A disturbing report from China last week highlighted the increasing tension that surrounds Beijing's expanding interests in our region. According to Liu Yuejin, commander of the formidable anti-drug police in southern China, Beijing had prepared plans and planes last year to attack the drug lord Naw Kham inside Myanmar with a drone aircraft. It would have been the first such use of drones in the Asean region. China would have become just the fourth country to use drones to attack another nation. And it could have been an act of war.
Mr Liu's superiors cancelled plans to use the drones to attack Myanmar. They wanted Naw Kham captured alive, for a show trial. The Shan drug lord was accused of masterminding attacks that killed 13 Chinese sailors inside Thailand on the Mekong River. The Chinese succeeded in capturing Naw Kham, and he is on death row in China, and likely to be executed soon.
The casual reference by Mr Liu to the planned drone attack, however, is the latest threat from China concerning the Asean region. Beijing's claims on the China Sea are better known, and are currently taken more seriously because they have brought armed clashes in several cases. But both the air and naval warnings are part of a new Chinese tone in its foreign relations. It bears directly on our region.
The new tone has come with the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. Mr Xi's style appears to differ in important ways with his predecessors, presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. When the often hawkish Chinese military leaders spoke aggressively and undiplomatically, Mr Jiang and Mr Hu always were on hand to damp down the rhetoric. Mr Xi, if anything, has ramped it up.
The result is the Chinese appear to be more belligerent, more willing to settle disagreements disagreeably. Tough talk has not turned directly into tough action _ yet. But a recent incident highlighted the dangers and problems.
At a meeting of Asian military leaders in Melbourne last month, the hawkish Chinese Lt Gen Ren Haiquan startled the audience with an attack on the "interfering United States" for its military return to Asia. But he galvanised the group with a swipe at Japan as the "fascist" nation that had once bombed Australia because the world was too slow to act on its threats. Today, said Lt Gen Ren, territorial disputes can lead to war.
The Japanese delegation walked out. After a few days of silence from Beijing, new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, regarded as a China hawk, asked parliament for the first increase in Japan's defence budget in 11 years. He specifically cited disputes over islands in the East China Sea.
Before Mr Xi became the new top man in China, there was concern in most of Asean that Beijing had refused to address the territorial disputes in normal diplomatic ways. At successive Asean security meetings, China managed to keep the conflicts off the agenda and out of the final communiques.
Now, with Mr Xi appearing closer to the military's often hostile rejection of negotiations, worries will increase, and new, escalating arms races are possible. China could put all such concerns to rest by a policy of recognising that territorial disputes must be openly discussed. One hopes Mr Xi will soon come to that position.