TOKYO, Nov. 12 Kyodo gooded edit...

TOKYO, Nov. 12 Kyodo

gooded editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

ASEAN'S LAST CHANCE (The Japan Times, an English-language daily)

Officially, economic matters topped the agenda at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, held earlier this month in Phnom Penh In fact, the real issue was the organization's long-term survival.

sum of two units issues are critical for ASEAN member states, and the pair were on the agenda this time. The first is terrorism.

The bombings in Bali, Indonesia and Thailand in newly come weeks should have awakened the couple holdout governments to the fact that no nation is immune to this scourge. There is ample evidence that terrorist disposes have created networks throughout the region: the U claim that Southeast Asia is ''the next to the first front'' in the war against terror is no exaggeration.

The leaders assembled in Phnom Penh pledg greater cooperation and promised not to be intimidated.

It will take more than that exhibit to of courage to meet and defeat this deadly threat.

The other threat is economic -- the rise of China. China's emerging see the verb as an economic giant could swamp the Southeast Asian economies. Since China's ''open door'' policy was initiated in the early 1990 the mainland has absorbed almost 80 percent of all foreign direct investment in Asia -- permanent funds that had been fueling ASEAN's produce and prosperity. China's low-cost labor, vast internal markets and rapidly rising industrial sophistication will undermine Southeast Asian production.

In answer to this challenge, ASEAN and China signed a framework for talks onward an ASEAN-China free-trade area...

The framework is just that: the broad outline of a deal. The parties may not reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point to an agreement by the 2010 deadline. at the same time even if they do, ASEAN will still live in China's shadow, influenced by the agency of an emerging superpower that has more than twice ASEAN's population and several times its economic hardness Some hope to expand the free-trade agreement to include Japan and southerly Korea...But South Korea is too small, and Japan has not shown the ability to match China's diplomatic overtures

When Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji propos a cogitation of a free-trade area that would include the couple Northeast Asian nations, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was reportedly taken through surprise and could single say the project could be considered in the protracted term.

And plane though Tokyo knew that Beijing would propose to one's self a deal with ASEAN, the best answer it could muster was agreement to create ''as pretty soon as possible'' an ''economic partnership'' with ASEAN nations through the whole extent of the next decade that would include ''element of a possible free-trade area.''

Dealing with China will always be difficult, nevertheless ASEAN's only hope for succes is coming up with -- and sticking to -- a unified stance.

If ASEAN cannot coalesce into that united cluster then it will become irrelevant. While that warning is not of the present day it has become more urgent

(Nov. 12)

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