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The slow-motion revolution

Murderous though May and the months before it were in Bangkok, this was not 1989 as it spontaneously rose in Beijing. Casualties were measured in Thai tens, not Chinese thousands.…

Who knows what happens in the shadows?

One hopes Stern Hu will keep a diary, a little red book if you will, of the dark years he’ll endure in his Chinese gulag, ruminating on the less-than-edifying events…

Dubai’s debt crisis

At Dubai’s soaring, spurious peak, one factoid the emirate’s bling-burdened battalion of ‘corporate communications consultants’ liked to slip to junketing media was that Dubai had the world’s densest concentration of…

After the war comes Sri Lanka’s refugee crisis

Last week at her bowls club, in a bucolic town in Victoria’s whitebread Western District, my mother mentioned to ‘the girls’ that I’d soon be in town for a school…

Indonesia’s elite has too much to lose from addressing its actions in East Timor

A friend, recently visiting Jakarta for the first time, surveyed this ugly, chaotic and most inappropriate of metropolises. As we edged our way through the gridlock clogging the fetid sepia…

The Stern Hu affair is a worrying preview of a world run on China’s rules

They are faraway times now, but before Stern Hu was interred in the bowels of a Shanghai star chamber, maybe he sampled the beaches of southern Sri Lanka, or trekked…

City Life

I feel like Forrest Gump, a barometer of Asian Armageddon. I’ve come to South Korea via Sri Lanka, where the triumphant Rajapakse brothers were parading the bullet-ridden body of Tamil…

Fear and incomprehension still dominate our perception of Asia

An old friend of mine, a self-made corporate tyro embedded at the Big End of Sydney, asked me recently why I bother writing from miserable, crisis-racked places like Afghanistan, Sri…

Everest: a risky business

You exited the bank just in time. The boltholes in Gloucestershire and Tuscany look after themselves, as do the family. You’re bored with your expensive toys and you’re not even…

Campaign fever and the corruption crackdown make Indonesia sweat

With landmark elections due next week in Indonesia, I recently got a rich taste of how grassroots politics really works here.

Moving to Jakarta, we’d hired a flotilla of domestic…