THE world has changed so much over the past two decades that historians are having a tough time keeping up with these changes and recording them for posterity.

It is interesting to note that if one were to walk into any library today, and look at the works that were written about Asian politics and economics in the 1990s, many of them have already become dated and irrelevant.

The most evident quirk is the relative silence on the future role of China, and how China may evolve in the decades to come. Up to the 1990s, notwithstanding the alarmist rhetoric of the likes of Samuel Huntington who forecast a “clash of civilisations” between East and West, there were few analysts who predicted the meteoric rise of China as a major economic power in Asia, as it has now become. Few even considered the likelihood of China becoming the No.1 trading partner of many of the economies of Southeast Asia as it is today.

… The writer is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and visiting fellow at Isis Malaysia.