five years. Saudi Arabia’s purchases grew by 212% and Qatar’s by 245%. But the trade is also underpinned by a push on the supply side. America, which sells arms to more than 100 countries, dominates the market.

…

He also hopes to create new markets for Chinese companies, such as high-speed rail firms, and to export some of his country’s vast excess capacity in cement, steel and other metals. By investing in volatile countries in central Asia, he reckons he can create a more stable neighbourhood for China’s own restive western provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet. And by encouraging more Chinese projects around the South China Sea, the initiative could bolster China’s claims in that area (the “road” in “belt and road” refers to sea lanes). Yet some of these ambitions contradict others: is a dodgy project in central Asia a better place to invest than American government securities? And with different motivations go conflicting interests.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

After sitting up “practically all night in a last-minute session with the Philippine gang, helping them plan,” Lansdale on May 31, 1954, was winging his way to Saigon in a U.S. Air Force flying boat. The Thirty-First Air Sea Rescue Squadron at Clark Air Base had offered to fly him over, provided he didn’t mind spending a few extra hours en route patrolling the South China Sea. Sitting sleepily in a bucket seat, his “boxes and other baggage piled up around” him, “shaking gently with the aircraft’s vibrations” and “sipping coffee from a paper cup,” Lansdale wondered about what he would encounter once he landed. He knew that “events in Indochina were moving toward a climax and that the U.S. wanted me on the spot for whatever occurred next,” but there was no way to predict what that would be.42 13 “I Am Ngo Dinh Diem” [Diem] was happiest when cloistered with books or papers in his study.

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He announced that “an opportunity had come up to take Hinh and his staff officers for a brief visit to the Philippines.”9 Hinh said regretfully that he was too busy to join the trip, notwithstanding his fond memories of the fleshpots of Manila, but he agreed that his key lieutenants—Lieutenant Colonel Tranh Dinh Lan, Captain Pham Xuan Giai, and Lieutenant Nguyen Van Minh—could go. So on the evening of October 25, 1954, Lansdale found himself winging his way over the South China Sea in a C-47 transport aircraft along with the three Vietnamese officers.10 After a few days in Manila, Lansdale returned to Saigon to find that no coup had occurred. At the end of November, General Hinh finally agreed to step down and leave the country. He moved to France, where he eventually rose to become deputy chief of staff of the French air force.

…

Little did they suspect that they would soon repeat and even exceed most of their forerunners’ mistakes. DESPITE THE mutual distrust among the South Vietnamese, French, and Americans, they were all supposed to work together to pull off the first big test of their nation-building prowess: Operation Liberty to reoccupy the Ca Mau Peninsula, jutting out into the South China Sea at the very tip of South Vietnam. It was due to be evacuated by the Vietminh in February 1955. When a group of French and American officers gathered for a briefing on the Ca Mau plans, the Vietnamese commander of the operation, Lieutenant Colonel Duong Van Duc, gave such an uninspired presentation that Iron Mike O’Daniel started asking some tough questions—until Lansdale pulled him aside and explained that Duc was not briefing the real plan.

Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

Michael Lelyveld, “China’s G-20 Role Debated,” Radio Free Asia Online, April 13, 2009, www.rfa.org Since early 2009, there have been several reports that Chinese vessels have harassed alleged American spying ships in the South China Sea. In June, a Chinese submarine accidentally collided with an underwater sonar array towed by an American destroyer which was in the South China Sea to participate in a joint military exercise with ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] members. Crisis Could Be an Opportunity Most recently, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries held their first summit meeting.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“I tell them that without pandas, then without tigers, next it will be fish that disappear. Then crops. Then everything. Then people.” On the final day, the scientists take Gretchen to China’s smallest and southernmost province. About the size of Taiwan, Hainan Island sits nineteen miles off the mainland in the South China Sea. As the only part of China that dips into the tropics, over the past two decades Hainan has been discovered by luxury hotel chains and developers, who are converting its southern shore into China’s Oahu, with Manhattan prices. Their destination is the central highlands, where the number of rubber plantations has doubled due to China’s explosive growth of automobile ownership and demand for tires, threatening the rainforests of one of Asia’s biologically richest islands.

…

But as they exit the preserve and descend, pristine clarity vanishes. All the rivers are running bloodred with eroded soil. Sheets of mud pouring through the rubber and pepper plantations wash across the highway. When they finally reach the airport on the island’s northern shore, Hainan’s rivers have burst their banks and the South China Sea is filling with red silt. They’re able to fly out, but the following day, a typhoon that has already cost defoliated Vietnam millions of tons of topsoil hits Hainan full force. Before it passes, 135,000 people have to be evacuated. On Hainan Island, or anywhere else, for that matter, the three axes on which the InVest program turns—land and sea use, climate, and demography—may ultimately hinge on the third.

…

Rain is increasing, storms are strengthening, and supposedly their sinking town will one day slip beneath Manila Bay, preceded by Manila itself. The Dutch ambassador has already advised the Philippines to dike the bay, the finest harbor in Southeast Asia. But where will money come from for that? The typhoon that drowned China’s Hainan Island has moved east across the South China Sea: weaker but still plenty wet, it’s overhead, soaking Luzon, the Philippines’ biggest island. Beneath Roland’s second-story window, the street is a swirling gray backwater. Beyond it, traffic in this megalopolis of 25.5 million2 flows imperceptibly, like a species of tropical glacier. Occasionally, chunks break free and surge forward, then jam into other chunks and stop in axle-high water.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Even in the 1980s, white supremacist terrorists dreamed of provoking an American nuclear war with Russia as a way to end emerging multiculturalism and to install their own genocidal regime.37 To such madmen, civilization-destroying nuclear winter was a small price to pay for racial purity. More prosaically, growing tensions in the Middle East, the South China Sea, Kashmir, and Ukraine give powers like the United States, Russia, India, Pakistan, and China ample opportunities to incrementally escalate the deployment of surveillance and armed drones on air, land, and sea. The knife edge between offensive and defensive capabilities intensifies the danger.

…

(Spielberg), 8 Aibo, 79 AirBnB, 183 Alaska, 184 Alexa, 81, 121 algorithms: accountability / responsibility for potential harm done by, 11–12, 19, 40, 49, 92, 98–101, 105, 114, 115–118, 197–198, 204; bias, inaccuracy, and unjustness of, 20–21, 38, 87, 92–100, 105–107, 113, 115–116, 212; in art creation, 218, 219; in education, 67, 75, 85; and Facebook, 73, 181, 225; free speech for, 109–110; and Google, 181, 225; and high-freqency trading, 11, 20, 155; in hiring, 66, 119; inadequacy of, in certain human endeavors, 23–28, 35; in law enforcement, 121, 123, 126; in lending, 131; and management, 227–229; in military settings, 145, 147, 155–156, 157, 158, 168; and non-standardizable judgments, 104; optimizing ad revenue and “engagement” in online media, 29–30, 89, 92; and reason, 222; rise in studies of, 224; and scheduling of workers, 176–177; for self-driving cars, 21–22; and smart machines mimicking humans, 7; in social credit systems, 138; and YouTube, 72 alt-right, 95 Amazon, 76, 104, 155, 165, 287–288n42; Rekognition (software), 125 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 125 Andrejevic, Mark, 91, 302–303n29 anti-Semitism, 95 Aoun, Joseph, 173 Apple’s App Store, 45 apps, 4, 15, 34, 57, 88, 134, 227; therapy, for mental health, 45–49, 57–58, 187 Arendt, Hannah, 77, 258n56 Arkin, Bill, 127 Arkin, Ronald, 149, 158 arms control agreements, 157, 162 arms races, 17, 31, 142–144, 146, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 170, 189, 198, 202, 206–207, 225, 230; for online media attention, 91, 101, 118; and the third new law of robotics, 9–11, 91, 101, 136, 171, 217 Arnold, Zachary, 292n84 Article 36, 156 artificial intelligence (AI): in education, 60–88; evaluative, 119–144; as governed by the new laws of robotics, 3–12; in health care, 33–59; in the military, 145–169; in online media, 89–118; and political economy, 170–198; as reflected in the arts and culture, 199–231 Arunanondchai, Korakrit, 220 Asaro, Peter, 151–152 Asia: Central, US presence in,168; values of, toward technology, 54–55. See also South China Sea; specific countries Asimov, Isaac, 2, 7, 233nn4–6. See also laws of robotics, Asimov’s assembly lines, 14, 26, 83, 189–190. See also manufacturing Atkins v. Virgina, 288n48 Australia, 58, 248n51, 257n45 authoritarianism, 91, 93, 94, 117, 126, 127, 161, 164, 166 autocompletes, 98–99 automation.

…

., 67–68 Skynet, 151 Slaughterbots, 147 Smith, Bryant, 21 smart cities, 121 Snowden, Edward, 128, 165 Snower, Dennis, 224 social credit systems (SCSs), 10–11, 136–139, 141 social media, 117; bot speech on, 164; and California’s “Online Eraser” law, 74; in China, 60–61; and content moderating, 91; destructive content on, 115–116; laws to govern, 110; and lending, 144; nudity on, 104. See also online media; specific social media sites social robots, 49–56 Social Science Research Council, 125 soldiers, robotic. See military: and killer robots Solingen, Etel, 163–164 South China Sea, 154 South Korea, 15, 54, 79, 159 Sox (digital companion), 50 Sri Lanka, 92 Stark, Luke, 126–127 Star Wars. See Strategic Defensive Initiative Star Wars, 50, 229 Steichen, Edward, 308n82 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine), 173 stereotypes. See racism; sexism Stevens, Wallace, 220 Steyerl, Hito, 219 Stiglitz, Joseph, 160 Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI), 9 student debt, 87, 134–135, 279n58 subsidiarity, 176 substitutive AI / robotics, 6, 31, 52, 55, 123, 172, 200, 202, 206, 211, 221 Sudan, 149 surveillance, 6, 8, 58, 121–123, 135, 159, 166–167; in China, 61, 160, 167; and arms races, 31, 136, 167; in education, 62, 72, 73–77, 83–85; and encryption / decryption, 10; in Europe, 5; and facial recognition, 125, 129; in finance, 135–136; and the military (including drones), 151–154, 164–166, 168; mobile, 15; public health, 11; in the workplace, 131 The Syllabus, 100 Syria, 167 Taiwan, 55, 159, 160, 163–164 Taliban, 160 Tamagotchi, 80 TaskRabbit, 84 tax(es), 10, 27, 53, 193; carbon, 185; and deflation, 26, 188–189; for education, 25, 62, 188; inversions, 228; and military technology, 158; and modern monetary theory, 193–194; policy, revitalizing, 172, 179–183; and the uninsured, 43; and universal basic income, 184 Tay (Microsoft chatbot), 12, 219 Taylor, Charles, 224, 308nn83–84 Taylor, Frederick, 83; and Taylorism, 67, 83, 139 Tcherneva, Pavlina, 186 teaching.

