Abstract
Southeast Asia has become the epicentre of great power rivalry between the USA and China, and Beijing’s expanding influence—both economic and political—and military presence have thrown into stark contrast the power disparity between the Middle Kingdom and peripheral Southeast Asian States. The region’s diversity and relative lack of hard power suggest it lacks the collective power to resist a dominant China. However, despite fractiousness within the regional grouping the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) and a historically ambivalent (and distant) USA, there may be room for hope for the region’s future.
Donald Emmerson, the head of the Southeast Asia Forum in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, has produced a new edited volume, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century, which brings together an array of voices to analyse Southeast Asia–China relations, both historical and forward-looking. The book focuses on themes of heterogeneity, asymmetry, and agency and adds to our understanding of this multifaceted and often misunderstood sub-region, which is certain to play a pivotal role in the twenty-first-century balance of power.
The first half of the book focuses on region-wide trends: China’s security and development policies in a historical context, China-ASEAN trade relations, how China and ASEAN perceive one another, the South China Sea, and the historical role of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. The second half delves into individual countries’ relationships with China, including chapters on Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, and Singapore. All chapters emphasise to varying degrees the common themes of heterogeneity, asymmetry, and agency. The result is a rich variety of views on Southeast Asia’s imbalanced relationships with China and the region’s future.
Emmerson argues that ASEAN’s heterogeneity allows Beijing to undermine its strategic autonomy and prevents the organisation from confronting China’s territorial assertions in disputed waters (p. 125). According to Emmerson, ASEAN’s internal disunity make a legally binding Code of Conduct with China an ‘institutional mirage’ (p. 152). Absent a legal mechanism to restrain Chinese coercion of weaker ASEAN states, several chapters explore the possible moderating influence of trade and investment ties, though, as Jörn Dosch and Shannon Cui show in their analysis of China’s maritime silk road (MSR) and One Belt One Road (OBOR) in chapter 13, realist motivations better account for Beijing’s designs. Emmerson’s chapter on the South China Sea starkly depicts China’s illegal seizure of maritime features, construction of artificial islands, and intimidation of smaller neighbours (p. 135). Given his description of Chinese actions to assert control over the South China Sea, what he calls ‘transactional co-optation’ (p. 153), it is surprising that he concludes, ‘as of 2019, the short-term probability of war between China and an ASEAN state was surely zero or near-zero’ (p. 9). This seems like an overly optimistic conclusion based on the evidence presented.
If ASEAN states are unlikely to stand up to China collectively, and, as John Ciorciari argues in Chapter 12, the ‘ebb and flow of US engagement has left little confidence in US staying power and renders abandonment a perennial concern of US security partners’ (p. 302), ASEAN states bearing the brunt of China’s pressure in the maritime domain may run out of options short of war. While the Philippines has signalled a general unwillingness—and inability—to resist China militarily, other states like Indonesia and Vietnam have demonstrated more resolve in pushing back on Chinese expansion and force within their territorial waters. It, therefore, seems premature to rule out the possibility of military conflict.
While ASEAN’s disunity poses clear strategic vulnerabilities, its ‘diversity is also a liability for China’, for it increases the propensity for Southeast Asian states to pursue their own strategic autonomy and national interests (p. 3). Mingjiang Li observes that Beijing has historically perceived its periphery as a strategic vulnerability, wherein great powers can intervene and turn smaller regional states against it (p. 113). While this perception may have impacted Beijing’s regional calculations in the second half of the twentieth century, when the People’s Republic of China, was far weaker and the Communist Party sought to establish its legitimacy, China has now become a more hegemonic pole power in Asia.
Yet, China’s own views of Southeast Asia are uncertain and at times contradictory. Chinese provinces such as Yunnan and Guanxi neighbouring Southeast Asia tend to advocate for a more tempered approach towards Southeast Asia based on economic connectivity and mutual exchange, while Beijing holds a more domineering, realpolitik attitude, as Mingjiang Li highlights in Chapter 5. These two visions are often at odds (p. 124) and may explain China’s peculiar blend of diplomatic charm, ‘Wolf Warrior diplomacy’, economic coercion, and unilateral military activism. Language like ‘Beijing’s aims in Thailand’ may, therefore, obfuscate more than it elucidates (p. 179). Rather than a monolithic state entity, in Chapter 7, Geoff Wade describes Beijing’s ‘record of intervention’ by ‘state-owned or state-directed bodies’ in Southeast Asia (p. 176). Wade points to a diverse array of Chinese businesses and associations operating in Southeast Asia, as opposed to a single unitary Chinese Communist Party (p. 179).
