Page 2 of 3 ASIA
HAND US, China square
off By Shawn W Crispin
on longtime ally Indonesia over
military-related abuses in East Timor, and
full-blown trade and investment sanctions against
oil-and-gas-rich Myanmar related to its
long-standing abysmal rights record.
Bygone moral era Those demands
and sanctions, however, hark to an arguably bygone
era when the US was widely perceived in Southeast Asia
and
elsewhere in Asia as a moral force for democratic
change. The George W Bush administration's recent
policy emphasis on regional cooperation for its
counter-terrorism campaign, and its attendant
restrictions on civil liberties, including the
implementation of anti-terror codes allowing for
detention without trial, policies the US
previously scolded in the region, has badly eroded
the United States' stature here.
Moreover,
Beijing's mix of political repression and economic
success has sent a bold new message to the
region's leaders that democracy and financial
openness are not necessarily preconditions for
economic prosperity. China's various
anti-democratic policies, from its brutal
crackdowns on free speech and political dissent,
to its sophisticated control and censorship of the
Internet, to its outrageous official land grabs
from urban squatters and rural peasants, are
gaining currency across Southeast Asian countries
that increasingly see China as a development role
model.
Worryingly, that trend is taking
hold not only in Southeast Asia's underdeveloped
but emerging economies, but is also prompting
anti-liberal backtracking in the region's more
established economies, including Thailand and the
Philippines.
Consider the US-versus-China
contest now under way for influence in Cambodia.
In recent years, Phnom Penh has relied heavily on
Western donors for its economic sustenance,
including aid that accounted for more than 60% of
the government's annual budget. To sustain that
Western aid, the Cambodian government was required
to move toward more democracy and economic
openness - a policy that was arguably successful
by half.
When Cambodian Prime Minister Hun
Sen jailed a journalist in 2005 for his critical
reporting, the authoritarian premier was forced to
back down and release the scribe by US and Western
pressure. Hun Sen was also apparently persuaded by
the US and European countries to amend Cambodia's
criminal-defamation codes and eliminated jail
terms as a possible penalty for libel.
Enter China into the mix: in April,
Beijing extended $600 million worth of
no-strings-attached foreign aid, on par with the
Western-led Consultative Group's contingency-laden
$601 million. Since, Hun Sen's government has
resumed jailing critical journalists on so-called
"disinformation" charges, a popular tactic Beijing
uses against Chinese journalists. And there are
growing indications that the government is trying
to wiggle out of its commitment to a United
Nations-backed tribunal for former Khmer Rouge
leaders which promises to unearth details of
China's past support for the murderous Maoist
regime.
Myanmar represents another case in
point. Myanmar's ruling junta for years teetered
on the brink of financial collapse under US-led
economic and investment sanctions, imposed for the
military regime's abysmal rights record. Beijing
sometimes provided a helping hand when finances
were particularly tight, including in the wake of
the 1997-98 regional financial crisis, but
Myanmar's sorry financial state then reflected the
still-tentative state of China's own national
finances.
Now, Myanmar's generals are
swimming in cash and politically secure as an
economically empowered China invests heavily in
the country's untapped oil, gas and hydropower
resources. China provided crucial funds to finance
the junta's bizarre and expensive 2005 move of the
national capital from coastal Yangon to inland
Naypyidaw, a move apparently motivated by the
junta's peculiar fears of a possible US-led
preemptive invasion.
Abandoned high
ground As China gains more economic and
political influence in Southeast Asia's less
developed peripheral states, the US is
increasingly abandoning the democratic high ground
and subordinating its regional diplomacy to plain
economic and strategic interests - that is, the US
is contesting the region on China's terms, not its
own.
That was plain in the recent trade
deal the US brokered with Vietnam - a country that
both Washington and Beijing are bidding to sway
into their diplomatic orbit. Earlier, the US had
pushed Hanoi to improve its abysmal religious- and
human-rights record substantially before the US
would back its bid to accede to the World Trade
Organization. In November, Bush blatantly
backtracked on that requirement and endorsed
Vietnam's membership to the world trade body even
as the communist regime brutally cracked down on
the country's nascent pro-democracy movement,
including while Bush was attending the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting held in
Hanoi.
Even where US interests are firmly
entrenched, China's growing influence is altering
the United States' diplomatic calculus, prompting
it to drop democracy promotion from its policy
priorities toward the region.
In November
2005, the US dropped an arms embargo it had
maintained against the Indonesian military after
it went on a death and destruction rampage in the
wake of East Timor's 1999 vote for independence.
The flip-flop came soon after China extended $300