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Day of the Dead, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the telescope, Lao Tzu, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, trade route

For twenty-two miles its ramparts enclosed nearly two million inhabitants, and immured them again in a nest of inner walls and gates, as ward after ward piled up around a vast chessboard of avenues. The nine-mile walls of today’s Xian trace merely those of Changan’s inner city. On one side it sucked in tribute by canals stretching to the South China Sea; on the other it stood as a lodestar at the eastern end of the Silk Road, where the Tang empire stretched to the Pamirs. Its aristocracy survive in the damp murals of their tombs pockmarking the Wei valley. Along the underground walls their women walk in décolleté bodices and silk gowns, chatting together or playing with pet cicadas.

…

Arab and Persian blood made his Hui people more handsome than the Chinese, he laughed. But his teeth were blackened pillars on shrunken gums, and he was running to fat. As early as the seventh century these traders had arrived along the Silk Road while their Islam was young, or filtered in through the ports of the South China Sea. But through intermarriage, whatever the man said, they had mostly become indistinguishable from those around them. Perhaps only a cyclical history of revolt and suppression, and the Chinese label ‘Hui’, had persuaded them that they were a nation. Sixty thousand strong in Xian now, they remained avid traders, and Arabic words still littered their talk.

…

Lhasa Li Bai Li Peng Lijian Linxia Living Buddha of Labrang Living Buddha of Tianshui Lop desert Lou Guan Tai Louis, St, King of France Lucan Macartney, George Magi Mahdi see Twelfth Imam/the Mahdi Mahmoud (builder) Mahmoud of Gazni, sultan Mahmud Kashgari, tomb of Mahmuda (Uzbek woman) Maitreya (Buddha of the Future) Maimana Maimundiz Malekshah, sultan Mamelukes Manas (Kyrgyz national hero) Manas air base Manchus Mangnai Manicheism Mansur (student) Mao Zedong Maracanda Maragheh Mardin Margilan Masihi, Artur (church caretaker) Massoud, Ahmed Shah Matisi temples Matthew, St Mazar-e-Sharif Mazinan Mecca Médecins Sans Frontières Medina Mediterranean Merv Meshed Mesopotamia Mevlevi sect Mexme, St Miandasht Mianeh Ming dynasty Mingzhao (daughter of Hu Ji) Mir-i-Arab, Bukhara Mir Sayyid Ali miscegenation Mobin (driver) Moguls Mohammad Jahi Mombasa Mongolia Inner Mongols Moscow Mouli (teacher) Mount Demavend Mount Qiao Mount Sipylus Muhammad, Prophet Mujahidin-e Khalq murals, Chinese Buddhist Sogdian Muslims see Islam/Muslims Namangan Namangani (guerrilla chief) Naqshbandi sect Naryn Naryn river Nasir ad-din Tusi National Minority People’s University (Lanzhou) nationalism and identity NATO assistance force Navoi Navoi, Alisher Nazira (caretaker) Nepal Nestorians Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople Nishapur Niya Nizam al-Mulk Northern Alliance Nurana (Kyrgyz girl) Nuwa (goddess) Oljeitu, sultan mausoleum of Omar, caliph Omar, Mullah Omar Khayyám Rubáiyát grave of One Child policy Orontes river Orumiyeh (town) Orumiyeh lake Osh Osman (taxi-driver) Ostrovsky, Nikolai Oxus river see Amu Darya/Oxus river Pahlavi shahs Pakistan Pakistanis Palestine Palmyra Pamir mountains Panchen Lama paper Paris Paropamisus mountains Parthia Parthians Pasargadae Pashtuns Pass to the West Paul, St Pax Mongolica Persia Persian Gulf Persians Peter (Sinologist’s agent) Peter, St Petrovsky, Nikolai Philip of Montfort Philippe le Bel pilgrimage Piyada, Hajji Place of Drumbeats Pliny Polo, Marco Polo brothers Pompey Portuguese, the Prester John printing Production and Construction Corps, Xinjiang Pure Land of the Amithaba Qadamgah al Qaeda Qajar Qala-i-Jangi Qazvin Qezelabad Qianlong, emperor Qiao, Mount Qilian mountains Qin dynasty Qin Shi Huangdi, emperor terracotta army tomb Qing dynasty Qinghai Qinling mountains Qizil Uzun, gorge of Queen Mother of the West Qum Qumrabat Padshahim Qusam ibn Abbas Rabia Balkh Rawak Raymond of Tripoli Red Guards Revolutionary Guard Rey Richthofen, Friedrich von Romans Rome Roxana (wife of Alexander the Great) Rukn-ad-din Rushdie, Salman Ruslan (Kyrgyz) Russia Russian Orthodox Church Samarkand Russians Rustam (hero) Safavid, dynasty Saladin, sultan Samarkand Sanjar, sultan Sanliurfa Sarnath SARS Sassanian dynasty Saudi Arabia Seleucia Pierea Seleucus I Seljuks Seneca Seres Serica Shaanxi museum Shaanxi province Shah Rud valley Shah Rukh Shah-i-zinda (grave of Qusam ibn Abbas), Samarkand Shahi Shahnama Shalamov, Varlam Shams Kilaya Shandong Shaybanid dynasty Shebergan Shen Congwen Shirin river Shutur Khan Siberia Sichuan silk in Buddhism discovery dissemination in Islam among the Mongols manufacture in Persia qualities Roman view of origins secret betrayal subverting Roman economy superfine uses Silk House constellation Silk Road Antioch at western end of Changan at eastern end of decline of humbler traffic interconnectedness letters travelling along lingua franca of spread of inventions along spread of musical instruments along trade along Sipylus, Mount Sirnak Sogdians Song-kul lake South China Sea Soviet Union/USSR Spain Sri Lanka Stalin, Joseph Stark, Freya Stein, Aurel stirrups Sufis see also Mevlevi, Naqshbandi Sui dynasty Sultaniya Sun Yatsen Sung dynasty Sunni Sussmayr massif Suzhou Syr Darya (ancient Jaxartes) river Syria Syrians Tabriz Tahir (BBC worker) Taizong, emperor Tajikistan Tajiks Takht-i-Pul Taklamakan desert Talas battle of (AD 751) Talas river Talas valley Taliban Tamerlane the Great tomb Tang dynasty and Changan Tangshan Tanintanin mountains Tao Te Ching Taoism Tarim basin Tartars Tash Rabat Tashkent Taurus mountains Tazhong Tehran Termez terracotta army Tethys Sea Tian Shan mountains Tiananmen Square, Beijing massacre Tianshui Living Buddha of Tibet Tigris river Timurids Titus, emperor Tocharians Tochtor (Kyrgyz) Toktogul lake reservoir Torugart pass Turcomans Turkestan Turkey journey in Turkic peoples ‘Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkestan’ Turkmen desert Turkmenistan Turks Tus Tusi, Nasir ad-din Twelfth Imam/the Mahdi Uighurs Ukrainians Ulug Beg, prince Unai Enye (goddess) United Nations (UN) Assistance Mission, Mazar-e- Sharif United States of America Urumqi University Ushmurvan river Ustkurgan Uzbekistan journey in Uzbeks Vahid (Iranian emigrant) Vakhuman, king of Samarkand Vatican ‘Vegetable Lamb’ Vespasian, emperor Virgin Mary Visigoths Wahabis/Wahabism Wang, Abbot Wang Zhonghu Warner, Langdon Wei valley Wei river West, the time line Western Market, Changan Western music White Jade river, Khotan World Trade Center Wudi, emperor Xian Xinjiang Xuanzang, monk Xuanzong, emperor Yacub Beg Yalda Yangtze river Yarkand Yellow Emperor grave-mound of Yellow Hat sect Yellow River Yenisei river Ying (Luo Ying) Yongchang Youshashan Yu (professor) Yuan dynasty Zahir Shah, king Zanjan Zelim (Zelim Khan) (artist) Zerafshan river Zhangye Zhelaizhai Zhukov, Marshal Zoroaster Zoroastrianism About the Author COLIN THUBRON is an acknowledged master of travel writing.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

We have already taken note of Taiwan, northeast India, and other actual and latent claims; there is also the question of Mongolia, a part of China during Qing times and now experiencing a strong resurgence of Chinese influence, hitherto in the economic arena but potentially in additional contexts as well. In offshore waters, China is contesting with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia the ownership of islands whose acquisition would extend Chinese jurisdiction over vast expanses of the South China Sea. In short, China's territorial drive is far from over. While many countries have territorial issues with neighbors, these tend to take on greater significance when the claimant is already a giant. More to the point is China's role in competition with the United States for influence and power in the western Pacific from Japan to Australia and from the Philippines to Myanmar.

…

America's military presence in the Philippines until 1991, abandoned when Mount Pi-natobo's giant eruption destroyed its air and sea bases on Luzon Island even 146 WHY GEOGRAPHY MATTERS as the Philippine Senate was weighing continuation of the United States presence, dissuaded China from a greater aggressiveness in its now-renounced claims to all of the South China Sea. And Washington's close relationship with Singapore has been another part of this geopolitical framework. In this new century, however, the picture is changing. Late in 2004, President G. W. Bush announced plans to withdraw United States military forces from overseas bases including those in Japan.

…

Over the longer term, China's economic and geopolitical challenge will be more difficult to accommodate, and the American role in East Asia will undoubtedly have to change. China has unresolved issues with Japan ranging from Japan's failure to acknowledge the atrocities it committed in China during its wartime occupation to disputes over islands and waters in the South China Sea. These issues have remained relatively subdued because of the constitutional restrictions placed on Japan's military and because the United States has kept armed forces based in Japan. But there are signs that Japan will loosen the constraints on its military power, largely because of security concerns arising from North Korea's nuclear ambitions and maritime incursions, and the American government is contemplating a reduction if not elimination of its military presence in Japan.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

One dangerous scenario is that we witness the outright end of globalization in much the same manner as the first period of globalization collapsed in 1913, as I outlined earlier. This scenario is a favorite of commentators because it allows them to write about bloody end-of-the-world calamities. This is, thankfully, a low-probability outcome, and with apologies to the many armchair admirals in the commentariat who, for instance, talk willfully of a conflict in the South China Sea, I suggest that a full-scale sea battle between China and the United States is unlikely. Instead, the evolution of a new world order—a fully multipolar world composed of three (perhaps four, depending on how India develops) large regions that are distinct in the workings of their economies, laws, cultures, and security networks—is manifestly underway.

