China's strategic Southeast Asian
embrace By David Fullbrook
BANGKOK - If all goes to plan, China will
for the first time ever in July host joint
military exercises with troops from the 10-member
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),
the strongest indication yet that Beijing's recent
economic charm offensive toward the region is
starting to pay real strategic dividends.
Beijing extended the invitation during
last month's ASEAN summit, innocuously for
peacekeeping training and disaster-zone management
and reconstruction. ASEAN is reportedly still
mulling the offer, but many security analysts
believe that the group is poised to accept the
historic offer and that Beijing would
not
have extended the historic offer if the chances of
acceptance weren't high.
Beijing's
friendly overture would appear to mark a
significant strategic departure, with China moving
toward more limited multilateralism rather than
its historical unilateralism to advance its
regional-security interests. Developing
cooperation with neighboring militaries would
hypothetically help China secure its porous
southern periphery and free up more resources for
projecting its power and influence globally.
China is implementing what appears to be a
two-phased strategy toward the region,
characterized first by promoting growing economic
and investment linkages and now by offering
limited military assistance. It's a
well-calculated gambit aimed at stealing a march
from the United States, specifically through the
development of competing linkages and personal
relationships with individual ASEAN members'
militaries.
China's strategic overtures
obviously have the US on edge. This week,
Washington announced that it would indeed stage
its annual "Cobra Gold" joint military exercises
with Thailand. Those exercises, the largest in
Southeast Asia and which have in the past included
troops from Singapore and Malaysia and observers
from China, had been in doubt because US law
prohibits certain types of military assistance to
governments that seize power through
anti-democratic means - as was the case with last
September's Thai coup. Soon thereafter, Beijing
attempted to fill the military gap by offering
Thailand US$49 million in military aid and
training.
Significantly, China has
traditionally shied away from formal military ties
with regional countries that could be construed as
alliances. Likewise, ASEAN has steadfastly avoided
entering formal security pacts and collective
defense mechanisms. The group of pro-Western
states was founded in 1967 partially to guard
against the spread of communism, which China was
then promoting - often through disruptive means.
They had relied heavily on US strategic assurances
to counterbalance China's, as well as the Soviet
Union's, influence beginning as early as the
1950s.
Beijing arguably started to embrace
military multilateralism in the late 1990s with
the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, which loosely links four Central
Asian states, Russia and China together through
combined training and patrols in fighting against
terrorism, extremism and separatism. China's trade
and investment have since risen sharply in Central
Asia, giving it greater influence to counter
America's regional strategic designs, which
included military bases in Uzbekistan for a few
years and the ongoing use of a base in Kyrgyzstan,
on China's border.
Strategic
passageway If diplomatically possible,
China would doubtless like to lead a similar
security organization for Southeast Asia - a
particularly strategic passageway for China's
booming seaborne trade with India, the Middle
East, Africa and Europe, which passes through the
region's busy and congested shipping lanes.
Moreover, Southeast Asia is fast emerging
as an important supplier of China's industrial
commodities and energy, and the region as a whole
now runs a trade surplus with China. China is set
to displace the US as ASEAN's top trade partner as
early as next year, a position the Sino-ASEAN
free-trade agreement should cement when it comes
into force in 2010. Meanwhile, there is still no
sign of a counterbalancing free-trade proposal
with the US.
To be sure, longtime disputes
among ASEAN's member states, driven alternately by
nationalism, territorial disagreements and
historical rivalries, have given the lie to the
group's pretense of harmony and have complicated
China's attempts to push through universally
accepted proposals - particularly on military
matters. The United States' still-strong influence
plus ASEAN's traditional distrust of multilateral
security arrangements have meant China has had to
tread carefully for the past decade.
To
build confidence, China is now an active and
engaging participant in the grouping's various
talk shops, including significantly the ASEAN
Regional Forum (ARF), which also includes the US,
Japan and India among its participants. ARF has
long discussed pertinent regional-security issues,
but only toward the end of building confidence and
specifically not by introducing any binding
conflict prevention, conflict resolution or
disarmament pacts.
ASEAN's goodwill toward
China rose significantly in 2003, when Beijing
agreed to a code of conduct toward easing
territorial disputes among ASEAN members and China
over the Spratly Islands, which some think are
rich in oil. All sides recently reaffirmed their
support for the code, which has helped to ease
tensions in recent years. Moreover, China was
quick to send US$60 million worth of aid and
supplies to regional counties affected by the 2004
tsunami.
Though thoroughly outshone by the
United States' - and to a lesser degree Japan's -
rescue and financial response, Beijing's
benevolent-big-brother posturing toward the region
represents a diplomatic course shift that started
in the wake of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis,
when it offered $1 billion in financial assistance
to regional countries. The US, in comparison, was
widely criticized across the region for its
perceived opportunistic approach in dealing with
the region's suddenly cash-strapped governments.
China also arguably displayed its support
for ASEAN last month by making rare use of its
veto at the United Nations Security Council,
killing a US-sponsored resolution condemning
Myanmar's rights record, which would have badly
embarrassed the entire grouping on a global stage.
The US has so far wholly failed to match
China's softly-softly approach toward ASEAN, which
has significantly degraded the United States'
bilateral relations with particular regional
countries. The US administration's emphasis on
securing counter-terrorism cooperation from
countries in the region has taken precedence over
most cordial diplomacy and reportedly rendered
bilateral relations awkward with Muslim-majority
countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
Both those countries have recently
rejected as an infringement of sovereignty
Washington's offer to send US Navy ships to help
crack down on the pirates in the congested Strait
of Malacca - which coincidentally is also where an
estimated 75% of China's fuel imports travel
through.
China has notably not made any
hard demands on ASEAN, in effect practicing the
group's own adherence to "non-interference" in
other countries' domestic affairs. At the same
time, Beijing is now adroitly and aggressively
leveraging its recent successful diplomacy and
growing economic linkages to overcome historical
distrust and build new strategic assurances aimed
at displacing the United States' strategic
influence over the region. And judging by ASEAN's
warm response to its recent overtures, China's
grand designs are proceeding very much as planned.
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