Let’s talk fat, geopolitical fat. Strategists rarely see geopolitical “fat tail” events coming. They are so unlikely to happen that we ignore their possibility. A second usage of “geopolitical fat” literally means Western imperial powers grubbily making a feast of the resources of Asia. Third, for the journalist Dennis Bloodworth, “geopolitical fat” denoted a protective lining of territory through which ran the vital Ho Chi Minh Trail, the pipeline for men and weapons to be fed into South Vietnam. It was all about pipelines and supply routes, and soon the fat was properly in the fire.
The worst that could happen to the region, or to the world, is a risk known as a geopolitical “fat tail” event becoming a reality. Coined as recently as 2009, “fat tails” mean that the risk of a particular event occurring is so unlikely, and so difficult to predict, that we choose to ignore its possibility. Yet, these unlikely political risk events happen more often than we expect. So, it is necessary for policymakers, companies, and investors to understand them and manage the political risk. To know “fat tails” better, I would recommend that you read The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing (Oxford University Press, 2009) by political scientists Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat, if you already haven’t done so. A statistical concept, most “fat tails” occur at the ends of a distribution curve plotted on a graph. The danse macabre of violent politics in many geographies should make us understand that the geopolitics of the region is not reassuringly thin, but has become dangerously “fat.”
The peripatetic British journalist Dennis Bloodworth in his fluent turn of phrase had spoken of “geopolitical fat” back in the 1960s, although in another context and with a different meaning. Bloodworth wrote of the “fat” to literally mean Western imperial powers grubbily making a feast of the resources of Asia. Bloodworth also meant it in the scenario of Laos being a “pushover” in the Second Indochina War, but Vietnam “did not push.”[1] He explained, “Some 40,000 North Vietnamese regular troops and up to 29,000 pro Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas dominated much of the territory, but they were not deployed to conquer it. Their task was to hold a protective lining of geopolitical fat in the northern and eastern provinces of the kingdom [of Laos],” an area through which ran the vital Ho Chi Minh Trail, the pipeline for men and weapons to be fed into South Vietnam. It was all about pipelines and supply routes, and soon the fat was properly in the fire.
We must remember that a “fat tail” is an event that seems unlikely to occur, but when it does, it causes havoc—like the global financial crisis, or to an extent the Great Depression of the 1930s, to go further back. Where will the next “fat tail” wag? Will it wag in China? The United States? Or another power?
When even the last claps of the thunderous Asian monsoon failed to douse the flames of conflict in some parts of the region, and Autumn brought a mild chill to the burning places, we again turned to young scholars, early career professors, seasoned journalists, and old Asia hands to lead the way in producing deeply researched columns and articles on topics connecting parts of the Eastern World. Gazing at the region’s imperilled oceans, mountains, plants, and indigenous cultures, our eye travels to its geopolitical fat that is crying out for urgent attention.
From geopolitical risks we turn to a country that has taken a fast escalator to economic prosperity in three decades after landmark elections of 1993 restored peace. Cambodia now enjoys social and political stability, as the Rising Asia Distinguished Lecturer, Mouly Ieng, shows in his speech which we have published in its entirety. Mr. Mouly Ieng is currently a Senior Minister in charge of special missions and is the Chair of the National AIDS Authority of Cambodia. He was the architect of the Cambodian Government’s policy to fight against HIV/AIDS, leading Cambodia to reach its 90-90-90 target by 2017. He was a Member of the Supreme National Council of Cambodia and one of the twelve Cambodian co-signatories of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements that led to the establishment of a new Cambodia, with a multi-party system of democracy. As the Minister of Information from 1993-1998, he was instrumental in authoring the Press Law for the freedom of the Press in Cambodia. In his speech, he takes us on a long journey from his country’s ancient past, through its twentieth century turmoil, and finally to its present state of peace and prosperity.