If ASEAN’s heterogeneity is both an impediment and an asset, asymmetry between the mouse deer (ASEAN) and the dragon (China) clearly favours Beijing. As Thomas Fingar argues in Chapter 2, Beijing has calculated that ASEAN countries’ economic dependence on China prevents them from opposing it, lest they risk their economic development. In reality, China’s influence has had surprisingly varied effects on Southeast Asian countries based on their histories, institutions, and material capabilities. Beijing has been able to buy political influence in relatively weak, authoritarian countries with whom it shares a border, but it has had considerably less success in co-opting more distant and independent Indonesia or Singapore. In Chapter 10, Daniel O’Neill shows how China’s control over Cambodian elites offers it enormous sway in ASEAN with Phnom Penh serving as Beijing’s proxy. In Laos, China’s high modernist development policies have benefited a narrow elite, as Kearrin Sims demonstrates in Chapter 11. China’s influence taps into elite concerns with regime survival, which depends on a steady flow of Chinese capital to ensure economic growth and sustain control over weak institutions. Yet, Sims insists that Laos ‘is not a puppet of Beijing’ (p. 284). Vientiane has assiduously preserved a hedge against overreliance on China via its historically close ties with Hanoi. As in Laos and Cambodia where Chinese investment has enriched certain business tycoons and political elites while disenfranchising many poor farmers and traders, China’s growing presence in Myanmar has fuelled apprehension and resentment, resulting in a ‘delicate interdependence’, according to David Steinberg (p. 369). By contrast, Indonesia’s geographic distance and relative size and power allow it greater leverage in its relations with Beijing. Yet, Jakarta’s ‘free and active’ foreign policy has also meant deferring hard choices. As Yohanes Sulaiman asserts in Chapter 9, Indonesia’s on-again-off-again leadership of ASEAN has created a ‘leadership vacuum within’ the organisation and weakened its negotiating position vis-à-vis major powers (p. 231). By extension, his chapter has significant implications for the rest of ASEAN.
The book challenges the conventional wisdom of a hegemonic China dominating a weak and divided ASEAN by drawing attention to Southeast Asian agency. While international relations literature tends to emphasise the primacy of structure, this book illustrates that individuals can determine foreign policy. As the examples of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (p. 148), Cambodia’s Hun Sen, and other Southeast Asian elites show, individual leaders—and not just the structure of the international system—have agency in shaping the regional balance of power.
Contra assumptions that growing hegemonic pressure reduces smaller states’ space for strategic manoeuvrability, Emmerson suggests the narrowing balance of power between China and the USA may benefit ASEAN states if neither power is able to dominate the region exclusively (p. 3). As Anne Booth concludes in Chapter 3, Southeast Asia has options to diversify, including Japan and the European Union, whose investment in ASEAN still overshadows China’s. In Chapter 13, Dosch and Cui agree that ASEAN is likely to resist overreliance on China by diversifying economic ties with other major powers and deepening regional connectivity. While Beijing may have already roped certain states like Cambodia and Laos into its orbit, others, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and even Myanmar, are more likely to resist Chinese influence. Thus, Emmerson contends, ‘The future of Southeast Asia will greatly and probably decisively depend on what its individual states themselves either do or fail to do’ (p. 30).
Ultimately, The Deer and the Dragon offers a novel contribution to studies of China–Southeast Asia relations from a diverse set of voices, inviting the authors into an enriching conversation with one another. It also provides a welcome riposte to prevailing depictions of Southeast Asia as either powerless to challenge a rising China or as mere pawns in a great game between Beijing and Washington. In doing so, this volume pushes back on the most cynical interpretations of the region falling subserviently into Beijing’s sphere of influence, while simultaneously challenging Washington’s dalliance with isolationism (p. 300).