…

One area where China does forcefully express its power is in trade relations, where it uses its size and influence in a manifest way on its Asian neighbors (stretching to Australia). The challenge for China is to use soft power to win over neighbors and to stealthily create regional integration so that it oversees the South China Sea while confounding those who believe in what Harvard professor Graham Allison has named the “Thucydides’s Trap.”19 Thucydides was an Athenian general who turned historian after an unsuccessful battle. In his famous History of the Peloponnesian War, he recounts the fifth-century-BC wars between Athens and Sparta.

…

The One Belt, One Road plan ingeniously extends China’s influence across Asia, through the Middle East, and up through eastern Europe (China has established a trade and investment project, “16 + 1,” with sixteen eastern European states, including the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and others) without explicitly compromising the sovereignty of the many countries this project will traverse.28 Ducking the Dreadnought Like many large countries before it, China has also shown a tendency to dial pressure up on regional trade partners and then dialing it back down once agreement is in sight. One looming test for China is how it reacts to the hostile treatment of Chinese communities in populous Muslim countries like Indonesia. It is this kind of problem—rather than South China Sea naval battles conjuring up the likes of Dreadnought or USS New Jersey—that will be one of the key tests of Chinese foreign policy. The second part of the Chinese puzzle relates to the inner machinations of the Communist Party. Since Xi Jinping became president of China and general secretary of the Communist Party, party members have been more disciplined with regard to divulging the party’s inner workings and internal intrigues (such as concerning the sudden political demise of Bo Xilai, a charismatic Chinese politician who was considered a strong candidate for the top Politburo Standing Committee until, intriguingly, he and his wife were jailed for the murder of a British businessman).

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As historian Hal Brands and Jake Sullivan, now President Biden’s National Security Advisor, have argued, “the Soviet Union was never a serious rival for global economic leadership; it never had the ability, or the sophistication, to shape global norms and institutions in the way that Beijing may be able to do.”13 Today, however, we face in China a rising superpower with the ability to exert its influence from the artificial islands in the South China Sea to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Moreover—as illustrated by revelations of the wide-ranging “SolarWinds” Russian intrusion into U.S. government systems in 202014—there is the continued threat of Moscow’s machinations, different from the days of the Soviet Union, but still immensely disruptive.

…

“The new principles of war,” they wrote, entailed “using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.”94 It was a recognition, as Trump’s national security advisor H. R. McMaster would later put it, that “there are two ways to fight the United States: asymmetrically and stupid.”95 In 2001, after a diplomatic flare-up involving the collision of an American reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese jet over the South China Sea, American hackers vandalized a series of Chinese websites. Chinese hackers retaliated with an attack that took down the White House website and defaced other government websites with messages like “Beat down Imperialism of American [sic]! Attack anti-Chinese arrogance!” The New York Times dubbed it the “First World Hacker War,” yet it was only the smallest taste of what was to come.96 The same year, Chinese president Jiang Zemin declared that the Internet had become a “political, ideological, and cultural battlefield.”97 By 2008—the same year that Beijing tried to promote itself to the world as a responsible rising power by hosting the Summer Olympics—hackers from the People’s Liberation Army infiltrated the networks of defense contractor Lockheed Martin, stealing plans for the F-35 fighter jet.98 In a troubling preview of 2016, Chinese operatives penetrated the presidential campaigns of both John McCain and Barack Obama, apparently looking for information on their views on China.99 A year later, Google discovered Chinese hackers in the company’s own networks.

…

Crucially, the Chinese military has begun transitioning from GPS to Beidou. “It would make sense for them to have their own military system,” notes Andrew Dempster, director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at the University of New South Wales. “Because if there was a conflict in the South China Sea over these islands, GPS could be denied to them.”88 China has also dangled access to Beidou as an incentive for countries like Pakistan to migrate away from American alternatives. It’s all part of what Chinese officials have called a “space-based Silk Road.”89 In the vacuum of the cosmos, China’s back-end dominance quietly grows.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

-led liberal order might even lead to gradual political reform within China and other autocratic countries.37 As the past decade has shown, these expectations were shattered by what actually took place. Under Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, China and Russia diverged from American and European concepts of international order. China sought territorial revisions in the South China Sea and East China Sea, while Russia intervened in Ukraine, as part of broader efforts to carve out zones of military, political, and economic dominance. Beijing and Moscow also became more vocal and assertive in articulating an alternative order organized around the sovereign right of leaders to act as they wish within their borders and spheres of influence.

…

Japan’s decision was denounced by U.S. and Hong Kong officials.45 The Diamond Princess was the first of many cruise ships to find itself stranded at sea thanks to a little-known loophole in international law: onboard a ship, passengers are beyond national borders, and governments can refuse entry if they have a contagious disease. Another cruise ship, the Westerdam, crisscrossed the South China Sea during this period, having been denied entry to Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand. Eventually it was allowed to dock in Cambodia, where it was personally greeted by the prime minister—a move praised by the WHO as an act of international solidarity (even though masks were not worn as the passengers were welcomed onshore and social distancing was not observed).

…

Putin has sought to influence referendums and elections in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and elsewhere, with the aim of empowering movements and leaders skeptical of the transatlantic alliance. And Russia’s vast oil and gas resources have been leveraged to coerce governments and buy influence in both eastern and western Europe.39 Under Xi Jinping, China has sought to become the preeminent power in Asia—flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, in the East China Sea, and across the Taiwan Strait—at the expense of the United States and its regional allies. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (which involves seventy countries), new international economic institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and new multilateral agreements such as the fifteen-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership are all illustrative of Beijing’s assertive pursuit of global influence.

The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World's Most Mysterious Air Disasters by Christine Negroni

Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, flag carrier, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, South China Sea, Tenerife airport disaster, Thomas Bayes, US Airways Flight 1549

What was never reported is that this questionable altitude information caused a controversy among those reviewing the tapes, because some civilian radar specialists thought it indicated that the plane had been hit by a missile. This dominated the discussion for several days, with the Malaysian Air Force arguing against the theory. What settled it, according to the participant who told me about it, was the lack of wreckage in the South China Sea. “The search was going on in that area, the last place the airplane was seen, but they weren’t finding anything,” this person said. “If it had been shot down you would have found pieces of stuff, but there was no evidence to back up that theory, so we came to a consensus that’s not what happened.”

…

The FMS has many functions, including allowing the crew to send text messages to the airline’s operations desk. We know no messages were sent. Yet in an emergency, the FMS stores navigational information for the closest airports, so that in seconds the pilots can select a destination and head there. From where the 777 was flying, between the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, if Fariq turned the plane around, the divert airports would include Penang and Langkawi, according to pilots who fly in the region. These choices would have appeared on the screen in a list, waiting for the pilot to select one of them. Who knows how much actual thinking Fariq was able to accomplish, but for some reason he selected Penang, Malaysia’s third-busiest airport, with a ten-thousand-foot runway.

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

It is visible around the world in far-flung places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, from which China (and others) extracts precious metals, in Angola, where it built a highway to get the metals to port, and in Gwadar, Pakistan, where a port and highway are being built to ship goods up into China, thus avoiding the narrow and de facto American-controlled Malacca Straits between Malaysia and Indonesia. The symbol of the Middle Kingdom has now been seen in nearly every kingdom, republic and territory in the world, reinforcing its rapid expansion and growing influence over the past half-century. It also flies above the artificial islands China has built in the South China Sea, which Beijing says now constitute sovereign Chinese territory. The neighbours – including Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines – are not convinced. Neither is the US navy, which ensures that the Stars and Stripes is seen fluttering above its warships, which pass close enough to the islands to make the point.

