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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (7345)	10/29/1998 10:50:00 AM
From: Z268	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

Steve, Re: "I don't mind at all if China and Japan slug it out for dominance of Asia, as long as they do it in an economic arena, rather than a military one. I just hope there is sufficient awareness of self-interest in both countries to make that happen." IMHO, economic gunboats seem to be the order of the day. I subscribe to Maslow's theory on the hierarchy of needs. As long as people need not worry about where their next meal is going to come from, they will not resort to violence readily. The arguments, debates and actions then center around the quality of the meal, rather than the quantitative sufficiency of the meal. I think unless the world spirals downward into prolonged depression, mankind has largely lost its appetite for waging physical war. This is why Indonesia is a dangerous case, and can be a potential flash point in Asia, and indeed the world. I read from the latest edition of Kompas that large-scale student demonstrations occurred in six cities in Indonesia yesterday, calling for a change of government, among other things. Meanwhile we hear bizarre stories of a boom in the "monkey brain" trade as Indonesians catch monkeys and sell them to Taiwanese and Korean fisherman, monkey brain being a delicacy among these sailors. We also hear stories of farmers changing to cash crops instead of rice, thus exacerbating the shortage of rice in the country; and of people returning in large numbers to their villages, work in the cities having run out, no doubt in part giving rise to the recent spate of mystery witchcraft killings. It almost sounds to me like China in the 30s to 40s, when famine, food shortages etc were the order of the day, with people then resorting to physical violence to fill their stomachs. During that period in China, inter-village raids and killings were the order of the day. On your point of some Asian countries not becoming client states, I agree with you. To use a stock market analogy, some small companies are attractive takeover targets, others are not (yet)...<gg> Best, Steve