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some effect and the markets for their industrial goods in the developed world had become more difficult; but it did not seem
to be in the forefront of their minds. According to foreign observers there had been an effect on growth rates. As regards increased unemployment, it was difficult to say since there were no reliable statistics; what effects there had been, had probably been absorbed by the multitudes of under-employed.
Political Attitudes
the
9. At the risk of stating the obvious, I found nowhere a sense of Asian-ness among the people I talked to, no feeling of Asian unity, no awareness of a cause which concerned all Asians. Even on the subject of the two major crisis points, Afghanistan and Cambodia, where Asian opinion has been near unanimous in condemnation of Soviet and Vietnamese actions, I was conscious of no widespread feeling of indignation. Indeed, during my South-East Asia visits, Afghanistan was scarcely mentioned (and usually by me at that); same applied to Cambodia in the Sub-Continent. Most countries, in the final analysis, clearly tend to the parochial or, at least, the regional; the wider scene is thought of only fitfully (although Poland was the subject of some worried comment). Thus, Korean re-unification cropped up in Peking and Seoul, but not at all else-
where. ASEAN was hardly mentioned in the Sub-Continent.
An even
more graphic illustration was that Indo-Pakistan difficulties absorbed people's minds in Delhi and Islamabad but were hardly referred
to in Dacca or Colombo.
10. The villain of the piece altered with the locale. In Peking it was the USSR; in Seoul, North Korea; in Hanoi and (albeit much more mildly) Jakarta, it was China; in Bangkok, Vietnam; in
Islamabad and to some extent also in Dacca, India. In Delhi there seemed to be an almost pathological distrust of Pakistan and the USA, occasioned no doubt by the US undertaking to supply F16s to the Pakistan armed forces. Rangoon, Hong Kong, Brunei and Colombo, on the other hand, appeared to have no particular bêtes noires in the foreign context. I came across no overt signs of anti-Japanese
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