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Two thousand years ago, with only loose translations available, it was difficult to employ the rule of law.
The following is an edited excerpt from a speech given by Yeo to a school in Singapore
Rudyard Kipling said in his famous ballad: "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." Whether we like it or not, the twain are meeting again, and creating and opening a new chapter in history. When we read about the
trade war and
Huawei, and we read about the anti-China - and increasingly anti-Chinese - sentiment in the
United States, one recalls Kipling's famous line. But for him the East was not
China. For him East was
South Asia, where he spent many years of his life.
For my address this morning, I would like to confine the East to the realm of the "chopsticks people". There is a reason for this. There is a coherence to the culture of the chopsticks people.
It is not possible to understand the history of Vietnam, Korea or Japan without reference to the great drama on the Chinese mainland. Japan was the first to peel off from the Asian mainland to address the challenge of Western imperialism. By the time of the second opium war, any Japanese ship landing on the Asian mainland would be inspected by the Europeans, probably a Briton, and Japan knew it was only a matter of time before she would suffer the same humiliation.
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