In Conversation: Sebastian Strangio on Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century
In Conversation: Sebastian Strangio on Southeast Asia
SOUTHEAST ASIA IN THE CHINESE CENTURY
IN CONVERSATION WITH SEBASTIAN STRANGIO
1 July 2020
What first drew you to write ‘In The Dragon’s Shadow’ and how long has it taken you to research the book? Did anything during your research surprise you about Southeast Asia?
In some ways this is a logical extension of my first book, which examined the history of Cambodia since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. China played an important role in this story. In the years since, China has moved full circle from the “root of everything that was evil” in Cambodia (as the country’s perpetual prime minister Hun Sen put it in the 1980s) to possibly China’s closest partner in the Indo-Pacific. After eight years in Cambodia, during which time I followed this transition up close, I became interested in how other Southeast Asian nations were perceiving and reacting to the challenges posed by China’s growing power.
The book took me about three years to research and write, but it draws on reporting that I have done across the region for the best part of a decade. As I proceeded, I also became determined to offer a corrective to the increasingly binary views of China that are currently ascendant in the West. Compared to US perceptions of China as an unequivocally revisionist and predatory power, Southeast Asian views are more complex and anguished. In general, the region doesn’t much like China, but finds it unavoidable as an economic partner, and sometimes useful as a political one. This makes it hard for any Southeast Asian country to get on the wrong side of Beijing, or to join in any broader coalition aimed at containing China’s power.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans in Southeast Asia, please describe China’s historic role. Can you also explain how Imperial China engaged with the kingdoms and sultanates of Southeast Asia. Was the tributary system effective in giving China influence in the region and does its legacy remain today?
Few regions have experienced such a depth and variety of interactions with China as Southeast Asia. For more than a millennium, the region has been bound to the Middle Kingdom by commercial interactions and waves of immigration and cultural intercourse with the southern fringes of the Chinese empires. From Siam to the Sulu islands, the region’s sultans and kings also sent tributary missions to the imperial court, which ritually affirmed China’s centrality and civilizational prowess. Of course, the tributary system was never as systematic and cohesive as it is often made out to be. Southeast Asian kingdoms participated mostly because it was a precondition of trading with China. They were happy to flatter Chinese imperial conceits if it meant gaining access to its giant market, a dynamic that has some echoes in the present.
While the Chinese empires enjoyed a position of almost unchallenged primacy in precolonial Southeast Asia, direct intervention by the Chinese state in Southeast Asia was rare. The closest contact that most ordinary Southeast Asians would have had with it was with the people who emigrated to the region, from the Yunnanese Muslim muleteers who trickled down through the mountains into the Buddhist kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia, to the sailors, merchants, and manual labourers from Fujian and Guangdong who migrated across the centuries to Siam, Myanmar, Indochina, and the Malay archipelago. Ethnic Chinese immigration profoundly shaped the economic and political life—and in some cases the demographic balance—of the independent states that would later emerge in Southeast Asia. Today it remains possibly the most significant, and fraught, legacy of the region’s interactions with imperial China.
Can you explain how the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong engaged with Southeast Asia and also shed light on how/if China supported revolutionary anti-colonial movements in the region? Also, with an eye on ideologies what were relations like between China and non-communist governments?
When the PRC was established in 1949, Southeast Asia was in the midst of a turbulent process of decolonization that saw the Western colonial empires swept aside and replaced by a new array of independent states. In its dealings with these new nations, the PRC employed what came to be known as ‘dual-track’ diplomacy: engaging with Southeast Asian governments at a state-to-state level, while the Chinese Communist Party offered moral and material support to communist insurgents seeking their overthrow. Needless to say, it wasn’t a recipe for warm relations, although to the Chinese leadership it had a sort of logic. This ideological activism was the medium through which Mao sought to position China at the vanguard of world communism, and so reclaim its former status as a global power.
An overlapping source of tension was China’s relationship with Southeast Asia’s overseas Chinese. Given the predominance of ethnic Chinese in some communist insurgencies (particularly in Malaya), China’s support for communist movements was compounded by, and inseparable from, its relationship to the region’s ethnic Chinese diasporas. Both of these issues left a thick residue of mistrust that continues to cling to Southeast Asian perceptions of China.
Historically, what role did the South China Sea play in China’s engagements with Southeast Asia and how has Southeast Asia historically interacted with the South China Sea? Furthermore, given recent developments can you explain the importance of the South China Sea to Beijing’s ambitions in the region?
