Soothe, seethe

WHEN nationalism rears its head in China, the country's neighbours tremble. They have been trembling especially hard this year. In the wake of unrest in Tibet in March, a virulently xenophobic mood swept the country. Westerners were the main target, but East Asian governments still fear that China may start throwing its weight around and settling old scores.

The earthquake in Sichuan last month, and the West's sympathetic response to it, has helped to defuse the tension, but anxieties remain. At a recent conference in Singapore on regional security, organised by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said that how China and the West handled problems caused by “narrow interest groups” (apparently referring to the pro-Tibet lobby and its ilk), would “strongly influence whether China's emergence will unsettle the international order, or whether China succeeds in its path of peaceful integration with the rest of the world.”