The World Today

Within the five years, the World Wide Web will be dominated by Chinese users, and Chinese language websites. A western invention will have been effectively sinified. This will have a major impact on the content it carries, and the ways it is used, not just in China, but elsewhere.

A collapse in Chinese stock prices in February triggered a wave of selling in global markets. The crisis is a reminder that, although the Japanese economy is still far bigger than China’s, it is on China that the world is now focussing. Japan of the 1980s was confident that Tokyo would become the world’s second – perhaps, even, the leading – financial centre, so why has it actually been losing ground, even within Asia?

Building a successful state after centuries of colonialism and the destruction wrought by a quarter of a century of foreign occupation is daunting. In East Timor it has been made especially difficult by the political legacy of its 1970’s civil war and the persistence of deep- seated ethnic and regional loyalties.

A proposal by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to send peacekeepers to Chad and the Central African Republic has confirmed analysts’ concerns that the Darfur conflict has become a complex proxy war between neighbours. And funding for the latest rounds in the intractable crises is apparently coming from oil.

Letter bombs are sent to various businesses and organisations in Britain, suspicion falls on animal-rights protesters; work begins on a twelve kilometer long security fence around the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm in anticipation of disruption from anti-globalisation protesters at the G8 summit in June; around 1.8 million people sign an e-mail petition to the British Prime Minister against road charging. Discontent is widespread and wide-ranging – protest is clearly alive and kicking.

Turkey is about to face both presidential and parliamentary elections. Many argue that the usual faultlines – the role of the military, secularism, Islam, nationalism and the Kurdish question – change incrementally at best. But mounting evidence is challenging this basic assumption.