The “southern ocean”, or Nanyang, has been a commercial gateway for the peoples of southern China since Roman times, but the Chinese state itself came late to this maritime world. As Philip Bowring argues in his book Empire of the Winds, the South China Sea was historically dominated by the Malay peoples who inhabited the sprawling archipelago straddling the Indian and Pacific oceans. Contrary to the PRC’s historical claims to the South China Sea, it came late to the picture, just one in a long procession of outside influences—from the Islamic world, India, and the West—that coursed through the region.
The reason is that the various Chinese empires were overwhelmingly continental in their orientation. This resulted from the fact that the main threats to their survival came not from the seas, but from the nomadic warrior peoples that dwelt to the north and west. The corollary of this was a sort of strategic disdain for the oceans as an untameable realm of piracy and chaos—a land bound tendency that left China unprepared for the assault by the maritime empires of the West and Japan in the 19th century.
That has all changed since the 1980s. There are many reasons for China’s recent aggression in the South China Sea, but fundamentally it grows from the nation’s profound strategic insecurity, further fuelled by the official narrative of the “century of humiliation” at the hands of imperial rivals. It is born of China’s perceived need to secure the vital lines of sea communication upon which its economy relies, and to forestall the US-led containment that Chinese leaders have always feared. Beijing’s actual legal argumentation on the South China Sea, which is breathtakingly flimsy, sits downstream from this basic strategic consideration
Can you explain how China’s modern-day economic footprint developed in Southeast Asia and has the region itself broadly welcomed Chinese investment and economic interdependence? How has Southeast Asia managed to navigate the issue of China’s rise whilst also maintaining economic and security ties with the United States?
China’s presence in Southeast Asia has grown in line with China’s own emergence since “reform and opening” in the late 1970s. This has been a mixed blessing for the region. Before 1978, Southeast Asian nations like Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia benefited from China’s isolation and its effective self-sequestration from Asia’s markets, within a broader supportive framework of US security and Japanese capital investment. While these nations generally welcomed and benefited from new economic linkages to China, manufacturers across the region were undermined by a quickening influx of cheap Chinese imports. For the nations of mainland Southeast Asia, this has taken place in a context of economic integration—the construction of new roads, railways, and pipelines—which is pulling the region’s economic gravity to the north. Another crucial factor is the role of ethnic Chinese business conglomerates across Southeast Asia, which have invested in China itself, and in some instances been vocal advocates for closer economic links to the mainland.
Until recently, Southeast Asian nations had little problem balancing economic ties to China with a reliance on the US as a regional security partner. From the mid-1970s until the end of the Cold War, the US and China were de facto allies against the Soviet Union, and until relatively recently, Washington’s position was to assist China’s peaceful rise and integration into the global economic order. However, this period of apparent convergence has come to a rather abrupt end. As latent competition between the US and China sours to overt rivalry, even hostility, it is becoming ever-harder for Southeast Asia to maintain a judicious balance.
Relations between Vietnam and China have historically been tense, what role does the legacy of the 1979 border war play and how has Vietnam tried to respond to Chinese actions in the South China Sea? What role does nationalism play in bilateral ties?
It comes down to Freud’s notion of the narcissism of small differences. No nation in Southeast Asia has faced down Chinese power more often or more directly than Vietnam. Similarly, none has been so strongly imprinted by Chinese political and cultural norms. From chopsticks and vocabulary to social structure and moral philosophy, today’s Vietnam represents overlays of Sinitic borrowings over an indigenous Austroasiatic core. Indeed, the irony at the heart of Vietnam’s relationship with China is that these cultural inheritances have been the very tools that have allowed Vietnam to secure its independence. Present relations are thus shot through with a tense dialectic of emulation and resistance.
For the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), anti-Chinese nationalism is a potent tool, but one that always threatens to spiral out of its control. It is notable that critics of the VCP almost always focus on its supposed submission to China. The Vietnamese government thus finds itself caught between the need to maintain workable relations with the great power to their north and the public’s intense hostility towards China. The 1979 border war has been swallowed up by this contradiction. While Vietnam’s history museums proudly list the long list of resistance wars against imperial China (as well as those against the French and Americans), they omit any mention of the Vietnam’s most recent war.
Cambodia is widely viewed in Western circles as a vassal state. Is this an accurate perception of the relationship between Phnom Penh and Beijing and how has China’s economic footprint grown in Cambodia since 1991? If you can, please describe the view of their respective populations, and what role does the legacy of the Khmer Rouge play in perceptions of both countries?
