South China Sea Row Needs a Mellower Soundtrack

“Are you going to Scarborough Shoal? China, Phils, Vietnam and Brunei …”

Simon & Garfunkel sang different lyrics for their 1960s hit “Scarborough Fair,” a song that had nothing to do with Asian geopolitics. That didn’t stop one Filipino lounge singer from turning it into a protest song about rising tensions in the South China Sea on a recent evening in Manila for his martini-sipping audience.

Such strains are anything but music to the ears of world leaders, who already have enough to worry about. So how about adding a little diplomatic and military tension in Asia to the mix?

The brawl between China and the Philippines over ownership of a reef known as the Scarborough Shoal — the scene of armed patrols and a source of a daily war of words — is but the loudest of the moment. Asia features various territorial disputes involving Brunei, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan, with China at the center of almost all of them. The South China Sea is now the scene of one of the more serious feuds between officials in Washington and Beijing.

Read more at The Jakarta Globe