The Yi Jing: the Canon of Changes, the ancient Chinese book of worldly wisdom, describes life as nothing but conflict; in other words, life in all its forms cannot be sustained without conflict of all kinds, be it internal or external in nature. This might sound like the unending bane of those who cannot reconcile themselves to a world without some hope of lasting peace, but an analysis of any given period in history would necessarily confirm this Taoist dictum. Conflict, as everybody knows, engenders violence, whether extraneous as in natural disasters or brought on through the agency of self-inflicted acts. Here, in this issue, we’re inevitably confronted by the choice of how individuals and nations, leaders and the led, oppressors and victims have had recourse to this basic elemental tool to wreak change in, for instance, self-hood or national independence, both, by the way, in many cases being willfully chimerical pursuits. If this state of never-ending conflictual confrontation were limited only to the individual, we could see our way out of difficulty without much damage to the world at large. Alas, this’s not the case as we know only too well. The greatest damage - barring manifestations of Nature’s growing pains - is primarily inflicted by countries upon other countries. Countries often form themselves into blocs of nations, either founded upon religious affinities and/or ethnicities, or on the other extreme, based upon secular ideologies. In some cases, weaker nations, either for the sake of protection or for fear of encroachment upon their internal affairs by overly-protective interfering - but self-justifying - nations, merely attach themselves to the benefactor bloc. For the better part of Asia, the bête noire or nemesis during the past half a century or so has been America or rather that part of America which has traditionally concentrated power in the realms of high finance.