…

K. 121 Russia 61, 63–65, 69, 82, 87–90, 149, 150, 249 Russo-Japanese War 169 Russo-Turkish war 233 see also Soviet Union; tricolour, Russian Rwanda 187 S Saarland 62 Sabrata 118 Saddam Hussein 115 Sagan, Carl 72 Saladin 114 Saltire (Scottish) 38, 39, 41 Samarkand 100, 150 San Francisco 246 São Paulo 219 Sarajevo 92–93 Saud, Abdul-Aziz bin 102–104 Saudi Arabia 92, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 126 Savoy 80 House of 77 Scandinavia 78–83 Scotland 37–41, 53–56 Second World War 4, 13, 69, 74, 77, 85, 86, 164, 165, 170, 171, 178, 238, 242, 249 Senegal 183 Senussi dynasty 18 Seoul 168 Serbia 2–4, 90–92 Seychelles 188 shahada 104, 106, 126, 135, 136, 152 Shakespeare, William 33, 37 Shanghai 160, 162 Shepperson, George 181 Shintoism 169 Siberia 64 Sikhism 153, 155 Singapore 170 Sino-Japanese War 169 skull and crossbones 227–230 Slovakia 83, 90 Slovenia 90 Smith, Dr Whitney 208, 258 Solomon, King 113, 177 Somalia 131, 227, 229 Somme, Battle of the 44 South Africa 48, 182, 191–194 South China Sea 163 South Korea 164, 165, 167, 168, 170 Southern Cross see Dixie flag Soviet Union 86, 87, 89, 160, 165, 234 collapse of 148, 150 see also hammer and sickle; Red Flag; Russia Spain 2, 58–59, 78, 85, 202, 203, 207, 209 see also Catalonian independence movement St Petersburg 86 star and crescent 153–154 Stars and Stripes 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 9–32, 47, 154, 163, 172, 186, 212–214, 241, 246 Stockholm 248 Stormont 53 Strasbourg 62 Suárez, Leysi 215 Sudan 44 Sun Tzu 158 swastika classic symbol 72, 74 Nazi 6, 71–74, 170–171 Swaziland 184 Sweden 30, 78, 80–82, 85 Switzerland 80, 83, 224–225, 238 Sykes, Mark 100 Sykes-Picot Agreement 102 Syria 27, 99, 101, 106, 113–115, 120, 130, 132, 133, 152 see also Civil War, Syrian T Taegukgi 164 Taft, President 19 Taiwan 13, 134, 163–164 Tajikistan 105, 148, 151 Taliban 152–153 Tamerlane 150 Tamil Tigers 232 Tannenberg, Battle of 70 Taoism 233 Tea Party 16 Tehran 110, 112, 116 embassy hostage crisis 15 Tennessee 21 Tertitskiy, Fyodor 165 Texas 28, 31, 32, 242 Thessalonica 91 Thomas, Rear Admiral 48 Thomson, Charles 18 Tibet 161–162 Tiranga 154–157 Titicaca, Lake 204 Togolese Republic 183 Tongzhi, Emperor 159 Topelius, Zachris 82 Trafalgar, Battle of 44 Transoxiana 150 Transpadane Republic 76–77 Trasnsjordan 103 Tricolor, French 67, 69, 71, 81 tricolour Bolivian 196, 198, 204 Dutch 85–86, 191, 192, 235 Ethiopian 177–178, 181–183 German 70–71, 74–75, 170 Iranian 109–110, 112, 120 Iraqi 106, 114–115 Irish 54 Italian 76–78, 205 Mexican (Bandera de México) 205–208 Russian 86, 89 Uzbek 150–151 Venezuelan 5, 202, 203 Tripoli 118–119 Tripolitania 118 Trump, Donald 30 tulip 110–112 Tunisia 76, 109, 118–119, 247 Turkey 40, 60, 61, 63, 64, 85, 92, 107, 108, 109, 114, 127, 149, 152, 236, 238 Russo-Turkish war 233 Turkmenistan 105, 148–149, 150 Tuvalu 46 U UAE (United Arab Emirates) 100 Uganda 125, 186 Uighur 161 UK 29, 30, 39, 43, 45–48, 50–54, 56, 61, 80, 140, 188, 219, 228, 235, 247, 249 Ukraine 89 Umayyad dynasty 100, 111 UN (United Nations) 4, 50, 62, 91–92, 93, 116, 149, 182, 224–225, 245, 246, 248–252 see also League of Nations Union Jack 6, 18, 33–56, 217 United Arab Republic 113 Ur 147 Urals 64, 90 Uruguay 217–218 USA 1, 13–18, 20, 23–32, 47–49, 71, 115, 116, 127, 131, 156, 165, 178–180, 182, 199, 209, 210, 212–214, 217, 219, 236, 241–243, 249 Federal Republic of Central America 209–211 Flag Acts 17–18 Revolution 200 War of Independence 17, 18 see also Stars and Stripes United Provinces of Central America, flag of 209 see also Latin America Uzbekistan 117, 148, 150, 152 see also tricolour, Uzbek V Valdemar II, King 79 Venezuela 201, 202 see also tricolour, Venezuelan Vermont 18 Versailles, Treaty of 102 Vichy regime 69 Victor Emmanuel II 77 Vienna 108 Vietnam 23, 162, 163 War 15, 28 Vikings 66 Vishnu (god) 73 W Wahhabism 102–103, 105–106, 126 Walden, Sidney 243–244 Wales 38–40, 56 Warhol, Andy 14 Warsaw Pact 89 Washington 213–214 Waterford 54 Waterloo, Battle of 44 Weimar Republic 70, 71, 73, 74 West Bank 132, 136, 137, 238 Westendorp, Carlos 93 White, Charles Mowbray 180 White Ensign flag 51 white flag 231–232 William of Orange 53, 85 William the Conqueror 66 Wiphala 197, 204–205 X Xi Jinping 162 Y Yemen 100, 101, 120 Yugoslavia 90–92 Z Zambia 186 Zapata, Emiliano 203 Zeng Liansong 159–162 Zimbabwe see Rhodesia Zionism 116–117 Zurich 192 First published 2016 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 27 John Street London WC1N 2BX www.eandtbooks.com epub: 978-1-78396-228-0 MOBI: 978-1-78396-229-7 Copyright © Tim Marshall 2016 The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

The criminalised poor abandoned outside their walls may once have served as sufficient justification for their flight and fortification – but now they have the very real threat of climate change as well.’47 The case of Eko Atlantic shows that the world’s real estate and reclamation industries increasingly sell the manufacturing of land as a miraculous solution to problems of congestion, population growth and urban development. In a final important example of the politics of dredging material up from the seabed to make land, China’s terraforming of a string of ‘fake’ islands in the Spratly Archipelago in the South China Sea since December 2013 demonstrates that ‘reclaiming’ land through dredging can also work to bolster major national geopolitical claims to subsea resources and maritime and air space in contested zones. By July 2015, 810 hectares (2,000 acres) of land had been created through China’s terraforming programme in a remote but strategically vital area fully 500 miles from mainland China.48 Crucially, by being ‘habitable’ to humans – unlike the atolls and reefs at their root – these new islands can be the formal basis for China’s sovereignty claims at the UN in the hotly contested South China Sea.

…

By July 2015, 810 hectares (2,000 acres) of land had been created through China’s terraforming programme in a remote but strategically vital area fully 500 miles from mainland China.48 Crucially, by being ‘habitable’ to humans – unlike the atolls and reefs at their root – these new islands can be the formal basis for China’s sovereignty claims at the UN in the hotly contested South China Sea. Moreover, in a strategy similar to that which allowed the US military to ‘island hop’ across the Pacific in World War II, these islands are now being surmounted by three brand-new military-length runways as a means to allow China to project its military power both vertically and horizontally. The ecological impacts of these terraforming projects are often catastrophic.

…

., 106–7 Singapore, 144–6, 189–90, 201, 242–3, 257–8, 260, 296–8, 297, 380 Singer, Marc, 352, 364 Sitrin, Marina, 22 Situationist International, 360 Situationists, 319 Ski-Dubai, 266 Sky Train, 230–1 Slavick, Elin O’Hara, 62–3 Sloterdijk, Peter, 3n4, 7–8, 29, 247, 254, 261–2, 269, 273 Smith, Christopher, 333 Smith, Harold, 346 Smith, Mark, 344 Smith, T. Dan, 224, 225n16 Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, 60–1 Smithsonian Institution, 59–60 Smudge Studio, 286–7 Solis, Julia, 364 Solman, Dario, 25 Somalia, 73 South Africa, 382, 384–6 South Bank, 203 South China Sea, 304 South Dakota, 344 Southwark, 203 Space Needle, 138 ‘Spaceship Earth’ (Fuller), 24 Spain, 140, 316 Spectacle Island, 288 Spoor, Richard, 386 Spratly Archipelago, 304 Squibb Building, 155 Sri Lanka, 46 Stahl, Roger, 47 Stallybrass, Peter, 325 ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defense Initiative, 41 Staten Island, 310, 311 Steadman, Ian, 204 Stern, Robert, 196 Steyerl, Hito, 2n2, 10–2 St Louis, Missouri, 185 Strategic Data Services group, 355 Stroli, Dani, 87 Sudjic, Deyan, 160–1 Sugarloaf Mountain, 126 Sullivan, Louis, 154 Sunni, 46–7 Sweden, 287–8 Switzerland, 355, 358n56 Sydney, Australia, 177, 218 Syria, xiv, 46, 169 Taipei Financial Center, 141 Taiwan, 141 Taliban, 111, 172, 351 Tampines, 298 Tarhunah, 346 Tatton-Brown, William and Aileen, 222–4 ‘Taurus’, 36 TauTona, 382, 385 Taylor-Foster, James, 160 Techwood project, 185 Teich, Andy, 110 Tel Rumeida, 295–6 Tenochtitlan, 285 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, xiv Terranova, Charissa, 227 Teufelsberg, 281, 282, 283, 288 Thailand, 231, 257–8, 301 Thames, River, 97, 167, 288 Things to Come (film), 138 13th Arrondissement, 159–60 ThyssenKrupp AG, 131 Tijuana, 349 Titan II Missile, 358 Tokyo, 59, 94, 130, 140, 192, 221, 296–7 Tora Bora, 342 Toronto, Canada, 146, 175, 177–8, 191n39, 194n48, 318, 378–9 Torre David, 120–2, 127 Toshiba, 141 Toth, Jennifer, 352–3 Tower Hamlets, 212 Tower of Babel, 174–5 Transparent Earth, 344 Treichler, Michael, 21 Trellick Tower, 205 Trenchard, Hugh, 66, 66n40 Tripoli, 61 Turkey, 276, 316 Twin Towers, 310, 311 UE movement, 362n65 Uganda, 378 UK, 57, 225, 259, 272, 288, 314. see also specific locations Ulan Bator, 334 Um Lugar ao Sol (‘A Place in the Sun’) (documentary), 214 Underneath New York (Granick), 278 Under the Dome (film), 255 Underworld (DeLilllo), 356 UN Human Rights Council, 75n27 UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), 41 Union Carbide, 257 United Arab Emirates (UAE), xiii, 160, 164, 270–2, 374, 377, 380n43 United Nations, 346 United States, 34, 57, 66n40, 83, 143, 229–30, 258–9, 262–3, 274, 290. see also specific locations United States Space Command, 39 United Way, 146 ‘Universal Corrective Map of the World’ (McArthur), 20–1 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Shadow UAV), 69 Up on the Roof (MacLean), 215 Urals, 343 Urban Theory Lab (Harvard University), 8 US Air Force, 56, 62–3, 69, 71, 341–2 US–Canada border, 349, 351 US Congress, 351 US Department of Defense, 342 US Department of Homeland Security, 84, 85, 87, 89, 363 US Department of Justice, 87, 90 US GeoEye-1, 31 US Geological Survey, 379 US–Mexico border, 84, 85, 351, 363 US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), 33 US National Security Agency, 281–2 US Navy, 343 US RAND, 31 Utopia in Trial (Coleman), 184 Vaal Reefs Mine, 384 Vale, 375 Valjean, Jean, 327–8 Van Alen, William, 155 Vancouver, 175, 177, 192–5, 201, 243, 318, 380 Vanity Fair, 177 van Vuuren, Detlef, 262 Varnelis, Kazys, 158 Veltmeyer, Henry, 367 Vendrame, Giuditta, 257, 269 Venezuela, 119–22 Venice, 370 Viet Cong, 274, 351 Vietnam, 61, 274, 298 Vietnam War, 114 Ville Contemporaine, 181 Ville Radieuse (‘Radiant City’), 64 Virgil, 19 Virgin Galactic, 218 Virginia, 289 Virilio, Paul, 3n4, 30–1, 156, 341 Volic, Ademir, 314 Wahabist ideology, 172 Waldorf Astoria, 143, 155 Walker, A.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

The Obama administration made its “pivot to Asia” in 2011.65 In December 2017 the United States issued its new National Security Strategy that for the first time designated the Indo-Pacific as the decisive arena of great power competition.66 In March 2019, the EU issued a strategy document to the same effect.67 In 2020 the French and German foreign offices followed suit.68 The UK, meanwhile, performed an extraordinary about-face, from celebrating a new “golden era” of Sino-UK relations in 2015 to deploying an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea.69 The military logic was familiar. All great powers are rivals, or at least so the “realist” logic goes. In the case of China, there was the added factor of ideology. In 2021 the CCP did something its Soviet counterpart never got to do: it celebrated its centenary. Beijing made no secret of its adherence to an ideological heritage that ran by way of Marx and Engels to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

…

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam had centuries of history that testified to China’s strategic heft. No more than American bankers, European industrialists, or Arab oil producers could they escape the gravitational force of China’s giant growth machine, but they had immediate reason to be concerned about China’s aggressive new stance on the South China Sea and its bullying attitude toward weaker trading partners. China’s new scale could not be reversed. If it were to be, it would be an economic, a social, and likely a political disaster. The question was how to contain, institutionalize, and frame the new balance of power. One option had been the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a giant regional trade and investment treaty that excluded China and was pushed by the Obama administration as a “de facto China containment alliance.”63 This had the backing of Japan, Canada, Mexico, and several Latin American states.

