26 November 2005

An Explanatory Note About this Blog

Many readers of this blog will ask, quite rightly, why my seeming preoccupation with China in the posts. In fact, at the outset, this post should have been placed as a Foreword to the Blog.

The answer is simple: the media, the US and most other governments are narrowly focused on Iraq and the Middle East and to a great extent ignore the developments in Asia, in particular those involving China.

Most news about China centres on the trade deficit, outsourcing and loss of US jobs to China. These are also salient issues, but there are bigger stakes, political ones, that are having global impact, events that are in play, but being overlooked by a public uneducated and poorly informed by media about the region.

As has often been the case, the world, and chiefly the United States, is generally reactive to events. That is to say, it only takes note of happenings in a region of the world when a crisis is already full blown. The reaction is usually one of shock or surprise and more often than not inappropriate, frequently disastrous and hasty decisions are made by a government merely because it was unprepared to deal with the matter and needed to be seen as in control by a nervous and even more ignorant public.

Thus, although this blog will deal with geopolitical questions throughout the world, I make no apologies for the focus on Asia, and the individual topic of China. The latter looms larger in influence on the world with each passing day and it behoves the public, governments and media to prepare for the consequences by understanding the history and staying abreast of events in that area.

baoluo

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