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Leaders' Tests

The year 2008 will confront many leaders in Asia, especially in Beijing and Islamabad, with exceptionally difficult tests. For the US, stuck with a lame duck president and a tedious election campaign, the tests will not come until a new president enters the White House in January 2009.

The authoritarian leaders in Beijing, who are promoting the Olympic games they will host in August as an emblem of China's arrival as a great power, will be tested by their handling of the hordes of foreign athletes, spectators, and journalists who will descend on the capital.

Chinese political activists are almost certain to draw attention to China's violations of human rights while religious activists, such as Falun Gong, will most likely find ways to protest the regime's repression of freedom of worship.

It may be 1989 all over again. Advocates of democracy camped in Tiananmen square in central Beijing attracted foreign press and TV coverage from news teams who had journeyed to China to report on the visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. When demonstrations erupted and were put down brutally, the news flashed around the world.

Moreover, China's leaders may find it hard to conceal their nation's economic shortcomings that were recently outlined in a World Bank report, or its corruption, civil unrest, censorship, pollution and other environmental problems.

Across the continent, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, or his successor if he does not survive in office, will be tasked to hold together a country threatening to split apart after the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. At the very least, the Pakistani leader will need to establish some semblance of order in that stricken nation.

The test that much of the rest of the world is watching is whether Pakistan's stash of nuclear weapons, reported to number 60, can be kept away from terrorists such as those of al Qaida, the Taliban, or others who may be operating in Pakistan. Pakistani military officers say they have control of the weapons-but the allegiance of some officers may be in doubt.

Back in East Asia, a new president in Taiwan is scheduled to be elected in March and to take office in May. A critical task will be to decide whether to rebuild relations with the US, the ultimate guarantor of Taiwan's de facto separation from China and, if so, to figure out how to go about it.

The incumbent, President Chen Shui-bian, has shown calculated disregard for Washington's efforts to maintain a balance between China and Taiwan. Moreover, both his political party and the opposition party have, in the eyes of many US officials, been lax in preparing to defend Taiwan from a China that has repeatedly threatened to use military force to conquer the island.

In Seoul, similar tasks will confront President-elect Lee Myung-bak when he takes office in February. The current president, Roh Moo-hyun is regarded by US officials as having been anti-American throughout his term. He has disparaged South Korea's alliance with the US and adopted a policy toward North Korea that borders on appeasement.

North of the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, the leader of the regime in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il will continue to be confronted with at least two difficult decisions. One is whether to give up his nuclear weapons, which he has given little sign he is ready to do.

The other is to survive in power and to name a successor. Whiffs of civil unrest due to near starvation and hints of dissent, including from the army that assures Kim's power, occasionally waft out of that dark and isolated land but they are so fleeting that no one gives them much credence. His father, Kim Il Sung, assured Kim Jong Il's rise to power by appointing him successor long before he passed away.

In Southeast Asia, Islamic terrorists in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia promise to keep leaders awake at night. If the past is any indication, those who hold office in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, won't be of much help in defeating the terrorists.

Americans, preoccupied with their own politics, may have little to say about how the pressing issues of Asia are met during this year. Indeed, the new US president will most likely find himself or herself having to plunge into a thicket of changes in Asia over which the US has had little or no influence.

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Related Topics: china | election 2008 | foreign policy | pakistan |

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