…

See also migration and mobility Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), 207–8, 209, 296 remittances, 103, 161, 251 remote work, 98–99, 117 Renzi, Matteo, 284 repo market (repurchase market), 114–17, 121–22, 148, 165, 179 Republican Party, 20–21, 89, 219, 221–22, 225–27, 229, 269–70, 290, 299 Reserve Bank of Australia, 126 retail industry, 101 Rieder, Rick, 124 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 86–87 Romania, 104 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 20 Ross, Wilbur, 68 Rotary International, 32, 33 Russia: arms sales to Turkey, 267; and Chinese pandemic aid, 197; and development lending programs, 264; and early responses to pandemic, 11, 82–83; and emerging market debt crises, 159, 163, 165; financial crisis of 1998, 156; and lessons of 2020, 295; oil and gas resources, 18; and oil price war, 79–80; and vaccine development, 247–49; and WHO funding, 33 Ryan, Mike, 69 Sagasti, Francisco, 248 Salvini, Matteo, 285 Sanders, Bernie, 11, 21, 146, 201, 219, 224, 227, 270–71, 273, 284, 288, 291, 299 SARS-CoV-2 virus: characterization of, 4; “flattening the curve” efforts, 41–42, 75, 233, 250; historical perspective on, 27; infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, 51; mortality rates, 28, 36–37, 37–41, 169, 171; mutation/variants, 17, 44–46, 250, 266, 285; and second wave of pandemic, 223, 292; and social distancing measures, 10, 43–44, 45, 74–75, 80, 83–85, 89, 96, 107, 220, 233, 289 SARS epidemic (2003), 3–4, 34, 46, 52–53, 56, 62, 66–67, 238 Saudi Arabia, 33, 71, 79–80, 267, 295 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 134 Schnabel, Isabel, 180 Scholz, Olaf, 134, 185 Schumer, Chuck, 12, 272 Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), 127 semiconductor industry, 211–12 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 46 Serum Institute, 237, 246, 251 service sector, 100–101 sex workers, 98 Shanghai, 57, 59–60, 274 Shanghai Accord, 291 Shanghai Stock Exchange, 55 Shingrix vaccine, 236 shipping industry, 106, 274 short-time working, 103–4, 137 Siberia, 189 Singapore, 206 Sino-American relations, 50 Sinopharm, 248 Sinovac, 248–49 smallpox, 30 Snyder, Timothy, 228 social contract, 11, 16, 131, 137, 141, 149–50 Social Democratic Party of Germany, 184–85 social distancing, 10, 43–45, 74–75, 80, 83–85, 89, 96, 107, 220, 233, 289 social safety net, 20, 135–36, 298 Solomon, David, 228 Songwe, Vera, 261, 262 Sonnefeld, Jeffrey, 228 South Africa: budget consolidation, 268; and debt relief programs, 251, 266; and early responses to pandemic, 88; and emerging market debt crises, 157–58, 166; and fiscal responses to pandemic, 132; and global vaccine rollout, 242, 243–44, 245; safari industry shutdown, 102; and scope of 2020 challenges, 12; and spread of pandemic, 233; and virus variants, 250 South African Reserve Bank, 266 South Asia, 103 South China Sea, 18, 206 South Korea: and China’s growing influence, 205; and climate agenda, 194; and early responses to pandemic, 66, 71, 73–74, 74–75, 78, 90; and emerging market debt crises, 165; and financial market turmoil, 125; and fiscal responses to pandemic, 133, 140; and global market stabilization efforts, 122; and global spread of Covid, 80; and history of epidemic diseases, 47; and testing technology, 74, 75; and Trump’s pandemic rhetoric, 77; and WHO funding, 33 Soviet Union, 30.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

Nonetheless, a problem will arise as more and more funds are preallocated and locked into preordained uses. At some point this country will face an immediate crisis, and there won’t quite be the resources, or more fundamentally the flexibility, to handle it. Imagine, for instance, military crises in the Baltics and the South China Sea at the same time. To resolve such a messy situation, America probably would need more resources, more cooperation across government, and more public support for involvement than we currently have. Of course, that is just an example. I don’t know what this crisis will be or when it will come.

…

THE RETURN OF INSTABILITY AT EVERY LEVEL, INCLUDING THE GLOBAL As we look to the global arena now, more than fifteen years into the new millennium, a lot of the optimism from the 1990s has vanished. Much of the Middle East has been destroyed, Russia has invaded Ukraine and broken down the old international order, China is newly assertive in the South China Sea, and terrorism is a major news theme in many parts of the world. Europe seems unable to deal with its refugee problem in comparison to the rather smoothly handled Yugoslavian refugee crisis of the 1990s. Both Russia and China seem to be less free, and to be resorting to more censorship, than ten or fifteen years ago.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

There were only a few thousand humans left, maybe fewer, clinging to the shores of southern Africa, on the brink of oblivion.5 The catastrophic eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra 70,000-odd years ago—there’s been nothing its equal since—spewed 2,800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, spreading from the Arabian Sea in the west to the South China Sea in the east, and giving the earth the equivalent of six years of nuclear winter. Toba “is considered by some scientists to be the most catastrophic event the human species has ever endured.” 6Homo sapiens was already in trouble; although we had mastered tools and fire during our 130,000-year history to that point, the earth was in a cooling cycle that had wiped out much of the food supply.

…

Together with its tottering Austro-Hungarian ally, Germany dragged the world into the first of two cataclysmic wars, the greatest folly and tragedy of modern times. Will the Chinese be similarly tempted? It could be something that puts Taiwan firmly in its place, or that lets everyone know the South China Sea is mare nostrum. A quick little war. The boys will be home by Chinese New Year. That doesn’t have to happen. China could evolve peacefully into a mature global power, managing its demographic challenges with restraint. And if the other hot spots—North Korea, Iran, and who-knows-where-next—manage to avoid provoking war, then the world could enter a new era of peace: a geriatric peace.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam are all running into problems with China and its territorial claims to most of the oil- and gas-rich South China Sea. China’s years of practicing a good-neighbor policy appear to be coming to an end. It’s getting more aggressive in pressing its rights, recently sending an unmanned submarine to plant a flag on the ocean floor of the South China Sea to act as a symbol of its military capability and regional dominance. China reportedly planned to call the Varyag the Shi Lang, after a 17th-century admiral who conquered Taiwan—a not so subtle nod to its plans for the craft.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Looking back, will future generations say that the most profound consequence of Covid-19 was the start of the Second Cold War? The shift in Sino-US relations has taken place in both capitals. Under President Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, Beijing has become far more assertive internationally, from grabbing Indian territory to asserting maritime claims in the South China Sea. It has imposed greater control over Hong Kong and sought more deference from countries that receive Chinese foreign aid and loans—while pressuring nations, firms, and global organizations to accept China’s position on Taiwan and other issues. The Chinese foreign ministry has become more belligerent with its new “Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” an approach that gets its name from a Chinese action-movie franchise that shows China’s military flexing its muscle around the world.

…

Beijing has tightened its grip on Hong Kong, too, imposing a draconian “national security” law on the autonomous territory in July 2020. China’s foreign policy has also become more ambitious under Xi, from its pursuit of leadership roles in UN agencies—where it now outnumbers the US four-to-one—to the vast Belt and Road Initiative, to the construction of islands in the South China Sea. The country’s growing belligerence marks a break with its previous passivity, captured by Deng Xiaoping’s adage “Hide your strength, bide your time.” The military buildup, in particular, suggests that China is executing a long-term plan. But what would be an acceptable level of influence for China, given its economic weight in the world?

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

The Great Recession that rocked the US economy in 2008 helped convince Communist officials that China’s system was superior and gave them the self-confidence to become more assertive on the global stage. The US Navy had suddenly woken up to the fact that China was building islands out of nothing in the South China Sea and began to push back, further galvanizing an already strong anti-American sentiment within the Party. But to me the most convincing argument for the Party’s dictatorial lurch remains the nature of the Chinese Communist Party. The Party has an almost animal instinct toward repression and control.

