Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion

by Humphrey Hawksley

There was no Pan-Asian identity that united Chinese, Indians, Japanese, or Papua New Guineans, and very little in culture, food, language, or religion that gave India and China shared common ground. Instead there was the mistrust of neighbors. South Asia still tolerates practices like forced marriage or the stoning to death of couples who fall in love and thereby offend family honor;4 the tradition of chhaupadi, when a menstruating girl or woman is banned from the home, from touching others, or from going to school5; and bonded labor, in which millions of the very poorest live in conditions defined by the UN as slavery.6 While these practices are technically illegal and have been cleared up in many parts of the modernizing world, governments of South Asia have done little or nothing to stop them.