China & Southeast Asia
In the new millennium, no issue in international relations will be more important than how to accommodate the rising power of China. Many analysts, especially in the United States, see China as a significant threat to American interests in Asia. Washington has treaty commitments in both Northeast and Southeast Asia and retains a substantial military presence in the region. Beijing claims it does not seek to replace the United States reigning global hegemony, but seeks to promote a multi-polar world in which six states (the US, China, the EU, Russia, Japan, and India) would have pre-eminent status.
* By MARTIN STUART-FOX
China is determined to increase its international power status through pursuit of its 'four modernizations', but sees the United States as standing in the way of two essential strategic goals: national reunification through the return of Taiwan, and 'de facto' regional hegemony of the kind the United States enjoys in the Americas. Of course, Beijing denies that it seeks regional hegemony, but however increasing Chinese influence is described, it is this that poses the question of the future of relations between China and Southeast Asia.
In seeking to pursue these strategic goals, China is drawing deeply on its own history and culture. The lesson of Chinese history is that the Middle Kingdom was strong when it was united, but weak when divided. Moreover, China is determined to erase the humiliation it suffered at the hands of the West and to regain the superior international status it enjoyed for almost two thousand years prior to the nineteenth century. What has been termed the 'Middle Kingdom syndrome' figures prominently in these national goals. China is not prepared to reconcile itself to any loss of empire (Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan) as Russia has apparently done.
History and culture, including the culture of international relations, provide approaches to the analysis of the present state and future directions of China-Southeast Asia relations. Historically, relations between China and Southeast Asia were regulated by the Chinese imposed 'tributary system'. This rested on convictions of Chinese cultural superiority that in turn reflected a cosmology that gave the emperor of China the key role in mediating between Heaven and Earth. Neighbouring peoples and kingdoms were required to acknowledge the superior status of the emperor as a condition for diplomatic and trade relations with the Middle Kingdom.
Kingdoms and port principalities (Melaka, Brunei) in Southeast Asia coped with the requirements of the tributary system in their own ways. Hierarchy and with it social and international inequality were in any case central to the Hindu and Buddhist views of the world. Moreover, as impermanence characterized a world in which the play of karma could never be predicted, all political relations were temporary. For Islamic polities, trade and courtesy overrode any cultural incompatibilities in world view.
Benefits accrued to both sides. For the Chinese, the tributary system reinforced imperial legitimacy and convictions: the world was as the court conceived it to be. For the kingdoms of Southeast Asia, legitimisation was reinforced through imperial investiture and valuable trade was conducted. Moreover, the tributary system carried with it certain moral obligations of fair trading (the emperor gave more than was received in tribute) and protection for nominal vassals.
China was not always a remote and beneficent power, however. Though Vietnam managed to escape the embrace of the Chinese empire, other kingdoms and peoples to the southwest were overrun and absorbed (Nanzhao, Dali), for historically in every direction China has been an expansionist power. As the Vietnamese and Burmese well understood, independence had to be resolutely defended. But once invading Chinese armies had been defeated, security was best ensured by re-establishing the tributary relationship.
In the course of time, bilateral relations regimes became established between Southeast Asian polities and the Middle Kingdom. These comprised mutual understandings and obligations, and accepted forms of protocol and exchange. Southeast Asian kings, even those in Vietnam with imperial pretensions of their own, learned the forms of address to use for the Chinese and how to describe their relationship in ways acceptable to the Chinese court (in the event that they failed to adopt appropriate language, communications might be redrafted before imperial inspection!)
It is not possible in this brief exposé to trace the course of China-Southeast Asia relations as these were influenced by European incursion and eventually colonization. Suffice it to say that the European presence and the incompatibility between European and Chinese world views at first undermined and finally destroyed the tributary system. One unforeseen outcome of lasting importance for China-Southeast Asia relations was the massive increase in Chinese migration to the region.
The more or less simultaneous Communist revolution in China and achievement of independence by the countries of Southeast Asia confronted both sides with the challenge of how to shape their mutual relations. These were deeply influenced by the context of the Cold War in which China's strategic goals centred on defence against the threat of US imperialism allied to the extension of Chinese global influence. China's attempt to seize the revolutionary initiative elicited very different responses from Southeast Asian states - from the pro-Chinese neutrality of Burma to Thai and Philippine alliance with the United States in SEATO. Only in the post-Vietnam War and post-Mao period, did China's 'open door' policy and the end of the Cold War allow relations to evolve on a more stable basis.
So what does the future hold? A recent Rand study characterized China's current grand strategy as a 'calculative' one of maintaining a benign international environment while building its future economic and military power base.1 How should the states of Southeast Asia articulate their relations with China? To begin with, bilateral relations, preferred by China, have been augmented by multilateral relations between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, now including all ten Southeast Asian countries. But ASEAN, for all its international role in organizations such as APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum, is weak and divided. The leadership formerly provided by Indonesia no longer has any basis, and it is far more difficult for ten such disparate states to arrive at any consensus, especially in the face of crisis.
The principal focus of likely contention between China and Southeast Asia is now the South China Sea, to all or part of which China and four Southeast Asian states lay claim. How this is resolved will shape future China-Southeast Asia relations. Apart from the area's resource significance, control by China would have weighty strategic consequences, for it would allow the projection of Chinese power deep into the region.
Despite uncertainty over China's longer-term intentions if and when the 'calculative strategy' is abandoned, Southeast Asian countries are unanimous in calling for engagement of China and rejecting any form of containment. The United States has withdrawn from mainland Southeast Asia and will not return. Thus, none of the five states closest to China (excluding Malaysia, which is also a maritime state) will join any US-led anti-China alliance. This leaves the maritime states, with an alliance possible to include Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia. But if this were to happen, ASEAN would disintegrate.
It seems more likely that the countries of Southeast Asia will respond even to a more overtly hegemonic China not by joining a US alliance, but by dealing with Beijing in their own way. And in doing so, they will draw upon the histories of their relations with the Middle Kingdom and on their own cultures of international relations to arrive at compromise: bilateral relations that avoid overt conflict through de facto recognition of China's superior international status in return for Chinese commitments (moral obligations) to security and fair trade. Or, so I argue in a book to be published by Allen and Unwin later this year, part of the research for which was conducted at the IIAS. *
Note
1. Swaine, Michael D. and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China's Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation (2000).
Professor Martin
Stuart-Fox is Head of History, University of Queensland, Australia
and was an affiliated fellow at the IIAS, Leiden, from 14-8 to 15-9-2000.
E-mail: m.stuartfox@mailbox.uq.edu.au