…

., 42, 93 Carlyle Group, 93 Carnegie, Dale, 63 Chen Liangyu, 202 Chen Shui-bian, 170 Chen Tonghai, 197 Chen Weida, 197 Chen Xi, 183–87, 252, 253, 259 Chen Xitong, 56–57 Chen Yun, 239–40 Chen Zuo’er, 247 Chiang Kai-shek, 6, 46, 240 China airport construction boom, 137 average height for men in, 27 capitalism and entrepreneurship in, 50, 169–70, 171, 180, 182, 189, 192, 194, 196, 197, 201, 282, 283 CCP control of all non-Communist elements in society, 205, 208 censorship in, 237 charities in, 182 Christianity in, 71, 182 “common good” fantasy of, 282–83 concept of “face,” 28, 109–10, 212 constitution of, 2 consumption boom, 2000s, 161 consumer goods in, 57 crackdown on Western ideas, 195–97 “Crazy rich Asians” in, 161 democracy and, 86–87, 94, 169–70, 189, 194, 283 Deng and reforms, 18, 45, 55, 170, 216, 251, 283 doing business in, 46, 47, 112–13, 194 (see also Shum, Desmond) economic growth, 45, 51, 55–57, 113, 124, 171–72 economic system of state control, 132, 141 emigration from, mid-1990s, 59–60 exporting its system overseas, 282 extralegal kidnappings in, 2, 254–55, 280, 281 financial crisis of 2008 and, 195 first generation of wealthy, 218 first private research institute, 182 five “black categories,” 5, 11, 170 foreign relations and, 189, 194, 254 Gang of Four, 18, 52 Great Leap Forward, 273 guanxi (connections), importance of, 46, 74, 120, 121, 139, 149–50, 155, 164–65, 181, 204, 217, 247, 271 Gu Mu and economic reforms, 272 Heineken beer and Marlboro cigarettes, sales of, 46 hotels, popularity of, 228 indefinite detention (shuanggui), 281 influence peddling and, 164 intellectual property theft in, 62 Internet and broadband in, 49, 51 islands in South China Sea and, 197 jewelry start-ups in, 89 Jiang’s policy on capitalists, 170 laws as ambiguous, 150, 258 Leninist system of total societal control, 281–82 Li Peng and economic slowdown, 45 medical system, 153–56 military-industrial complex, 185 mobile phones in, 60 modernization of, 77, 169–70, 188 moral vacuum in, 158 motorcycle production, 48 the “New China,” 3, 6, 49, 180 nouveau riche in, 158, 161 one-child policy, 154 Overseas Chinese Affairs, 19–20 parenting philosophy in, 15 as patriarchal society, 3, 64, 103, 173, 246 “patriotic overseas Chinese” as source for foreign currency, 9 politics as the key to riches, 215 pollution in, 188 privatization in, 174 pro-democracy protests in 1989, 272 real estate business, 56, 123–24, 216 relatives overseas, as stigma, 5 secrecy and fear in, 120 shock-and-awe hospitality of, 48 southern clans, diaspora of, 8 Special Economic Zones, 201 sports bureaucracy, 16 state-owned banks, 224 state-owned businesses, 126–27, 142, 171–72, 174, 192, 195, 199, 223 state-run work unit system, 56 state-subsidies of exports, 134 status symbols, 60, 114–15 stock markets of, 240 the “system” and, 95, 274, 282 tariff revenues, 46, 133 tax system, 197 theory of zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong, 77 tuhuangdi or dirt emperor, 128, 193 universities run by the CCP, 183 US-China relations, 32, 182 Western businesses in, pretense of ignorance and, 47 Western private equity investment in, 45, 51, 56, 57, 91, 101 woman’s average age to marry, 69 women and power in, 173 women’s repression in, 71 WTO and, 57, 134 Xi Jinping’s repressive rule, 251–55 See also Chinese Communist Party China Central Television, 124 China Democratic League, 52 China Duty Free Group, 126–27 China Mineral and Gem Corp., 89 China National Petroleum Corp., 8 China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), 75, 110, 165 China Telecom, 172 ChinaVest, 44–54, 60, 134 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 189 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 2, 7, 53, 57 ability to drink and, 128 anti-American stance, 197, 237–38 battle against Western ideas, 195–96, 253 Beijing vs.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

He consistently gave, and still gives, absolute priority to commercial competition over national-security threats. Unlike the Republican Party’s now silenced national-security hawks, he is in sync with 21st-century American public opinion, where kitchen-table issues preoccupy voters more than a few terrorists in East Africa or a few artificial islands in the South China Sea. Trump does not see the transformation of America’s former authoritarian and militaristic enemies into peaceful capitalist democracies as a victory for American foreign policy. Rather than being ‘the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness’, as Oscar Wilde claimed, he sees German-style imitation as a con game that undermines America’s economy.

…

To say that the rise of China marks the end of the Age of Imitation is to say that there will be no return to a global ideological confrontation between two great powers each imposing its social and political model on a group of vassal states and trying to persuade peoples everywhere to adopt its own goals, objectives and vision of mankind’s future. There is no reason to believe that Xi’s China will be a particularly benign actor internationally. Its immediate neighbours, many of whom welcome a US naval presence in the South China Sea, justifiably suspect that its economic projection of power may at some point become much more coercive and military. The coming confrontation between China and the US will no doubt reshape the international order in important and dangerous ways. But it remains misleading to see ‘a new economic Cold War’21 as a rerun of the original, ideology-obsessed Cold War.

The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Khartoum Gordon, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, placebo effect, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Successive governments had stated flatly that the islands were historically and by geographical logic Chinese, and any official maps you buy of China inside China show a curved dotted line extending from Shanghai south and returning north to a point near Hainan, and encompassing every atoll and reef and skerry in the South China Sea. All, says China, are Chinese. In recent years Beijing has stated these claims rather more robustly, and shortly before my arrival at Woosung the Chinese Navy had installed a detachment of the Chinese Army, who would build a small base on one of the rocks. Now, as I arrived in Shanghai, the Chinese government was publicly defying anyone to try to move it.

…

Compounding the strangeness of the topography, they were also very, very close – making this one of the best-drained parts of the world, with rivers shearing away like railway lines from a city terminus. First there was the Yangtze, heading south to Shigu and – but for the intervention of Cloud Mountain – the Gulf of Tonkin; then, a mere fifty miles to the west, was the upper part of the Mekong, which drained through Laos and Cambodia before entering the South China Sea near Saigon; and thirty miles farther west was the Salween, a lesser-known river that watered the Shan States of upper Burma, and flowed into the Andaman Sea by the town of Moulmein, a place made famous only in a poem by Kipling, the one about the Burma girl a-settin' by the old Moulmein pagoda.

…

., 177 Rustomjee, Heerjeebhoy, 177 Sailing Through China (Theroux), 408 Salween River, 364, 373, 393 Sampans (small boats), 47, 300, 306 Sand Pebbles, The (McKenna), 286, 410 Sandouping, 229, 231, 232–3, 245 Sanxia, 169 Satellite communications, 309–10 Savage, John L, 227, 229 Schistosomes, 195 Science and Civilisation in China (Needham), 410 Second Opium War, 204 Seeds of Change (Hobhouse), 412 Sexual morals, 145–6, 320, 332, 334–5, 378 Sexually transmitted diseases, 334–5 Shadwell, Charles, 50 Shamanism, 329, 367, 406 Shanghai Club, 36, 75, 84 Shanghai Down Express, 12 Shashi, 244 Shen-nung, Emperor, 363 Shennong Stream, 289, 290, 291 Shenyang, 216 Shigatse, 401 Shigu, 3–4, 20, 359, 362, 365, 373 Shimantan Dam, 240 Ship locks, 255–6 Shipai, 232 Shippee, David, 354, 358 Shippee, Margit, 355 Shipwrecks, 44–5 Shun, Emperor, 363 Shutung (ship), 269 Sichuan Basin, 225, 237, 375 Sichuan Corporation for International Cultural Development, 371 Sichuan province, 213, 226, 295, 297, 313, 314, 371, 377 Signal stations, 272–3,299–300 Sikhs, 72, 76 Sikkim 383 Silk industry, 123, 283 Silk Road, 313 Single Pebble, A (Hersey), 230, 254, 408 Singsong girls, 139–40 Sixteen Points for the Cultural Revolution, 201 Smedley, Agnes, 215 Snowmelts, 151, 153, 158 Soochow Creek, 72 Sourcewaters, 349–53, 404–6 South China Sea, 54 South Manchurian Railway, 129 Space programme, 309–10 Sperling, E., 134 Spratly Islands, 53 Standard Guide Book to Shanghai, 412 Star TV, 309 Steepness, 344, 349 Stilwell, ‘Vinegar Joe’, 287 Su, Mr, 67–9 Subways, 81 Suez Canal, 179 Sui dynasty, 100 Suicides, 319–20, 332 Suifu, 295 Sun Yat-sen, 51, 125, 211, 215, 225, 228 Sun Ziming, 330 Sung dynasty, 100 Swimmers, 194–203 ‘Swimming' (poem), 218, 231 Szechuan province, 284 Taco Bell, 213 Tactical Pilot Charts (TPCs), 30–31, 409 Taipan (company chief), 63, 65, 75, 86, 89 Taiping Rebellion, 121n, 134n, 142 Taipings, 121 Taipingxi, 232 Tang dynasty, 100, 114, 254, 330 Tang, Mr, 370–71, 374, 396, 397, 400 Tanggula Range, 398, 399, 405 Tanggula township, 402–3 Tannu-Tuva, 381 Taoists, 224, 330, 338–9, 341 Taotai (city official) 597183 TCBY store, 212–13 Tea clippers, 175, 205 Tea industry, 166–7, 170, 173–86, 380–81 Tea-making process, 181–2 Tectonics, 367 Telegraph cable, 58n Television, 309 Tempe, Arizona, 116 Ten thousand li Yangtze (painting), 10, 14–23 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 48 Theacea plants, 174 Theroux, Paul, 408 Thistle and the Jade, The (Keswick), 412 Three Gorges, 25, 26, 29, 97, 225, 226n, 228, 235, 243–4, 266, 287–9, 345, 366 Three Gorges Dam, 19, 164, 169, 219, 223, 225, 226–46, 249–53, 255, 257–62, 276–7, 371 Three Gorges Hotel, 247–8 Three Gorges Project Corporation, 249, 259 Through the Yangtze Gorges or, Trade and Travel in Western China (Little), 411 Tiananmen Square, 235, 239, 379 Tianjin, 131 Tibet, 322, 356, 369–70, 373–6, 379–407 Tibetan foothills, 303 Tibetan people, 278–9, 322–3, 325, 383–91 Tibetan Plateau, 150, 225, 295, 345, 351, 382, 396, 406 Tides, 124–5, 160 Tientsin, 95 Tiger Leaping Gorge, 327, 330, 346–9, 356, 366 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, 132, 134 Tolley, Admiral Kemp, 410–11 Tongtian He, 345, 350–52, 354 Topographical maps, 30–31 Trackers, 267, 268, 277, 279, 289–90 Travel Survival Guide to China, 409 Treaty of Nanking, 142–5, 270 Trobriand Islanders, 334 Tsampa (Tibetan food), 380, 396 Tsingtao beer, 220, 311 Tuotuo stream, 322, 340–41, 374 Tuotuoheyan, 403, 405 Tuotuoheyan bridge, 404, 406–7 U.S.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

Militaries regularly interact in tense situations that have the potential for conflict, even in peacetime. In recent years, the U.S. military has jockeyed for position with Russian warplanes in Syria and the Black Sea, Iranian fast boats in the Straits of Hormuz, and Chinese ships and air defenses in the South China Sea. Periods of brinksmanship, where nations flex their militaries to assert dominance but without actually firing weapons, are common in international relations. Sometimes tensions escalate to full-blown crises in which war appears imminent, such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In such situations, even the tiniest incident can trigger war.