In this issue, the editorial writer for The Straits Times, Asad Latif, argues that there is much that India should do if its “Project Mausam” is to serve as the blueprint of the Act East policy, in the same way as the history of China’s Maritime Silk Road underpins its Belt and Road Initiative strategy. Latif, who studied at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, explains that the Indian Ocean must not remain Indian only in name but must serve as the natural maritime expression of India’s national interest. India, he posits, can employ the “neo-Curzonian” potential of contemporary Indian foreign policy which is premised on a logic of centrality in India’s dealings with major powers in seeking access and leverage from East Africa to Pacific Asia by building links with neighboring regions.
Julie Banerjee Mehta, former lecturer at the University of Toronto who presently teaches at Loreto College in Kolkata, celebrates in her column the 80th birthday, this September, of the Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist and poet, Michael Ondaatje. She writes that a strange friendship between reader and writer over thirty-odd years is cause for celebration. It does not matter that we have never met, she writes because “he walked by my side during some of my toughest times when I felt the pain of separation from my family when I came to live in Canada.” Ondaatje’s memorable lines in The English Patient come to mind, to heal us, to repair our fractured world: “We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”
A former Resident Editor of The Telegraph of Kolkata covering the Indian Northeast, Sudipta Bhattacharjee, turns her attention to the traditional indigenous culture of the Indian Northeast. She interviews traditional musicians of the state of Meghalaya, as well as young performers, to discover how the traditional music and musical instruments of the state are being popularized among the younger generation, leading to a current resurgence of an ancient artform that has a rich folkloric oral history.
In our research articles, Tian Mashuang, a PhD student in the Department of History, School of Humanities at Tsinghua University, Beijing, writes the first article of his two-part series telling the story of the beginning of the South Asian tea industries through botanical imagination and incubation. Using archives in multiple countries, the two articles rewind the history of universal botanist entrepreneurship through the journey of the tea plant across the Bengal region. Mashuang’s first article sketches how during the late-eighteenth and the early-nineteenth centuries, botanists depicted blueprints of tea planting and wrote up business plans. Botanists lobbied the British colonial authorities in India and Ceylon to encourage and experiment on tea cultivation, and ignited public enthusiasm for the tea planting business in the region. To research his tea series, Mashuang has traveled since January 2023 to Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom, and hopes to continue his expedition to other tea producing countries such as India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Japan, and Brazil. Through research, he expects to reconnect the global migration of tea plants with China’s “Huizhou tea” and Pu’er tea” in the future, and to witness how the tea plant unites modern global humanity.
HM Izhar Alam, a PhD scholar in the Department of Political Science at Aligarh Muslim University, investigates the state of Manipur where he grew up and which, at press-time, was embroiled in a raging, unchecked communal war. Taking a broad view that goes beyond the present conflagration, Izhar Alam notes that there has been a remarkable decline in insurgency-related violence across the Indian Northeast owing to negotiated agreements with armed groups, and the desire of young people to find jobs and seek a life of prosperity amid visible signs of construction of new physical infrastructure, as well as buoyant economic growth and rising literacy in many Northeastern states. Manipur’s good economic growth, however, is imperilled by a new cycle of violence between the majority Meitei community and the state’s tribal communities since May 2023. Employing phenomenological hermeneutic analysis, the author argues that national security concerns play a major role in shaping development efforts, and examines the multifaceted nature of the conflicts, encompassing ethnic clashes, poverty, unemployment, political instability, extortion by insurgent groups, corruption, and the use of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act under which the military tackles active insurgencies. In the end, Izhar Alam explores innovative approaches to end the conflict in the Northeast, arguing as well that the impressive economic growth and development indicators in Manipur, and in a few other Northeastern states, make the forging of peace a real possibility.
Kendall Belopavlovich, a doctoral candidate of the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture program at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, explores the gender and sexuality boundary work of Japanese shōjo anime series Ouran High School Host Club (2006) through theoretical perspectives of Judith Butler’s performativity theory and Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory. Kendall explains that at the same time that Ouran first aired, the Akihabara district in Tokyo was alive with a vibrant dansō community which has only recently been researched for the first time. Kendall argues that Ouran successfully operates within a dominant paradigm of shōjo conventions in order to create space for two new performances of the shōjo, which disrupt the shōjo myth. These performances, Kendall explains, are Haruhi’s dansō identity, and Tamaki’s shōjo identity. Viewers can still identify the show within shōjo genre conventions. However, Kendall explains that it is within this comfortable space that the series is able to develop each character with significant depth and create non-normative performances of gender and sexuality.
