Penned from Phnom Penh.

• Author: Rock, Robert H.
• Position: LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN

SITTING IN THE Foreign Correspondents' Club in Phnom Penh, I began to write my Publisher's Letter. This Christmas my family and I visited Southeast Asia. The bustling streets and crowded marketplaces evidence the economic boom of this region. Foreign investment has been pouring in and factories are springing up alongside rice paddies worked by barefoot farmers and water buffaloes. In Asia's newly industrializing economies, growth and development are visible everywhere, no more so then in the faces of the young as they speed along on their mopeds on their way to work and to bars at night.

On our way to Southeast Asia, we stopped in Hong Kong where we visited one of my Harvard Business School classmates who runs a major trading company there. Where once his company focused almost exclusively on China, he now is getting half his business from other Asian countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia. In addition, he is planning to expand into some lesser-developed countries, including Cambodia where we spent several days.

Even after reading Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, Philip Short's chilling account of the Khmer Rouge's horrific experiment in social engineering, my family and I were not prepared for what we found there. Evidence of atrocities on a colossal scale are everywhere. However, even among the desolate faces of older Cambodians can be found glimpses of hope and signs of renewal. Young people are beginning to build new lives for themselves as they scoot about Phnom Penh's emerging nightlife.

What the countries in Southeast Asia need and often lack is political...