…

This same action could be perceived very differently in contested areas, however, such as the Senkaku Islands, where both countries assert sovereignty. In such situations, a country whose drone was shot down might feel compelled to escalate in order to back up their territorial claim. Hints of these incidents have already begun. In December 2016, China seized a small underwater robot drone the United States was operating in the South China Sea. China quickly returned it after U.S. protests, but other incidents might not be resolved so easily. All of these complications are manageable if autonomous systems do what humans expect them to do. Robots may raise new challenges in war, but humans can navigate these hurdles, so long as the automation is an accurate reflection of human intent.

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., 48f human intervention in, 147 Senkaku Islands incident, 208–9 Sensor Fuzed Weapon (SFW), 51–52, 326 sentry robots, 5, 102, 104–5, 112–13, 118, 303–4 SGR-A1 sentry robot, 5, 104–5, 118, 303–4 Shadow drone, 209 Shattuck, Lawrence, 308 Shelley, Mary, 234 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 274, 296 Shield AI, 122–24 shot detection system, 113–14 Siemens Step 7 software, 214 Singapore, 103 Skinner, B. F., 39 Skynet (fictitious weapon system), 26–28, 52–53, 134, 233–34, 360–61 SMArt 155 artillery shell, 343 “smart” weapons, 38–40; see also precision-guided munitions Somme, Battle of the, 38 sonar, 85 Sorcerer’s Apprentice (animated short), 148–49 South China Sea, 209 South Korea, 5, 102, 104–5, 260, 303–4, 356 sovereignty, drones and, 208 Soviet Union, 1–2, 76, 313–14; see also Cold War S&P 500, 199, 204 space shuttle, 154, 382n SpaceX, 154 Spark hobby drone, 115 Sparrow, Rob, 259 spear phishing attacks, 224 speed, 199–210 autonomous weapons and, 207–10 and crisis stability, 304–5 in cyberwarfare, 229–30 and limits of centaur warfighting, 325–26 online price wars, 205 in stock trading, 200–204, 206–7 spoofing attacks, 182–83, 183f, 186, 206 Sputnik, 76, 80 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), 37–38 stability, 297–318 autonomous weapons and, 302–3 autonomous weapons’ potential to inflame crises, 317–18 benefits of autonomous weapons in crises, 311–14 and debate over autonomous weapons bans, 351–52 and nuclear weapons, 298–302 psychology of crisis decision-making, 306–11 and removal of human fail-safe, 305–6 speed and, 304–5 stability-instability paradox and mad robot theory, 314–16 strategic, 297–302 Stark, USS, 169 Star Wars, 134 “Star Wars” missile defense shield, 309–10 stationary armed sentry robots, 104–5 stealth drones, 56, 61–62, 209, 354 stigmergy, 21 stock market algorithmic trading, 200–201, 203–4, 206–7, 210, 229, 244, 387n E-mini price manipulation incident, 206 “Flash Crash,” 199–201, 203–4 Knight Capital Group incident, 201–2 Strategic Air Command (SAC), 307 strategic corporal problem, 309 Strategic Defense Initiative, 1, 309–10 strategic stability, 297–302 Strategic Stability (Colby), 299 Strategy of Conflict (Schelling), 341 Stuxnet worm, 213–16, 223, 224 Submarine Safety (SUBSAFE) program, 161–62 submarine warfare, 101 suffering, unnecessary, 257–58 Sullivan, Paul, 162 Sun Tzu, 229 Superintelligence (Bostrom), 237 supervised autonomous weapon systems, 29, 45–46, 45f, 193, 329f CODE, 72–76, 117, 253, 327–28 human intervention in, 147 surface action group (SAG), 64 surrender, false, 259–60 surveillance drones for, 13–14 FLA and, 68–71 swarming by autonomous weapons, 11–13 CODE program, 72–76 command-and-control models, 20f and evolution of autonomy, 17–23 FLA and, 71 of U.S. ships by Iran, 22, 107 synthetic aperture radar (SAR), 86 Syria, 7, 331 system failure, Three Mile Island as, 151 T-14 Armata tank, 116 Tacit Rainbow, 49 Tactical Technology Office (TTO), 79–83 Tactical Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile (TLAM-E), 55, 368n tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), 41 Taliban, 3, 253 tanks, robotic, 115–16 Taranis drone, 108–11 targeting ATR, 76, 84–88 autonomous, 116, 123–24, 187 DIY drones and, 123–24 by human-assisted automated weapons, 98 by sentry robots, 112–13 of weapons instead of people, 261 target location error, 98 Target Recognition and Adaption in Contested Environments (TRACE), 84–88, 128 targets, cooperative/non-cooperative, 84–85 task, as dimension of autonomy, 28 TASM, See Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile TensorFlow, 128–29 Terminator (film series) and autonomous weapon debates, 264 fate in, 360–61 good Terminators in, 295 self-aware robots in, 27 Skynet, 26–28, 52–53, 134, 233–34, 360–61 “Terminator Conundrum,” 8 terrorism, 93, 134 Tesla Model S crash, 147 Tetris, 239 thermostats, programmable, 30–31, 33–34 Third Offset Strategy, 59, 82, 93 Thomas Jefferson High School (TJ), 130–33 Three Laws of Robotics (Asimov), 26–27, 134 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 151–53, 156 Thresher, USS, 161 tightly coupled systems, 152 TJ (Thomas Jefferson High School), 130–33 Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile (TASM), 49, 49f, 53–54, 368n Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile (TLAM-E), 55, 368n Tornado GR4A fighter jet incident, 138–40, 176 torpedoes, 39–40 torture, 280 total war, 274, 296, 341 Tousley, Bradford, 80–84, 149, 210, 223–24 TRACE (Target Recognition and Adaption in Contested Environments), 84–88, 128 training, limitations of, 177 transparency and crisis management, 328–29 in description of weapons research, 111 in treaty verification regimes, 344–45, 352–53 treaties, arms control, see arms control Trebek, Alex, 146 Trident II (D5) ballistic missile, 173 Trophy system, 92 trust in Aegis combat system, 168 in automation, see automation bias and cybersecurity, 246 and dangers of autonomous weapons, 192, 194 and deployment of autonomous systems, 83 and need to understand system’s capabilities and limitations, 149–50 Tseng, Brandon, 122, 123, 133 Tseng, Ryan, 122 TTO (Tactical Technology Office), 79–83 TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures), 41 Turing, Alan, 236 Turing test, 236 Tutsis, 288 Twain, Mark, 35–36 Twitter, 185, 224 U-2 surveillance plane, 307, 310–11 UAV (uninhabited aerial vehicle), 104 UCAV (uninhabited combat aerial vehicle), 62 unguided weapons, 38–39 UNIDIR (UN Institute for Disarmament Research), 150–51 uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV), 104 uninhabited combat aerial vehicle (UCAV), 62 United Kingdom (UK) autonomous weapons policy, 118 Brimstone missile, 105–8, 117, 326, 353 stance on fully autonomous weapons, 110–11 Taranis drone, 108–11 transparency in description of weapons research, 111 WWII aerial bombardments, 341–42 UK Joint Doctrine Note 2/11 (The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems), 109 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), see Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), 150–51 UN Security Council, 344 United Nations Special Rapporteur, 287 U.S.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Elizabeth Huff; rev. by Priscilla and Richard Roberts, “The First Barbary War,” Monticello, 2011, www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/first-barbary-war#footnote10_trdpc84. 18. Sarah Schoenberger, “Piracy in the South China Sea: Petty Theft in Indonesia, Kidnapped Ships in Malaysia,” Asia-Pacific, Global Analysis, Center for International Maritime Security, September 6, 2014, http://cimsec.org/piracy-south-china-sea-petty-theft-indonesia-kidnapped-ships-malaysia/12899. Chapter 2: Wanna Go to Gitmo? 1. Agreement Between the United States and Cuba for the Lease of Lands for Coaling and Naval Stations, February 23, 1903, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/dip_cuba002.asp. 2.

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In 1815, however, the United States launched another successful offensive against the Barbary States. This time, the pirates were vanquished—until piracy off the coast of Africa accelerated again in the twenty-first century. Piracy had never fully disappeared from the world’s shipping channels, of course, and the Navy has fought pirates from the Caribbean to the South China Sea over the last two centuries. The nature of piracy has changed significantly since America’s first foreign military adventure, however. Fearsome as the Barbary pirates were, they operated largely under the control of the Barbary States, making diplomacy a viable adjunct or alternative to war.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Singapore’s deep-water harbour is one reason why Sir Stamford Raffles chose it as a base for British trading in 1819; another reason is its strategic location at the south-eastern end of the Strait of Malacca, between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. Any boat wanting to travel from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea needs to go through the strait. Today the port is the second-busiest in the world and Singapore is one of the planet’s most prosperous nations, thanks to its position at the heart of Asian trade and finance. Shipping containers are so uniform in appearance that it is difficult to tell what is inside them.

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In the last 50 years, more and more nations have made the breakthrough out of poverty, starting with Asian “tigers” like South Korea and Taiwan, and moving on to the giants of China and India. Economic power is shifting away from Europe and North America, where it resided for the last three centuries, and back to Asia. This is a return to “normal” in some ways, since the Middle East, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea were for a long time the heart of the global trading system. Many economic changes that have led to long-term prosperity faced short-term opposition. Change means that some tasks must stop so that others may start, and that creates losers as well as winners. In the short term, the complaints of the losers may dominate the discussion.

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(Indeed, in the terminology of the current Chinese government’s Belt and Road initiative, the sea route to Africa and the Mediterranean is the road element.)13 The overland route was vulnerable to disruption by raiders and suffered a decline after around 750CE before reviving again at the time of the Mongol empire. Shipwrecks in the South China Sea have shown vast cargoes of pottery, with 55,000 pieces in one wreck and 500,000 in another. Such cargoes were far too bulky to have been carried by pack animals. One of the most remarkable finds in recent years was the Belitung shipwreck, found off the coast of Indonesia. This Arab dhow was on the way back from China in the ninth century CE and contained the largest ever hoard of Tang dynasty artefacts.

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, company town, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Exxon Valdez, Mason jar, Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, refrigerator car, San Francisco homelessness, South China Sea, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, University of East Anglia

But it could live almost anywhere, while these damselfish are condemned to the tropics. When I tire of listening to grunting damselfish, I stand in the water. Facing shore, I look at coconut palms growing just beyond white sand. Farther back, in the hills behind the beach, macaques play in jungle branches. I turn to watch the swells coming in from the South China Sea. They break on the reef face. A surge of water, the remains of a broken wave, advances across the shallows, then retreats, leaving white foam behind to slip slowly back. The sun hangs low on the horizon. At this latitude, sunset comes quickly. I can almost see the sun move as it sinks into the sea.

