Southeast Asia is a much broader and more diverse region than Northeast Asia or (obviously) China, so it can be hard to keep up with events, particularly when there is so much going on in North Korea, Japan, China, and back here in Washington. So here are a couple recent events worth noting.

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All the political swirl surrounding Liu Xiaobo and his Nobel Peace Prize will soon die down, returning again no doubt when the prizes are actually awarded in December. For me, as I have written in previous postings, the import was as much about Liu, himself, as it was about the potential for the Nobel to act as a catalyst for broader political change within China. However you want to define that change, it is difficult to argue that the country wouldn’t benefit from greater transparency, the rule of law, and some form of real official accountability.
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The New York Times had a short piece yesterday, based on a longer report by Thomson Reuters, about how China is now poised to become the world leader in patent filings by 2011.  There has been a massive expansion of the number of patents filed in China–279,298 in 2009.  More importantly, Chinese firms are now filing within China at a rate almost two times higher than foreign firms.
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On Tuesday, a bombing at an apartment building in Bangkok killed three people and wounded four others. This attack got only minimal coverage in the international media – largely because, over the past six months, bombings have become routine in the Thai capital, which in the past, despite its reputation for sleazy nightlife, was a very safe city. There have been dozens of blasts in Bangkok over the past year (and bombings in regional capitals in Thailand as well), and though the police sometimes round up suspects, usually they seem stumped. “It was likely to have been a bomb but we don’t know which kind and why it was there,” the Thai metropolitan police spokesman told the Straits Times of Singapore. Well, that’s encouraging.

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Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has thrown down the gauntlet. In a fascinating interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Wen committed himself to fight for political reform, even in the face of what he acknowledges is serious adversity. The interview should lay to rest all the speculation surrounding two speeches Wen delivered over the past six months—one in Beijing and one in Shenzhen—that hinted at a newly energized commitment to political change. After these speeches, no-one seemed quite sure whether Wen was actually saying something new. Given that no-one else in the Politburo is saying anything like this—or has in the past twenty years—I think Wen’s remarks qualify as not just new but pathbreaking. Just look at some of what he had to say to Fareed:
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My latest “DC Diary” column is out in India’s financial daily, the Business Standard. And it’s premised on a pretty straightforward question about U.S.-India relations: Now that India has a seat at many of the top tables of international relations, why is America’s dialogue with India less global in scope than with any major power, even China? Read more »

As decision day nears for the Nobel Peace Prize nominations, the Chinese government has gone on high alert. Long-time Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo has once again been floated as a contender for this year’s Peace prize. Liu was trained as a scholar but has made his name by calling for political change—first as a Tiananmen activist and most recently for drafting Charter 08, a wide ranging manifesto for political reform in China. He is now in the midst of serving his third—and at eleven years his longest—prison term.
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