 There's two things that I worry about. One is increasingly sharp economic inequality across the region. For many years we thought of Asia as a region in which there was rapid rises in income and reasonably fairly distributed income by world standards. That's no longer the case. Asia's becoming, in certain parts of it in particular, most conspicuously China, is becoming quite sharply unequal. And that sooner or later is likely to have social and political consequences. That's one thing I worry about and I don't think we give enough attention to. Another thing that I worry about, again, linking to my research, is I think most of us have in our mind an image of government across Asia, whichever particular parts of the region people are interested in. And it's an image of government which is, by the standards of the developing world, very capable government, quite competent executive government. And I think that's decreasingly true. I think it's becoming less and less the case that government in Asia is really capable. That the scariest part of the future, not only in Asia but also in Asia, is external sources of instability. I worry less about what's going to happen within the country or even in the region than I do with the destabilizing external event, trend, intervention, accident even, that will provoke reactions that are actually negative in their consequences, not only for Asia but for other places. I say that as a historian. So often some of the things that we foresee in a straight line from the present to the future are derailed by things that we can't foresee. And so I worry more about external shake-ups than I do about internal shifts. Water. Water is a very big issue. I've been working for a long time on environmental problems in China and looking at climate change, looking at the energy security issues related to that. And I've come to the realization that perhaps what is most critical is what is most essential to human survival, that of water. And it's not only China, it's Asia as a whole. Asia has fairly abundant water resources, but of course on a per capita basis it's really quite small. The smallest of any continent, something like 2,800 cubic meters per person. And the problem is that that water is unevenly distributed within countries and across countries. So the question is how to get water from one place to another and that can cause a lot of concern. But increasingly as there is a competition over the uses of that water not only for livelihoods, for irrigation, but for hydropower I think we're going to see more tensions. What worries me most is that particularly where I've been working in the Himalayas there are real lack of institutions for mediating some of those tensions over water. I think the major issues that would keep me up at night is growing resource and growing population imbalance. In China, for example, the female male ratio is increasingly skewed and it will present the possibility of massive social problems in the future which may require or at least elicit political responses that will not be useful for anybody. And a link to this in a kind of ironic way is the fact that the growing prosperity of East Asia, of Asia in general is nowhere being matched by the growing availability of global resources. Hence there is an effect, a growing shortage of resources on the basis of economic development which again is a kind of ironic or indeed paradoxical circumstance. Well actually it's just one particular issue. I'm really concerned about migrant populations in Thailand that are from Burma because a lot of my field work has been done amongst these people so I know them personally. There's 300,000 estimated ethnic Shahn migrants in Northern Thailand, a total of close to 2 million people from Burma in Thailand and if all of these opening up so-called democratic transitions are just window dressing to appease to western countries in Burma and the Thai government decides to crack down on refugee camps and migrant workers from Burma that are in Thailand, this really could have very serious, very sobering effects for those people. So there's this part of me that constantly wonders if these democratic transitions aren't for real what are going to be the consequences for people in the border areas. It is the rising nationalism among various Asian nations that worries me quite a bit and this nationalism not only involves territorial claims that historically that each country would have on others but also the kind of the emotional side of the nationalism that is beyond rational consideration and particularly with China, the country I'm more interested in, I study most and as China's economic rises at the middle class growing as more Chinese getting richer and China's power becomes stronger in the region that you naturally have a certain group of Chinese, especially young people has a very strong nationalistic feelings and that of course doesn't go too well with the other neighbors which also has granted, also have a similar kind of nationalistic trend on the rise among its younger generation be it in Korea, be it in Japan or Vietnam and elsewhere, neighboring countries so China's rise has caused both the Chinese themselves and the neighboring countries be kind of this feeling of distrust because nationalism sometimes brews this distrust that distrust was worrisome because that could spell eel in the region in terms of security, in terms of other kind of interactions among the countries No question is climate change I really do worry about the impact of climate change and as someone who works on Philippine politics let me just use the Philippines as an example historically the Philippines is a land of extraordinary biodiversity it's been called Galapagos Islands times 10 just in terms of the rich diversity if you look at what's happened to the Philippine environment over the past century or so first of all it's a country that is one of the most natural disaster-prone countries in the world so there's already a number of strains that are there but over the past half century or so all of the deforestation, all of the ways in which watersheds have been destroyed the way in which coastal environments have been destroyed already the Philippine government and the Philippine political system has shown itself to be not very effective in dealing with those environmental problems now comes fourth climate change and the Philippines is the third most affected country in the world in terms of populations that will be affected by sea level rise after China and India so when we think of that, when we know that the natural disasters are there the regular issues that we know about these mega typhoons that are coming through bringing forth such extraordinary flooding, mudslides and all sorts of things that makes me lose sleep at night what keeps me up at night is the potential for transnational issues to wreak havoc in Southeast Asia whether it comes to avian influenza or climate change those sorts of issues have the potential to do horrific damage on Southeast Asia as you may know, Southeast Asia is a locus point for avian influenza Indonesia has suffered more deaths from avian influenza than any other countries the World Health Organization predicts that a mild pandemic if it were to occur could kill anywhere from three to seven million people a more severe one could kill 40 million worldwide countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand have varying ability, capacity, both technical and political to grapple with this many of them for both political and economic reasons have not taken sufficient measures to both impose surveillance mechanisms and then lay out pandemic preparation plans that have any hope of really making a dent as we saw in the case of swine flu when a pandemic is announced countries in the West, both the US and others tend to ensure that their citizens are first in line for the drugs that their pharmaceutical companies produce so if in fact we were to see a pandemic outbreak of something like avian influenza I think that could have impacts of such a horrific nature that keeps me awake at night about us Australia and many other countries in the region mismanaging China's rise including the Chinese mismanaging their own rise and getting those the transition wrong moving from relatively prosperous region now with the trends in general in a good direction towards more volatile unstable transition one of my concerns is that China's rapid growth, rapid emergence as a global power is coming after a generation, more than a generation of relative isolation and the instability that this is already causing and the instability that this might continue to cause is something that keeps me up at night in particular whether or not global institutions and other powers, western powers in particular are able to accommodate China's emergence and what I think will be an increasing demand by China to have a global voice commensurate with its size and economic resources, economic influence and one of the things that I fear is that if global institutions if the other powers in the world are unable to accommodate China given the fact that China's authoritarian government depends so much on nationalism for its legitimacy I fear that there could be serious conflicts in the future This is directly related to my research and it's really the misunderstanding that the Chinese government has about the threat of Tibetan Buddhism to the stability of China as some people have pointed out already Tibetan autonomous regions are one quarter of the Chinese territory so they are justifiably concerned about this area as needing stability but they seem to misunderstand Tibetan Buddhism as being a threat and not understand, so most of my work is focused on the history of relations with Tibetan religious institutions and leaders with ruling states based in Beijing and the very positive past that has been up to the 20th century and the challenges to communicate this idea to the rulers today that there can be a positive way for managing these relationships and tightening is not the correct way we see the tighter things get, the worse things are so that's what keeps me up