Southeast Asia's complex dance with China, US explored in new book
As a contiguous, big and growing power, China will always have significant influence in Southeast Asia. But for precisely the same reasons - size, contiguity and economic weight - Beijing will always arouse anxieties in the region. Big powers have a responsibility to reassure small countries on their periphery. China has not fulfilled this responsibility.
From the end of the Hu Jintao era, and even more so under Xi Jinping, China's actions in Hong Kong, the South China and East China Seas, the upper reaches of the Mekong, the Taiwan Strait, the Himalayas, as well as Beijing's attempts to use trade to coerce South Korea and Australia, have fanned anxieties into active concerns.
Significant influence is not necessarily dominant or exclusive influence. No Southeast Asian country is ever going to shun China. On the contrary, almost all countries want good or at least stable relations with China. But concerns about Chinese behaviour make it highly unlikely that any are ever going to de-emphasise other relationships in order to cultivate China.
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As the strategic crossroads between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Southeast Asia has for centuries been the arena where the interests of major powers have intersected and sometimes collided. The United States and China are only the latest in a long list of rivals.
This has embedded the instinct to simultaneously hedge, balance, and bandwagon in Southeast Asia's diplomatic DNA. There has been many a misstep and stumble along the way. But the natural multipolarity of a strategic crossroads, where there has always been more than one major power present, has facilitated this instinct.
Few Southeast Asian countries have thought it necessary - or needed - to neatly align all their interests across the defence, economic, and sociocultural domains with any single major power. To preserve autonomy and extract maximum benefit, Southeast Asian countries may bandwagon in one domain, hedge in another, and balance in a third.
Southeast Asian diplomacy is naturally promiscuous, not monogamous. The steps of the region's diplomatic dance are intricate, often intended for a domestic as well as international audience.
For example, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 notoriously announced his "separation" from the US during a visit to Beijing. But his statement was as much for domestic effect as it was to curry favour with China. Duterte has enhanced relations with Japan, America's principal regional ally. With the need to retain support of the Philippine armed forces, and as Chinese largesse failed to materialise in expected quantities, Duterte recalibrated both his statements and actions.
This is not well understood, even by scholars of Southeast Asia who ought to know better. There is a strong tendency to view the region in simplistic, binary terms, as if every advance by China is automatically and necessarily a setback for the US. This is simply wrong.
David Shambaugh is a China and not a Southeast Asia specialist. Perhaps because he brings a fresh eye and open mind to the region, he does not fall into this particular intellectual trap, at least not to the same extent as other scholars.
Shambaugh's masterly Where Great Powers Meet: America & China in Southeast Asia, is the only book on US-China rivalry in Southeast Asia that views changes in the regional balance in relative and not absolute terms.
One of its greatest strengths is Shambaugh's detailed, country-by-country analysis of how relations with the US have in most cases expanded and not diminished, even as China's regional footprint has grown. There may well be an inverse correlation between the two phenomena.
Singapore has never made any secret of our conviction that the US is a vital and irreplaceable component of the regional balance of power. In 1990, after a combination of Filipino domestic politics and a natural disaster forced the US out of its bases at Subic Bay and Clark airfield, Singapore concluded a memorandum of understanding with the US that allowed it limited use of our facilities. Our neighbours reacted furiously, as if we had conspired with the devil to sell their firstborn into slavery.
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore before signing a defence agreement during a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2019 Photo: AFP alt=US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore before signing a defence agreement during a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2019 Photo: AFP
But there were only murmurs in 2005 when Singapore concluded a Strategic Framework Agreement with the US that allowed for greatly expanded defence and security cooperation. And when the 1990 MOU was renewed by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and President Donald Trump in the full glare of publicity at the United Nations in 2019, there was not even a whisper of protest in Southeast Asia.
President Xi's abandonment of Deng Xiaoping's sage advice to "hide your capabilities and bide your time" is very largely responsible for this fundamental change of attitude. This is a strategic mistake that cannot be reversed. Once your capabilities and ambitions have been revealed, they are not going to be forgotten no matter what you subsequently try to do to mitigate the situation.
A "community of common destiny" rings hollow in the light of naked, overbearing ambition. Shambaugh's analysis of China's contemporary roles in Southeast Asia exposes the complexity and ambivalence with which the region views China. Such attitudes go well beyond Southeast Asia. If there is a nascent global coalition of countries with concerns about Chinese behaviour, it is as much - and perhaps even more - a creation of Xi as Trump.
The weakest part of Shambaugh's book is the chapter on "Asean's Agency". He correctly identifies Hun Sen's Cambodia as the only "full-blown Chinese client state". But Shambaugh misses the point when he claims that "Asean states are already conditioned not to criticise China publicly or directly". Asean does not publicly or directly criticise the US or any other external power. This is not because Asean is "conditioned" by everyone, but because public criticism only reduces manoeuvre room.
Most Asean countries do not trust either the US or China very much, but know they must deal with both. Shambaugh does not directly draw this conclusion. But any reader's understanding of US-China competition in Southeast Asia cannot but be enhanced by his book.
Bilahari Kausikan is the former Permanent Secretary of Singapore's Foreign Ministry.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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