We could wait until the President finishes talking about Bank Failures this morning. “Silicon Valley Bank” is the one that failed most recently, although there is another one in the string that went down in what is being described as “the second biggest failure ever.” They tell us the latest failure demonstrates that even medium-sized banks are now too big to fail. There was talk about the utility of the Dodd-Frank legislation that set up the last major string of failures. Remember that one?

We had a meeting long ago about what that Congress was up to. They were trying to eliminate “Red Lines” of systemic oppression in lending. To do so, they set up a system in which the ability to pay back a loan was not the primary qualification for getting one. We recall generally agreeing that spreading cash around should be done moderately. We think that was the morning the real estate reports indicated we had lost about a hundred grand that week on the value of the place we owned then. Thankfully, we have learned that common sense has little to do with the movement of Money.

We seem to wander through the world of Finance like we did through the various parts of China we have had the opportunity to share. This morning? We would be walking in cool humidity with a feeling the monsoon season is here again. The winds are sweeping east along a line in North Carolina. It is a modest inversion of a winter that was a little warmer in January and February and a little cooler here in Mid-March. It is that morning moisture that makes me think of older times in South Asia, on the periphery of all the Chinas.

Hong Kong was always our favorite China. There was something special about the ship dropping the hook in the busy harbor, and the smells in the air as you drew closer to the Fleet Landing in one of the liberty boats. There were still Vietnamese refugees in little boats seeking refuge.

There was something about that part of China directly connected to another world. The elegant Peninsula Hotel typified it for me in later years, but when I first walked on soil attached to China, it was to a comfortable place in the cocktail lounge of the Repulse Bay Hotel. They ripped that placedown in 1982, but it had also been a haunt for expatriates working all over the Far East.

In the days of Other Empires, Royalty and celebrities stayed there away from the bustle of Kowloon. The views were spectacular from the verandah, and the Japanese tour groups arriving by motor-coach were unaware that their seating, packed into the dim interior of the dining room, was a small quotation of the Allied POWS who were held in the hotel compound during the Occupation by the Japanese Empire.

I didn’t know much about the various Chinas then. I should have taken the hydrofoil to down-at-the-heels Macao, where it was said the single strand of wire that marked the border between Portugal and the PRC could easily be crossed on a lark, normally without consequence. That was not true in Hong Kong, where the announcement about the Border was a serious event on the train heading to the edge of the New Territories.

If the Crown Colony offered a glimpse of the world that was, it was a transient one. The Vietnam War was not long over on that trip. The Americans were still in the Philippines, in strength, and the South China Sea was an American lake.

If I had not been so young, I might have been able to get a clue from the remaining Portuguese, those weary old Colonials. Their day was done, and they waited with resignation to see what the Chinese were going to do with what they were leaving behind.

When the Brits left Hong Kong for the last time as rulers, it was as good a reference point as any for the fact that the show was over, even if the Americans did not seem to recognize what was happening around them. I saw it with painful clarity in South Korea. That time- 14 months of a military coup- is a candidate for the topic of The Next Book. It was fun. Working title is “The Snake Ranch Papers.”

Seoul, ROK, then sprawled south all the way to the air base at Osan in mighty apartment blocks. The ROKs seemed to be going their own way, and the critical part of the equation was what the Chinese thought about things.

It was on a different trip that I first saw Shanghai, old and new. It was staggering to stand on the warf of The Bund near the solid colonial buildings and look at the science-fiction city across the river; wild, astonishing architecture and a hotel that thrust more than a hundred stories into the sky.

I passed through Beijing a few times, not long enough to settle in and get to know the place, once on the way to the Hermit Kingdom, whose doctrine of self-reliance could only be possible with the assistance of the Chinese.

Taiwan was something else altogether. The tomb of Chang Kai-shek was still holy in those days, though his memory is now being trashed in that China, and the honor of his resting place stripped from it.

The Vietnamese hated China, even if they owed their independence to the support of their periodic enemy. Traveling by the Socialist Republic as we often did, it was hard not to think of it. Visiting Hanoi later, I was startled to realize that what I thought of as Chinese architecture was actually that of the French, long gone.

Singapore, bastion of British navigation, was a part China, if only by transplant of population. Further on, visiting carefree Thailand, we were introduced to more odd history. A Chinese army division, the good Chinese, had been emplaced in the North as a bulwark against the Communist bacillus, and to the west, the stoic Burmese were the pivot point of Beijing’s strategy to protect it’s flanks.

China’s “String of Pearls” strategy was rising then. That network concept involved taking the money the Western nations showered on Beijing for accepting the burden of creating strategic production facilities to replace those of Ohio and the rest of America’s Rust Belt. Supporting the new export economy, China showered the circumference of the world with strategic port facilities. They began at Burma’s Sittwe, Bangladesh’s Chittagong and Pakistan’s Gwadar, and spread east and west. The String of Pearls was intended to protect the sea lanes to the Middle Kingdom and ensure uninterrupted access to energy supplies. China has a lot of resources, but oil is not one of them.

India is watching with interest, as well it should be. It is pursuing its own Blue Water naval capability, and the means to rule it’s own ocean. We took a delegation to Delhi after 9/11 to talk about the continuing problems of the border with China. They periodically fight up north, while their former compatriots in the versions of Pakistan that exist today were demonstrating their nuclear capabilities. There were other meetings with Australians to firm up our strand of pearls against Chinas. There were events in progress a bit like the ones this morning. It was our summer, not theirs, and we talked to Naval officers who had been with the Americans when the Chinese “demonstration” rockets were launched into the South China Sea as a warning about Taiwan.

As a forthright response, our America Navy steamed two carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Strait as a demonstration of resolve supporting the independence of that part of China on that day.

The Australian looked at us with a resigned twinkle in his eyes. “Whatever were you Yanks thinking?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “Two carriers against China?”

We will have some fun with the excitement surrounding the sale of American (not French) nuclear submarines to Canberra. That would change the calculus of numbers a bit. But at the moment there are fewer Chinas to deal with than usual and one larger one. We will see how it goes, right?

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