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Globally, El Niño has come to refer to those years when the Christmas currents are unusually strong. The currents strengthen when trade winds blowing to the west weaken and unusual volumes of warm water reach Peru and Ecuador. Global weather patterns respond. It rains in California. Australia dries out, and bush fires burn out of control. Gulf of Mexico hurricanes become less prevalent. South China Sea typhoons become more prevalent. Corals die in the Pacific Ocean. People catch marlin off the coast of Washington State. With El Niño, cold, clear high-pressure air stalls between Alaska and Seattle. The pressure ridge forces warm winds forming along the Aleutian Islands to swing north, toward Anchorage.

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

For Steve, the message gave him license to forage further, to admit aloud to himself that the Bible as a blueprint for life was incomplete, and that a fuller spirituality even in the Christian tradition would require venturing beyond. At least, that was his tacit justification as he dove into the Upanishads or Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. And the effort wasn’t all about reading, either. Steve renewed his practice of meditation while on the destroyer. The stress of the responsibilities of patrolling the South China Sea was enough to make moments of calm and stillness brought by meditation palliative and essential. His method was basic, a distillation of what he had learned in college: he found a sitting position—nothing fancy—closed his eyes mostly, dropped his chin, relaxed his shoulders, and centered his attention on calming his breaths.

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As a naval officer, especially in this part of the world, you just couldn’t be talking about stuff like this. He knew what his superiors would think of him, and had on occasion laid awake at night playing hypothetical conversations in his head. He pictured his superior finding out: “Bannon’s doing fucking Zen meditation on a combatant? In the South China Sea? On picket duty? Put a mark in his fitness report. Drop his security clearance. There are nukes on this ship, and we’ve got a pollywog going native. Bannon’s a weirdo!” That would be devastating—being weird. If you’re weird in a wardroom, you’ll get a shitty fitness report. You get a shitty fitness report, and you start dropping down the hierarchy.

Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Buddhist monks travelling by motorcycle taxi, Siem Reap BERNARD NAPTHINE/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Elemental Forces The life-giving force of water has sculpted many Southeast Asian landscapes. The jungle-topped islands of the Malay peninsula are cradled by coral reefs that tame the ocean into azure pools. The languorous Vietnamese coastline greets the South China Sea from tip to tail, while inland there are karst mountains – evidence of long-vanished oceans. And the muddy Mekong River lopes through tightly knit mountains to flat rice baskets. The traditional ‘highways’ of Borneo are tannin-stained rivers that slice through the wilderness. And the volcanoes of Indonesia and the Philippines provide a glimpse into the earth’s blacksmithing core.

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Kek Lok Si Temple, Penang JOHN BANAGAN / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Kuching (Malaysia) 11 Borneo’s most sophisticated and stylish city (Click here) brings together an atmospheric old town, a romantic waterfront, fine cuisine for all budgets and chic nightspots that would be right at home in London. But the city’s biggest draw is what’s nearby: some of Sarawak’s finest natural sights that are easy to visit on day trips. You can spot orang-utans or search out a giant Rafflesia flower in the morning, or look for proboscis monkeys and wild crocs on a sundown cruise in the South China Sea. Finish off the evening by dining on fresh seafood or crunchy midin (jungle fern tips). PETER PTSCHELINZEW / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Bagan (Myanmar) 12 More than 4000 Buddhist temples are scattered across the plains of Bagan (Click here), the site of the first Burmese kingdom and an architectural complement to the temples of Angkor.

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Top of section Malaysia Includes » Kuala Lumpur Melaka Cameron Highlands Penang Pulau Langkawi Pulau Tioman Kuala Terengganu Pulau Perhentian Kota Bharu Taman Negara Malaysian Borneo Understand Malaysia Survival Guide Why Go? Malaysia is like two countries in one, cleaved in half by the South China Sea. The multicultural peninsula flaunts Malay, Chinese and Indian influences, while Borneo hosts a wild jungle of orang-utans, granite peaks and remote tribes. Throughout these two regions is an impressive variety of microcosms ranging from the space-age high-rises of Kuala Lumpur to the smiling longhouse villages of Sarawak.

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, South China Sea

The initial strike occurred on August 4, the president got his congressional resolution on August 10, and on August 5 Secretary McNamara announced that the following military deployments were under way: transfer of an attack carrier group from the Pacific coast to the Western Pacific; movement of interceptor and fighter-bomber aircraft into South Vietnam [36 B-57’s and 12 F-102’s]; movement of fighter-bomber aircraft into Thailand; transfer of interceptor and fighter-bomber squadrons from the United States to advance bases in the Pacific; movement of an antisubmarine force into the South China Sea; the alerting and readying for movement of selected Army and Marine forces.4 It was unclear when Johnson would approve additional actions in support of the central recommendation of the May memorandum: the gradual application of additional military pressures on North Vietnam. Deliberations about Vietnam, conducted in the middle of a presidential campaign, solidified two critical assumptions: first, that the principal difficulty in South Vietnam stemmed from North Vietnam’s support for the Viet Cong; and second, that the gradual application of military and diplomatic pressures on the Hanoi government would persuade North Vietnam’s leaders to terminate that support.

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While South Vietnamese generals occupied themselves principally with political intrigue, the Viet Cong were growing stronger, to a point where they controlled half of the countryside and one-quarter of the rural population. They had infiltrated the once-safe major cities and seemed poised to cut off the northern portion of South Vietnam by driving from their highland bases to the coastal provinces on the South China Sea. The pacification program that Westmoreland had hoped would secure the area around Saigon and serve as a model for the entire country had come to a standstill. The South Vietnamese armed forces were exclusively on the defensive and had suffered major defeats in spite of their superiority in numbers and equipment.

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.”* It was apparent to Collins that “the US would get far more committed than it intended, and it was obvious from the civilian influence on the tactics and strategy that we were just going to nibble away at this Vietnamese problem.”2 On February 7, 1965, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers Ranger, Coral Sea, and Hancock were afloat in the South China Sea, waiting for orders to bomb North Vietnam. The Viet Cong attack on Pleiku provided the occasion to launch Flaming Dart I, the name for the reprisal strikes against military barracks in the southern portion of North Vietnam. Ranger would strike military barracks at Vit Thu Lu, while Coral Sea and Hancock would target a barracks facility at Dong Hoi.

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

In the ‘country trade’ – that is the traffic within Asia – an array of indigenous merchants plied routes that predated by centuries the arrival of European shipping. Arab and Swahili merchants in East Africa, Hadramis from Southern Arabia, Indians from Surat, Bugis from the Celebes, as well as Chinese, carried much of the trade of the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea.41 Of all these groups, it was the Armenians, with their headquarters at New Julfa in Safavid Isfahan, whose commercial success was most widely envied by Europeans. As we shall see, the English in Asia were anxious to link their own fortunes with those of this remarkable network. To make their way into this world, and snatch a profit from its trades, the English merchants had banded together into a common concern.

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But it was Britain’s possession of India that made it a great Asian power, and for much of the nineteenth century, the Asian power. No other European state acquired an overseas territory on remotely this scale, or one which conferred such astonishing benefits. With India in their hands, the British had the means to exert their power across a huge swathe of the world from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea, and even for a time into the Sea of Japan. This was partly because India supplied so many mercantile assets (Indian merchants as well as cotton and opium). But India’s unique value lay mainly in the fact that it gave the British an army. After the Mutiny, when the Indian army was shrunk, and the all-British garrison enlarged, two thirds of Britain’s regular forces (Indian and British) were paid for by the Indian taxpayer.

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Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (London, 1995), p. 14. 40. V. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context c. 800–1830 (Cambridge, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 277–82. 41. For a fascinating survey, D. Lombard and J. Aubin (eds.), Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea (Delhi, 2000). 42. This is a tiny selection from that extraordinary lexicon of Anglo-Indian speech, H. Yule and A. C. Burnell (eds.), Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, first published in 1886. 43. For these ventures, W. Foster, England’s Quest of Eastern Trade (London, 1933). 44.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

At the scale of national economies they hardly move the dial. Disputes over who has the right to go where in the South China Sea could escalate into a real concern very quickly; rights of passage across Shackleton Crater seem less likely to. But in this respect the Moon does not exist in a vacuum, responding only to the solar wind. The political climate on Earth—and thus, in the Anthropocene, the Earth’s own climate—will buffet it, shake it, reshape it. The way people treat each other in Shackleton Crater will depend on what happens in the South China Sea. The extent of any future development of the Moon will depend in part on what is found there, in part on ingenuity, in part on luck.

Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ... by David Barrie

centre right, colonial exploitation, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, GPS: selective availability, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, polynesian navigation, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

While the celestial navigator deploys almanac and sight-reduction tables to define and then solve the trigonometric problems arising from a sextant “sight,” the GPS user relies on computer algorithms in the receiver to perform analogous calculations—instantly, effortlessly, and automatically. I first encountered satellite navigation when I was sailing across the South China Sea from Hong Kong to Manila in April 1984. I was navigating with the sextant I had used going to and from the Azores three years earlier, though the experience of working out sights under a tropical sun that passed almost vertically overhead at noon was very different. Beyond the strong winds of the northeast monsoon we were becalmed off the coast of Luzon.

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See also Slocum, Joshua Skyring, William, 201 Skyring Water, 202 “skyspaces,” 283–84 Slocum, Joshua, xviii, xix, 22, 57, 207, 227–38 small-boat voyages, xx Smalls Lighthouse, 219–20, 219n Solander, Daniel, 89 solar declination, 28, 58, 237 solar flares, 282–83 Solomon Islands, xvi–xvii, 121, 125, 133–34, 196–97n soundings, 4–5, 267 South America Pilot, 231 South Atlantic, 92 South China Sea, 280 South Georgia Island, 92, 242, 251, 255–59, 262 South Pacific, 90, 105 South Sandwich Islands, 92 South Seas, 87 southern continent debate, 87, 93 Southern Cross, 253 Southern Hemisphere, 168 Southern Ocean, 92–93, 240, 255 Spain, 85, 138–39, 147, 149–53 Spanish Armament, 138–39 “Spanish Ladies” (song), 33n spherical geometry, 69 Spice Islands, 194 spiritual significance of celestial navigation, 286–87 Spray, xviii, 207, 227–38 St.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases