THIS YEAR WILL confront many leaders in Asia, especially in Beijing and Islamabad, with exceptionally difficult tests.
For the US, stuck with a lame- duck president and a tedious election campaign, the tests will not come until a new president enters the White House in January next year.
The authoritarian leaders in Beijing, who are promoting the Olympic Games in August as an emblem of China's arrival as a great power, will be tested by their handling of the hordes of foreign athletes, spectators and journalists who will descend on the capital.
Chinese political activists are almost certain to draw attention to Beijing's violations of human rights, while religious activists, such as Falun Gong, will most likely find ways to protest the regime's repression of freedom of worship.
It could be 1989 all over again. Advocates of democracy camped in Beijing's Tiananmen Square attracted foreign press and TV coverage from reporters who had journeyed to China to report on the visit of then-Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. When demonstrations erupted and were put down brutally, the news flashed around the world.
Moreover, China's leaders may find it hard to conceal the country's economic shortcomings that were recently outlined in a World Bank report, or its corruption, civil unrest, censorship, pollution and other environmental problems.
Across the continent, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, or his successor if he does not survive in office, faces the difficult task of holding together a country at risk of splitting apart after the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. At the very least, the Pakistani leader will need to establish some semblance of order in that stricken country.
The test that much of the rest of the world is watching is whether Pakistan's stash of nuclear weapons -- reported to number 60 -- can be kept away from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or other radical groups operating in the country. Pakistani military officers say they have control of the weapons -- but the allegiance of some officers may be in doubt.
Back in East Asia, a new president in Taiwan is scheduled to be elected in March and to take office in May.
A critical task for the new leader will be to decide whether to rebuild relations with Washington and, if so, figure out how to go about it.
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has shown calculated disregard for Washington's efforts to maintain a balance between China and Taiwan. Moreover, some US officials think Taiwan has been lax in preparing to defend the country from a China that has repeatedly threatened to use military force to conquer it.
In Seoul, similar tasks will confront president-elect Lee Myung-bak when he takes office next month. Many US officials view the current president, Roh Moo-hyun, as having been anti-US throughout his term. Roh has disparaged South Korea's alliance with the US and adopted a policy toward North Korea that borders on appeasement.
North of the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, the leader of the regime in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il, will continue to be confronted with at least two difficult decisions. One is whether to give up his nuclear weapons, which he has given little sign he is ready to do. The other is to remain in power and to name a successor.
Whiffs of civil unrest resulting from near starvation and hints of dissent, including from the army that assures Kim's power, occasionally waft out of that dark and isolated land, but they are so fleeting that no one gives them much credence. His father, Kim Il-sung, assured Kim Jong-il's rise to power by appointing him successor long before he passed away.
In Southeast Asia, Islamic terrorists in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia promise to keep the leaders awake at night. If the past is any indication, those who hold office in the ASEAN won't be of much help in defeating the terrorists.
Preoccupied with their own politics, Americans may have little to say about how the pressing issues of Asia are met this year. Indeed, the new US president will most likely find himself or herself having to plunge into a thicket of changes in Asia over which the US has had little or no influence.
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
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