From his office in Southern California, Joseph Song, vice president at Boeing Defense, Space, and Security, oversees the development and execution of Boeing’s biggest defence campaigns in the Asia-Pacific, straddling the interests of both policymakers in Washington and buyers in a region that makes up about 50 percent of the company’s international revenue derived.

Boeing, like many Western military exporters, is repositioning itself to compensate for future declines in defence budgets in the European Union and the United States. According to Song, this has increased the importance of the overall international sector at Boeing. ‘Seven years ago, international business wasn’t a big concern for Boeing,’ Song says. ‘It was approximately 7 percent of our revenue. Since then, we’ve shifted and it has grown to 17 percent of our revenue.’

‘Our goal is to get that number to 25 percent in the next several years,’ he says. ‘We need to be more global.’

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Asia is at a crossroads. The region has achieved remarkable economic success in recent years, and now accounts for 27 percent of global GDP. The Asian Development Bank expects Asia’s GDP will increase nine-fold, from $16 trillion in 2010 to $148 trillion in 2050, to account for half of global GDP by the middle of this so-called ‘Asian Century.’

This prosperity is the result of a combination of successful integration into the world economy, high saving rates, and capital accumulation. Yet realization of the Asian Century isn’t guaranteed, and there are three major challenges to attaining the ADB’s expected growth numbers:inflation, the burdens of population growth, and growing wealth disparities. These factors could, according to the ADB, see Asia’s share of global GDP stall at 32 percent.

The ADB warns that inflation will remain one of the biggest policy challenges, noting that it could create worrying social tensions. Inflation typically involves rising food prices and exacerbatesinequality. Two-thirds of the world’s poor are concentrated in developing Asia, and they are particularly susceptible to price changes. The recent turmoil in the Middle East has pushedup oil prices further. In addition, inflation makes it difficult for Asian countries to keep labour cheap, something that has helped the region’s economic growth. Bangladeshi, Chinese, and Indian workers are demanding higher wages, which will in turn increase production costs. Central banks in Asia therefore need tighter monetary policy as well as more flexible exchange rates.

Three weeks after the fatal high-speed train crash in Wenzhou, China, a fierce and wide-ranging debate is taking place on the country’s micro-blogs over issues including train safety, corruption, governance and compensation plans.

The March 11 disaster has brought with it yet another unwelcome side effect – an uptick in cybercrime.

Since the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, members of the public have been receiving virus-infected emails supposedly with information about the disaster, but which are actually being used to steal information. Some of the emails merely claim to be from government bodies, while others are sophisticated enough to look like they’ve been sent from government email accounts.

It’s not clear where exactly these emails are originating – some have used Chinese and South Korean access points, for example. But regardless, it’s essential that the government properly utilizes a new cybercriminal law to crack down on the problem, while promoting cooperation with the international community.

The new law is overdue. Up until the middle of July, Japan had no legislation for punishing those who create or keep computer viruses without good reason, which prevented Tokyo from actually joining the Convention of Cybercrime – the first international treaty on the issue – despite it having signed up in 2001.

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Back in 1992, current Supreme Allied Commander Europe Adm. James Stavridis wrote: ‘We need an air sea battle concept centred on an immediately deployable, highly capable, and fully integrated force – an Integrated Strike Force’.

Ever since then, the AirSea Battle concept has been evolving, with the first military exercises tied to the concept set to take place next February. While details of the operational plans remain unclear, we do know that it embraces a war fighting capability aimed at countering an enemy’s anti-access/area denial strategy by penetrating defences and taking out targets in its interior.

The idea is to destroy the source of the enemy’s firepower while degrading its command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissancecapabilities. The saturation of the enemy’s defences through coordinated strikes by both the Navy and the Air Force would allow aircraft and submarines to strike land-based missile systems and command and control centres.  

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China is catching up quickly in terms of technological innovation, and indeed is on the verge of becoming a global leader. This reality has sparked increasing concern over the future of Western leadership in science and technology.

The United States has approached the problem mainly from a national security perspective, trying to limit scientific cooperation with China in order to avoid the transfer of technologies that also have potential military applications. Europeans, in contrast, have turned science and technology cooperation with China into one of the pillars of the so-called strategic partnership that was established between the two sides back in 2003.

While the United States worries about security, economic considerations are the major driving force behind the overall European strategy of engagement with China, and not just in the technology field. China is now the EU’s second biggest trading partner behind the United States, while the EU is China’s No. 1 trading partner. The financial crisis has further strengthened the economic relationship, with successful export-oriented economies like Germany becoming ever more dependent on the Chinese market.

