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Politics: U.S. Losing Clout in Southeast Asia to China

Posted on: Friday, 9 December 2005, 21:00 CST

By Tim Shorrock

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9, 2005 (IPS/GIN) -- The United States is rapidly losing its influence in Southeast Asia to China, thanks to an overly narrow focus on terrorism and a propensity to place ties with individual nations above multilateral relationships, according to U.S. and Chinese analysts.

"China makes a point of dealing with Southeast Asia as a region and has a very aggressive ASEAN policy," said Catharin Dalpino, an Asia specialist at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton administration. "This also helps its bilateral relationships with Southeast Asia quite a lot."

ASEAN is the acronym for the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations of Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei.

While China takes a regional approach, the U.S. is "notoriously bilateral, and almost gratuitously so in Southeast Asia," Dalpino said.

Additionally, U.S. officials won't be attending the first East Asia Summit, scheduled for Dec. 14 in Kuala Lumpur, which Dalpino said underscores U.S. alienation from the region.

Besides the ASEAN bloc, China, South Korea and Japan are members of the 16-nation summit -- the world's newest grouping -- with India, New Zealand and Australia attending as newly accepted members.

By making Southeast Asia a second front in its global war on terror, the Bush administration has signaled that "we care less about other areas of policy," Dalpino said, addressing a forum on China and Southeast Asia sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA.

Minxin Pei, director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agrees that the U.S. "has ceded the region to China's initiative."

He said U.S. military policies following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, have played a significant role in the estrangement. But he dated the problem back to the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998, when the Clinton administration used its influence on the International Monetary Fund to impose solutions on Asian countries that supported U.S. economic goals in the region.

During the crisis, "the U.S. showed to the East Asian countries it really did not care about them," he said.

Conversely, the Asian crisis was a turning point for China's ties with the broader Asian region, says Ren Xiao, director of the Asia- Pacific Studies Department at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

After decades of estrangement during the Cold War, China and ASEAN began mending fences in the early 1990s. Since then, their "mutual needs" for economic and military security "have been the driving force behind the relationship," said Ren.

By the mid-1990s China had become a charter member of the ASEAN Regional Forum, an influential discussion group where military officials from around the region meet to discuss missile defense, piracy and other security issues.

But the 1997 financial crisis was a watershed when China's decision not to revalue its currency "helped stabilize the regional economic order," said Ren. Shortly after that China, Japan and South Korea began holding annual discussions with Southeast Asia under the "ASEAN-plus-three" formula. "It was here that the East Asian cooperation process started," he said.

In 1999, after the U.S. and China reached an agreement on China's accession to the World Trade Organization, ASEAN governments began to worry about the impact of Sino-U.S. trade relations on their region. As a result, China proposed a free trade agreement with Southeast Asia, the framework for which was signed in 2002.

Over the past three years, the SARS epidemic, the threat of piracy and the rapid increase in intra-regional trade have drawn China and Southeast Asia even closer. Those ties culminated in 2003, when China became the first nation outside the region to sign the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Russia and Japan have since followed suit, but not the U.S., which has refused to sign over its objections to Burma's full membership in ASEAN.

China is now ASEAN's second-largest trading partner, and bilateral trade could reach $200 billion by 2010, Ren predicted. Already, that trade has grown 40 percent since 2002, and had hit $106 billion in 2004.

China, Ren stressed, has built its ties with Southeast Asia out of altruism. "China's foreign policy way of thinking has much to do with its geographical location," he said. "That is to say, we must have a stable and peaceful neighboring area."

But Pei, the Carnegie scholar, suggested that China wants to preserve its big-power status and minimize U.S. influence in the region. "China is very much afraid that the U.S. would develop strategic alliance ties that would be used to contain China," he said. With Japan's influence in the region diminished, "China is indisputably the regional power as viewed by Southeast Asian countries."

However, Pei said the ASEAN countries don't want to be seen as satellites of China and are using their ties to Beijing "to convince other big powers to come in." That's why India has been so active in the region in recent years, he said.

In that context, added Dalpino, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's decision to skip an ASEAN meeting last July "was a big mistake." Pointing to the lack of U.S. participation in this month's summit, Ren added that the Bush administration is "not interested in participating in this (regional) process right now."

The most recent official statement of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia was in October, when Eric John, a deputy assistant secretary of state, was asked at a congressional briefing why the U.S. won't be represented in Kuala Lumpur.

"It's a question we get all the time: what is our policy on the East Asia summit?" he replied. "Quite frankly, we haven't determined a policy because the East Asia summit, if you really look at it, is a black box. Nobody knows what the East Asia summit is other than leaders coming together."

Once the forum "begins to take form, we will study how we can engage," John said.

Source: Global Information Network

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