Global commentators seem completely pre-occupied with the rise of China, and many assume this is the “China Century,” with superpower status all but guaranteed. Has too much hype been attached to this scenario?

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Tension in the US-Pakistan relationship isn’t something new. But a recent book challenges the common perception that Islamabad is mostly responsible. In his book Deadly Embrace, Bruce Riedel writes that ‘America has been a fickle friend, sometimes acting as Pakistan’s closest ally and sharing important secret programmes, while at other times moving to isolate and impose sanctions against it.’

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The earthquake and tsunami that struck northwest Japan on March 11 triggered an outpouring of charitable initiatives, including two books compiled in a matter of weeks that were published in print and electronic form and sold to raise money for the victims of the disaster. 2:46—Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, better known as Quakebook (Goken) is essentially written snapshots of the disaster, while Tsunami: Japan’s Post-Fukushima Future (Slate), examines the political, social and technological implications of the disaster from a long-term perspective. Its contributors include journalists, academics, a former central banker, a poet, an English teacher, an art historian and a non-profit executive.

The Diplomat interviewed Tsunami’s editor, Prof. Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University’s Japan Campus, about the e-book, which was produced in collaboration with Foreign Policy magazine.

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Can you give us some of the historical background to Middle East-China ties, or are the developing relationships a new phenomenon?

The historical background is the old Silk Road and the trade routes between China and the Middle East that largely ran overland, but also overseas at some points—the old spice routes. The trade on the old Silk Road faded away around the 1600s, so the modern historical backdrop is very, very limited.

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You say counterinsurgency (COIN) is a battlefield where ‘popular perceptions and rumour are more influential than the facts and more powerful than a hundred tanks.’ What are the battlefield perceptions and rumours in Afghanistan today?

It’s important to realize that some of the perceptions and attitudes of the population can seem perverse or completely unrealistic to us, until we try to see things from their standpoint. For example, one persistent rumour among Pashtuns is that the Americans are sponsoring the Taliban. Their theory goes that America is the most powerful nation on earth, we can put a man on the moon, so the so the only rational explanation for our failure to stabilize a little place like Afghanistan is that we must not want to.

So they talk about the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ (those sponsored by Pakistan), the ‘Iranian Taliban’ sponsored by Teheran, and the ‘American Taliban’ supposedly sponsored by us in order to keep the country weak and provide a pretext for our long-term colonization.

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The Diplomat speaks with John Kampfner about the trade-offs between prosperity, consumer power and public and private freedoms.

Your book describes the global phenomenon of people willing to give up their freedoms in return for an easy, comfortable life. You suggest that we’d all make this trade-off, regardless of the political system we’re in. Could you name some of what you think are the most striking examples of this?

The trade-off applies equally to countries that are long-established democracies and those that have a recent totalitarian or authoritarian past. In the UK, for example, the population was seemingly entirely comfortable with giving up all civil liberties from ID cards, to plans for a universal DNA database, to a surveillance state that allowed local councils to eavesdrop on phone calls and emails if they suspected citizens were being irresponsible in the way they threw away their garbage.

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The environmental situation in China is anything but simple. ‘China is a 3000-year-old civilisation in the body of an industrial teenager; mega-rich, dirt-poor, overpopulated, under-resourced, ethnically diverse mass of humanity that is going through several stages of development simultaneously,’ writes Jonathan Watts in his upcoming book ‘When a Billion Chinese Jump.’ Based on his seven years of experiences as The Guardian's Asia environmental correspondent and seven months' travelling to almost every corner of China, Watts tries to make sense of the environmental state China is in, and what this means for the rest of the world.

The Diplomat contributor Brian Chapman spoke with Watts about his book—part reporting, part travelogue—about the dark reality of the country’s factory pollution, cancer villages, species loss and emissions hazards. And about what China can do to make its growth green and sustainable.

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