| |
SE Asia the focus of potential Sino-US
rivalry
By Stephen Blank
Before September 11, 2001, a major debate took
place in the United States over the entire range of
issues involved in the US-China relationship. What is
notable about this debate was that for both sides it
revolved around purely political and military issues:
Taiwan, proliferation, missile defense and the
possibility of an evolution within China toward greater
democracy and human rights.
Since September 11
this debate has been largely suspended, at least until
recently. China has supported the US "war on terrorism"
and has been instrumental in trying to facilitate a
negotiating process to induce North Korea to renounce
its nuclear program. In return, Washington has labeled
the East Turkestan independence movement in Xinjiang a
terrorist group, has forcefully reminded Taiwan that it
supports the status quo and not Taiwanese independence,
has counseled against next month's proposed Taiwanese
referendum and has continued to invest enormous sums in
China's development. US spokesmen have gone out of their
way to say that Sino-US relations are at an all-time
high, and China has even appealed to the administration
of US President George W Bush to induce Taiwan to call
off the referendum, once again invoking all the usual
threats that to hold it would be a dangerous and
provocative act.
While it is unclear how
Washington will respond to that appeal, it is
increasingly clear that a new US debate is just
beginning over China policy. It is also clear that this
debate is beginning to encompass economic issues and is
animated in part not only by a sense that China is
exploiting the United States, but also by a growing
realization that the Chinese economic dynamo may soon
become, or already is, a rival to America's economic
position in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.
Many factors have combined to bring about this
dawning realization. In 2003 China supplanted the United
States as South Korea's leading trade partner. Also last
year there was considerable pressure from the Bush
administration to get China to revalue its currency
upward to ease pressure on the trade deficit and the US
dollar. The administration's argument was that the
undervalued yuan not only was causing a vast flow of
jobs and investment to China away from other centers,
including the United States, it also was fueling the
huge US trade deficit with China. The implicit fear is
that as China sucks up all this foreign investment,
other countries, including those of Southeast Asia, are
left behind in the competition for foreign investment
and thus fall further behind China.
While this
US pressure has been inconclusive to date, the growing
salience of the issue of US job losses to Asian
competitors and the calls for protection against such
practices are rising and will surely cause many to view
China as an economic and not just political rival.
However, there are also signs in China's foreign
economic policies, especially toward Southeast Asia, of
China's rising economic potency and its potential
challenge to the established US, British and Japanese
positions there.
At the same time, the
continuing boom in China has become a major source of
heightened demand for imported goods there, a factor
that stimulates job creation across Asia, not least in
Southeast Asia. Thus, China affects Southeast Asia and
the entire continent as both market and competitor. Now
it also is beginning to compete with North America,
Japan, the United Kingdom and others as a source of
foreign investment to Southeast Asia. The Far Eastern
Economic Review reports that Chinese firms are beginning
to buy up closed or weakened Southeast Asian firms as
they seek foreign outlets for their capital and sources
close to their producers as well as their own foreign
markets for Chinese-owned production. The trend is only
beginning and is hardly surprising given Asian economic
history, but it is noticeable. Added to trends elsewhere
in Asia, it will surely heighten US fears of rivalry
with China.
Thus US conservatives who view
Chinese policies with suspicion have expressed their
fears of China's power in Southeast Asia and beyond in
testimony to the US-China Commission that was created
during the 1990s as a result of Republican congressional
suspicion of China to investigate China's overall
foreign economic presence and policies. This testimony
not only underscores the increased range, sophistication
and confidence of China's overall diplomacy, it also
raises fears that China's proposals to the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create a
free-trade area by 2015 through a series of intermediate
steps that represent concessions to weaker Southeast
Asian states as they endeavor to meet those targets
represent an effort to create a Chinese-dominated trade
bloc to counter US and Japanese influence there.
Analysts such as John J Tkacik Jr of the Heritage
Foundation fear that China may turn Southeast Asia into
a dumping ground for its exports to the region, which
are skyrocketing, and convert the area into a stable
supplier of raw materials and commodities to China. If
that is indeed the outcome or intention of the rulers in
Beijing, then the result would undoubtedly resemble an
updated Chinese version of Japan's Greater East Asian
Co-Prosperity Sphere of 1931-45.
It is by no
means conclusively clear either that this is China's aim
or that this outcome will come into being. The fears of
a Japanese yen bloc 20 years ago have turned out to be
ephemeral and misplaced and Japan has still to come out
of its recession of a decade or more. But what strikes
outside observers, apart from the fear that rising
Chinese power may make China a military-political rival
of the United States in Asia, is that gradually the
stage is being set for making China into America's
economic rival and competitor there as well. If the two
sides fall out - and this possibility is by no means
inconceivable given the enduring Chinese suspicions of
US power and policy throughout Asia, and many US
figures' comparable suspicions of Chinese objectives -
then economic rivalry will become almost as critical a
factor as strategic rivalry, or fears of it, have
hitherto been.
That is a new and developing, and
potentially disturbing, phenomenon. Scholars of
international relations well know that when strategic
rivalry is jointed to economic competition for the same
markets, it becomes that much harder to disentangle them
from each other and reach an enduring political
solution.
While only time and the policies of
all of the relevant actors in Southeast Asia and
elsewhere will tell if there really are grounds for an
economic rivalry between Washington and Beijing, we
cannot rule out the possibility of either rivalry or
friendship. But it does seem that as an economic
dimension is now being added to a relationship that is
inherently unstable because of Taiwan and China's
democratic deficit and because of China's perception of
an aggressive and militant US unilateralism, the
untroubled period of the past two years of Sino-US
relations may turn out to be as ephemeral and as
long-lasting as the anticipated yen bloc of the late
1980s in Southeast Asia.
While relations between
China and the United States are by no means endangered,
neither is their stability or continued cooperative
nature to be taken for granted, especially under
conditions of Sino-US economic dynamism.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of
international security affairs residing in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