The scholar and regular Rising Asia Journal book reviewer, Vinod Kumar Pillai, reviews When East Asia Meets Southeast Asia: Presence and Connectedness in Transformation Revisited, edited by Yumi Kitamura, Alan H. Yang, and Ju Lan Thung (Singapore: World Scientific, 2023). Vinod explains that the book offers a very different perspective that looks at the flow of people, investments, and socio-cultural connectedness between these regions. The editors acknowledge that the political landscape in East and Southeast Asia in the coming decades is unpredictable, but they contend that “the dynamics of flows between the two transcend politics.” Their hope is that the book “displays the richness of those flows from both historical and contemporary perspectives and sheds light on the further understanding of the configuration of regionalism in East and Southeast Asia.” Vinod explains that the book focuses on the practical and the doable, and examines the historical and emerging relationship between East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) and Southeast Asia (Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) against the backdrop of “the rise of people-centred connectedness in shaping the international and regional order.”
Gurjit Singh, who was posted as India’s ambassador to Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), reviews Winning Hearts and Minds: Public Diplomacy in ASEAN, edited by Sue-Ann Chia (Singapore International Foundation, 2022). Gurjit explains that Public Diplomacy involves branding so that governments may improve their image and attain their longer-term policy objectives. The Cambodian government, for instance, would not like to be seen as authoritarian and would use its public diplomacy to alter this image. Another aim of public diplomacy is advocacy, which uses several tactics to seek a change in the international perception of a country and of its public towards its leadership, its institutions, and its achievements. When a new leader takes over in a country like Jokowi did in Indonesia in 2014, or Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in 2016, a conscious effort was made by such countries to provide a new impetus to the recognition of their leaders, their policies, and how they would impact their neighborhood, the region, and the wider world.
Himadri Lahiri, Professor of English in the School of Humanities at Netaji Subhas Open University in Kolkata, reviews Koushik Goswami’s, Reimagining Tibet: Politics of Literary Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 2023). Lahiri views the book as a revisionist exercise that critiques the ‘imaginings’ of earlier “regimes of representation,” and provides a picture of how new fictional and non-fictional works written largely by exiled Tibetan authors contest age-old ideas about the country and its people. Speaking generally of the West, Goswami argues that Tibet, which remained “hidden” from the eyes of the “civilized” world for a long time, had been imagined as steeped in mystery. Mythicized as a place of the yeti and the Shangri-La, it had been a site of conjectures, fantasies, and even desires.
Salikyu Sangtam, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tetso College in Dimapur, India, reviews China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter, edited by Kerry Brown and Gemma Chenger Deng (Singapore and London: World Scientific, 2022). Salikyu believes that this is a timely volume about a topic, a nation-state, a civilization that is hard to ignore, given its influential role in the world today. The reviewer writes that the book is opportune precisely because the shape and structure of the twenty-first-century world may be largely determined by what China does or does not do. Gaining knowledge of this context may, perhaps, enable readers to appreciate the annotated anthology of excerpts from European merchants, clergymen, missionaries, priests, philosophers, psychologists, and literary theorists who wrote and had interest, receptive or antagonistic, in China as a culture and civilization. Some of these views continue to resonate and constitute what China is for the Europeans and the West, in general.
Rising Asia Journal is delighted to announce the revamping and strengthening of our Books section, under the new title of “The Rising Asia Review of Books,” and the creation of a new “The Rising Asia Roundtable Review” to serve as a platform for comprehensive discussions by scholars and analysts of new books.
We welcome research articles, columns, and book reviews in our fields of interest. Please see our “Submission Policy” https://www.rajraf.org/submission-policy
[1] Dennis Bloodworth, An Eye for the Dragon: Southeast Asia Observed 1954-73 (Penguin, 1970), 74.
