Pacific Nightmare [antikvár]

FOREWORDFrom the endless steppes of Kazakhstan to the fogbound cliffs of the Kamchatka peninsula, the entire immensity that the rest of the world once called the Far East, and which it now prefers to call the West Pacific, is today in turmcil and in flames. Those who take the long view will say it has always been so, and that what is happening today is no more than the latest in an endless procession of irruptions of violence that tell us much about the nature of the Oriental mind.From the feudal batdes of China's warring states of the fourth century bc to the spread of the Mongol empire under Genghis Khan, from the Boxer Rebellion to the Korean War, from the Taiping Rebellions to the bizarreries of the Cultural Revolution, there seems invariably to have been some all-consuming fight going on somewhere in and around China and her satellites, spreading itself with a perverse magnificence over the pohticians' and the geographers' maps and thereby changing what is written on them, often for ever.This latest outbreak of war and insurrection, with the Greek chorus of torture and banditry and execution and rapine sounding all the while, started with the event that some modern historians like to refer to as the East's Sarajevo - the long-awaited, carefully planned and yet ultimately shocking handover of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to its rightful owners, the People's Republic of China.The Chinese behaved, as no British official had ever publicly supposed they might, with a wanton disregard for the agreement that the two parties had earlier signed over the colony's future - and the news of their behaviour became known some few days before the handover itself. The revelation triggered a wave of violence in Hong Kong - which led in turn to violence within China herself, and then, as the whole world is now only too well aware, to the outbreak of full-scale civil war.