As with any bilateral relationship, China and North Korea have good reasons to cooperate, but also potential sources of conflict. Conventional wisdom suggests that although China has many issues with North Korea, it still has greater incentives to ensure the survival of the regime. But to get a better understanding of the situation, perhaps it would be better to turn that logic on its head: despite there being an array of reasons for China to support North Korea, what potential problems are there that could deepen the political gap between the two countries?

The potential sources of conflict can be explored on two levels. At the purely bilateral level, China has experienced numerous problems along its border with North Korea. Economic relations, often taken as evidence of China’s vigorous support of North Korea, are also a growing source of friction due to the significant trade imbalance between the two countries. At the international level, meanwhile, North Korea’s increasingly bold military provocations, and its continuing nuclear programme, have adversely affected China’s own reputation. In addition, US alliances with South Korea and Japan have been strengthened as a result of the Kim Jong-il regime’s provocations. China is no doubt extremely frustrated with such developments.

Of course, the border issues between China and North Korea are at times no less messy than those with the 14 other countries that abut China. Still, there are two reasons why the North Korean border sometimes proves particularly tricky.

The first reason is illegal activity involving North Korean government agents. Among other illicit activities, Office 39 of the Korean Workers’ Party is believed to be involved in illegal weapons trading through foreign trading companies, gold smuggling, drug trafficking, and the distribution of so-called super dollars – nearly perfect forgeries of US banknotes. Second, these illegal activities are closely intertwined with one another. For example, massive human trafficking is linked with illegal border crossings by North Korean defectors. The smuggling of contraband, meanwhile, has caused serious corruption problems as it involves officials who are in charge of border management on both sides. In addition, drug trafficking from North Korea is closely connected with China’s criminal organizations not only along the border, but across the entire country.

Some researchers liken China to a rooster, with Korea as its beak and Vietnam its leg. The analogy, while highlighting the strategic importance of Vietnam toward China’s well-being, especially in terms of security, also implies that Vietnam has long been living with the weight of China on its shoulder. The problem is that Vietnam can’t do much about it, even if it wants to.

Just like Cuba to the United States or Georgia to Russia, Vietnam is, in Prof. Carlyle Thayer’s words, condemned to a ‘tyranny of geography,’ whereby it has no choice but to learn to share its destiny with neighbouring China through every twist and turn of its history.

In fact, a stronger China has long been the most serious threat to Vietnam’s security. Vietnam came under Chinese suzerainty for almost a thousand years until 938 A.D. Between then and the French colonization of Vietnam in the latter half of the 19th century, China invaded and occupied Vietnam a couple of times. But the most recent testimony in support of the idea that China is a major source of insecurity has been the brief yet bloody war that China waged along Vietnam’s northern border in 1979, and the naval clash initiated by China in the South China Sea in March 1988.

The threat posed by China toward Vietnam comes not only from geographical proximity, but also the asymmetry of size and power between the two countries. China is, for example, 29 times larger than Vietnam, while Vietnam’s population, despite being the 14th biggest in the world, is roughly equivalent to that of a mid-sized Chinese province.

The permanent settlement of foreigners is an emerging reality that South Korea is now acknowledging. With over 150,000 migrant wives and over 500,000 migrant workers, the government is scrambling to find a multicultural vision that will prevent looming racial and social discord. But with a fragmented multicultural policy and intergovernmental wrangling, as well as a society that still holds immature views of its supposed ethnic homogeneity, South Korea is facing a future it may not be ready for.

Currently, a third of all marriages occurring in South Korea’s rural areas involve migrant wives—mostly from China and Southeast Asia—who have been matched with South Korean men. An increasing gender imbalance tilting toward males ensures this phenomenon will continue, with jarring implications for the myth of Korean ethnic homogeneity.

In June, the government announced that the number of children with at least one parent of non-Korean heritage reached 150,000 this year, a number that has increased fourfold over the last four years. They are expected to number over 1.6 million by 2020, with a third of all children born that year the offspring of international unions.

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To help control potential armed conflicts in the South China Sea, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has recently pressed China to conclude a Code of Conduct (COC) to replace the Declaration of Conduct (DOC) of Parties in the South China Sea that was signed between ASEAN and China in 2002.

Negotiations on the COC have long been delayed by China’s unwillingness to be constrained by such a document, but ASEAN’s northern neighbour seems recently to be more cooperative over the issue, and discussions have made more rapid progress as a result. The COC will therefore be high on the agenda of the ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Bali this week, and is expected to be finalized before the ASEAN summit in November. The hope is that an agreement will be in place to mark the 20th anniversary of ASEAN-China dialogue relations.

The key rationale for ASEAN pursuing the COC with China is its supposedly higher legal standing compared with the DOC, a document that reflects parties’ political will rather than their legal commitments. ASEAN hopes that the more legally binding COC will encourage China to refrain from resorting to force or other coercive measures in resolving disputes with ASEAN claimant states over the South China Sea.