There has been much speculation as to the degree to which the Indonesian revolt reflects Japanese war-time propaganda. There has been much less mention in this connection of the one and a quarter million Chinese residents in the Indies. Yet, ten years ago many Netherlands colonial officials regarded this community as a fecund source of discontent. They were not altogether inconsistent when they complained, on the one hand, of Chinese “imperialism” and, on the other, of Chinese communism. Evidence of the former they saw, more especially, in the activities of the Chinese Bureau for Overseas Affairs in Nanking. These activities were intended, of course, to strengthen the loyalty of nationals abroad and to give them that protection of the motherland which they had been lacking for centuries. But it was inevitable that they should reflect, and to some extent feed, the resentment over the discriminations experienced by these nationals in every part of the Nan Yang (South Seas). The pamphlets distributed in the 'thirties by the Bureau harped on the “unequal treatment” of Chinese abroad, on the cruelty of many of the immigration laws–including those of the Indies. They did not go in for theoretical discussions and did not advocate socialism. Neither did the textbooks used in many Chinese schools or the subsidized Chinese newspapers, though some of the Shanghai-trained teachers may have been communists.

In early 2013, India's then comptroller and auditor general (CAG), Vinod Rai, while delivering a speech at Harvard University's Kennedy School, wondered whether his office should be confined to being “mere accountants.” That this question could be raised in a public forum, and that too outside India, spoke to the transformation in recent times of Rai's stature and the office that he held. The winds of change were reflected in the Indian Supreme Court's rejection in 2013 of a public interest litigation challenging the authority of the auditor general, who is a constitutional authority, to conduct performance audits of the government. Significantly, the Court ruled, the “CAG is not a munim [accountant] to go into the balance-sheets. The CAG is a constitutional authority entitled to review and conduct performance audit on revenue allocations . . . and examine matters relating to the economy and how the government uses its resources.”

“Your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States … both in military, but economics also,” said Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte to a burst of applause from an audience of officials in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the symbolic seat of China's ruling Communist Party. At the Philippine-Chinese trade forum that same day, October 20, 2016, Duterte opened his speech by asking, “What is really wrong with an American character?” Americans are, he continued, “loud, sometimes rowdy, and they have this volume of their voice … not adjusted to civility…. They are the more forward commanding voice befitting obedience.” Evoking some deep Filipino racialist tropes, Duterte then mocked the flat, nasal American accent and rued the time he was questioned at the Los Angeles airport by a “Black” officer with a “black” uniform, “black shoes,” and a “black” gun. Moving from rhetoric to substance, Duterte quietly capitulated to Beijing's relentless pressure for bilateral talks to settle the dispute over the South China Sea, virtually abrogating Manila's recent slam-dunk win on that issue before an international court (Demick and Wilson 2016; DU30 News 2016).