Recording a ‘Battle for Asia’s Soul’
Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion, by humphrey hawksley.
ono) believed in projecting personality or power, and Jokowi, as the current president is popularly known, is no exception.
and the fourth rule: shastry says Indonesia demonstrates that modernity and tradition can peacefully coexist in a nation of 260 million, reminding the reader of the blended, interwoven traditions of Indonesia, where Islam coexists with hinduism, buddhism and Christianity.
To be sure, Indonesia has extremist fundamentalism and potent Islamist forces, and shastry’s view may seem rosy to some. since the bali bombing of 2002, in which 202 people died and 240 were injured, there have been eight major terrorist incidents in Indonesia, killing nearly 100 and injuring about 600 people. Indonesia still has stifling blasphemy rules, under which Jakarta’s ethnic-chinese and Christian governor, basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as ahok, has been jailed. While the prejudice against the Chinese in Indonesia has diminished, it hasn’t disappeared. and yet there haven’t been any incidents of mass violence of the kind that threatened Indonesian unity in the 1960s.
shastry’s central premise is optimistic. Few analysts would have been surprised had the Indonesian nation-state crumbled in 1998. Not only did that not happen, the nation cohered without a strong, authoritarian leader suspending liberties. Instead, Indonesia consolidated and widened its democracy. This does not rule out the return of a strongman — suharto’s former son-in-law, the mercurial retired general Prabowo subianto, who lost the 2014 presidential election, may harbor ambitions to return. and yet, by proving the Cassandras wrong, Indonesia has shown that peaceful coexistence, a feel-good term that sukarno, the country’s first president, spoke about in Indonesia’s early years, is not a mere slogan. Its quiet success needs to be known more widely because it offers a reason for hope in an international environment that seems so bleak. Indonesia, shastry says, is “an archipelago of possibility,” and that is an achievement worthy of applause.
salil tripathi is a writer based in london. he was a correspondent for magazines including the Far Eastern Economic Review in singapore and hong kong between 1991 and 1999. MILLIONS OF bbc VIEWERS are familiar with humphrey hawksley’s reports from across the globe — from Dakar to Dongsha — spanning decades. In Asian Waters, he brings to bear the experiences of a lifetime of watching and analyzing the transformation of asia, where he has spent most of his career as a journalist. Despite the book’s title, it is not merely an addition to the growing collection of books on the south China sea. To hawksley, the contest over the rocky islets is “a battle for the soul of asia that is already rippling across thousands of miles to challenge governments on every continent.” The south China sea “lies at the heart of Chinese global expansion” and is a test of how far China can push the boundaries of international law and get away with it. This timely book offers a panoramic view of asia centered around China’s attempt at regaining its hegemonic role, and concludes with thoughts on the West’s trouble coping with the Chinese challenge to the Westphalian system.
hawksley begins with the story of a Filipino fisherman in the coastal community of Mansiloc in luzon in 2014. The 46-year-old Jurrick Oson was bitter when the Chinese coast guard threw him out of his habitual fishing grounds in scarborough shoal, which falls within China’s expansive claims over the south China sea. losing his livelihood, seeing his wife leave for saudi arabia to work as a domestic helper, the angry fisherman wanted to go to war against China. Three