Blood and Silk: guest post by Michael Vatikiotis

Journalist and international negotiator Michael Vatikiotis has worked for publications and organisations as various as the Bangkok Post and the BBC World Service. He is also a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is currently based in Singapore where he is the Asia regional director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.

Michael’s new book, Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, explores the dynamics of power and conflict in one of the world's fastest growing regions. It peers beyond brand new shopping malls and shiny glass towers in cities such as Bangkok and Jakarta, to probe the heart of modern Southeast Asia. Why is Malaysia, one of the region's richest countries, riddled with corruption? Why do Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines harbour unresolved violent insurgencies? How do deepening religious divisions in Indonesia and Malaysia affect the region and the rest of the world? What about China's growing influence?

Throughout Blood and Silk Michael offers vivid portraits of the personalities who pull the strings in Southeast Asia. His analysis is always underpinned by his decades of experience in the countries involved.

So, over to Michael…

Backlist books: The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post, the first in the series, is about The Art of War by Sun Tzu. This 2,500-year-old text, less than 11,000 words in total, is broken into thirteen themed sections, each of which contains a list of numbered principles only a sentence or two long. The message, in essence, is "Fight intelligently so you'll always win."

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read it, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

Singapore: Unlikely Power by John Curtis Perry

John Curtis Perry is the Henry Willard Denison Professor of History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has also served as the director of Tufts’ Maritime Studies program and was the founding president of its Institute for Global Maritime Studies. He has written widely on Asia-US relations, particularly on relations between American and Japan. In 1991, the Japanese government awarded him the Imperial decoration of the Order of the Sacred Treasure for his contributions to US-Japan relations.

Perry's latest book Singapore: Unlikely Power, explores the implausibility of Singapore's success. It tracks the meteoric rise of Singapore to the status of first-world dynamo in just three decades, shows how the city-state’s founders adopted a resolutely pragmatic approach to economic development rather than following any one fashionable ideology, and offers an overview of a country that has perfected one of the world's most influential political-economic models, despite its tiny size.

In this guest post, John Curtis Perry considers whether Singapore can offer a model to other countries.

500 words from Kaitlin Solimine

500 words from is an occasional series in which writers talk about their newly-published books.

San Francisco-based Kaitlin Solimine has been a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Fellow in China. She has received several scholarships, awards, and residencies for her writing, which has appeared in a range of publications from the Wall Street Journal, to China Daily. She here talks about her debut novel, Empire of Glass - the Center for Fiction, a New York-based organization devoted to promoting fiction, has longlisted it for their 2017 first novel prize.

Empire of Glass explores recent changes in China through the lens of one family's experiences. In the mid-1990s, an American teenager, named Lao K in Chinese, must decide whether to help her Chinese homestay mother, Li-Ming, who is dying of cancer, in ending her life. Twenty years later, Lao K receives a book written by Li-Ming called Empire of Glass; it chronicles the lives of Li-Ming and her husband, Wang, in pre- and post-revolutionary China over the second half of the twentieth century. Lao K begins translating Empire of Glass. But, as translator, how can she separate fact from fiction, and what will be her own role be in the book?

So, over to Kaitlin…

Q & A: Balli Kaur Jaswal

Balli Kaur Jaswal is a Singaporean novelist of Punjabi extraction.  As a child, she lived all over the world, thanks to her roaming diplomat father. After studying for an undergraduate creative writing degree in the US she continued work on her first novel, Inheritance, during a year spent in the UK, where she was a recipient of the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia – an award made annually to a novelist whose work deals with some aspect of East Asia. She then moved to Australia to do a postgraduate teaching degree in Melbourne, where she met her partner. She ended up staying in Melbourne for 5 years. In 2014, Inheritance won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist Award. She then moved back to Singapore, and in 2015 her second novel Sugarbread was a finalist for the city-state’s richest literary prize, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize.  Her recently-published third novel, Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, was the subject of a hotly-contested auction won by HarperCollins, in London, for a six-figure GBP sum.

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows follows members of the Punjabi immigrant community in the UK as they struggle to negotiate between two cultures. It is set in London, in Southhall, an area which is home to a large Punjabi population. Balli says her novel is about “a group of Punjabi widows who sign up for a literacy class, which quickly evolves into a space where they can speak freely about things that their community considers taboo. At first, their discussions are centred on erotic fantasies but as the trust builds, the women become empowered to break their silence about other injustices in the community.”

Liu Xiaobo

Amongst many other retrospects, tributes and obituaries, click here for the response from The New York Review of Books.

LSE Review of Books bookshop guides

The London School of Economics (LSE) is one of the world’s leading insitutions for the study of social sciences, economics, politics, and related subjects.

LSE Review of Books publishes daily reviews of books across the social sciences, all of them written by experts. This encourages wide public discussion of some of today’s most pressing global issues, including climate change, the struggle against religious fundamentalism, the challenges currently faced by Western-style democracies, the rise of China, how the internet is changing society, and issues connected with maintaining, or promoting, free speech.

The LSE Review of Books also runs an online guide to the world’s best bookshops, which has included contributions on Mumbai, and Fukuoka - and you don’t have to have a connection to the LSE to contribute.