Looking north

It's Paddy's Day, and here in Brisbane the green T-shirts are out and the Guinness is flowing like the Liffey, begorrah. I have to rise at 5am, and as I write in my humid, 6'x7', $45 backpacker cell I'm predicting about 2 hours' sleep at the most.

My thoughts are not with the global influence of the Celts, however, but with a more dominant race, the Chinese. It is geographically obvious that the countries I have visited feel its growing presence more acutely than the UK. The emergence of China as a superpower is palpable here, and everyday people can see the impacts that politicians in the UK are still "predicting". Queensland's modest but beautiful Museum of Modern Art is even in on the act, deciphering the State's historical and present connections to the giant in the North. One exhibit, a collage of hundreds of advertisements styled as Communist propaganda posters, captures the tone of western companies' attitudes to this huge new market. It is presented not as traditional exploitation but the desperation of the potentially marginalised. It underlines that, here in the Pacific Rim, the balance of world power is perceived to have already shifted sunstantially to the East.