This characterization is mostly valid, although the reasons for it are complex. Cambodia’s current embrace of China can’t be understood without reference to the country’s unique political trajectory since the end of the Cold War. October 1991 saw the signing of the multinational Paris Peace Agreements, which aimed to end Cambodia’s chronic civil war, send refugees home, and remake the country as a liberal democracy. The treaty, and the UN peacekeeping mission which followed, turned Cambodia into one of the most ambitious nation-building experiments of the post-Cold War period.
Since the 1990s, the US and other Western governments have tended to view Cambodia as strategically marginal, and therefore a place where they could press a values-based foreign policy with little strategic cost. Unsurprisingly, Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), resented being treated as a special case. They appreciated the West’s aid, to be sure, but not the Western scrutiny (and perceived condescension) that came along with it. They never forgave the US and other Western powers for rehabilitating the Khmer Rouge as an anti-Vietnamese force in the 1980s, and still bristle at the fact that Cambodia is generally held to higher human rights standards than neighbouring countries. This dynamic has gradually driven the CPP toward a new patron that offers financial support minus the conditionalities of the West.
Hun Sen’s shift towards China has been smoothed by the fact that Cambodia has historically been a welcoming place for the Chinese. To Khmer nationalists, the main bogeyman has always been Vietnam, which, starting in the seventeenth-century, slowly absorbed and annexed the former Khmer-populated territories in today’s southern Vietnam. But recent years have seen anti-Chinese sentiment rising due to the abrasive nature of Chinese investments, particularly the ugly gambling developments that have sprung up in the coastal port town of Sihanoukville. Over the long-term, this could well undermine the Sino-Cambodian love affair.
Thailand has historically been a US ally in the region, is this still the case since the military took over? How much influence does China have in the kingdom, what role does it play economically and domestically and finally, Thai democracy has always been fragile, is the country now moving away from democracy entirely?
The 2014 coup certainly put a dent in Thailand’s relationship with the US, but the reality is that relations had been in a state of drift for some time. The US-Thai alliance was forged during the Cold War, and based on a common opposition to communist (particularly Chinese) expansion and subversion, but the two nations’ interests have diverged somewhat since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. During that time, China’s commercial presence has expanded massively, and it has courted all sides of Thai politics, including the royal family. Beijing’s influence has been aided by improved overland infrastructure networks and the advocacy of Bangkok’s large ethnic Chinese business families, which have strongly pushed for increased business ties with the PRC. Cultural and economic connections, coupled with the simple but important fact that Thailand lacks a direct border with China, has muted Thai concerns about its giant neighbour.
Yet it has not eradicated them altogether. Thai leaders have historically been skilful in weaving, balancing, and safeguarding their sovereignty from outside encroachment. China is no exception, and Thailand has subtly but unmistakeably pushed back against key BRI projects, including Chinese plans to clear stretches of the Mekong River in northern Thailand for commercial shipping. At the same time, its relations with the US and other Western countries are complicated by Thailand’s perpetual political crisis, an outgrowth of demands for greater political representation among underrepresented segments of the population.
Please describe China’s role in Myanmar’s ethnic and border conflicts an how is it viewed by everyday people in Myanmar when it comes to issues such as investment and potential BRI related projects? Finally how big is China’s economic footprint in Myanmar?
The Chinese government and its officials have played an active role in Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts since its founding, and in the 1960s, it helped the Communist Party of Burma carve out a large ‘liberated zone’ in the northern hills. This presence has deepened since the end of the Cold War as northern Myanmar and its patchwork of rebel zones and statelets have become enmeshed economically with Yunnan province. China’s present aim is to stabilize restive border regions in order to push forward its long-term strategic goal in Myanmar: opening an overland route from Yunnan to the Indian Ocean. China has also worked to forestall the role of Japan, the US, and other rival powers in negotiations aimed at ending the country’s interlocking conflicts. It has sought to achieve these goals through an updated version of ‘dual-track diplomacy’: i.e. playing off the central government against the ethnic rebel armies with which it has the closest ties.
In recent decades, China’s increasing economic footprint in Myanmar has been the source of considerable elite and popular angst. This was one of the many factors that prompted Myanmar’s sudden political opening in 2011. Under the old junta, China was the dominant foreign presence in Myanmar, and Beijing’s support for unpopular infrastructure projects with the military created a strong backlash. There were also keen concerns about the flow of cheap goods and undocumented immigrants that swept in from Yunnan after the opening of the borders in the late 1980s. At the same time, China remains a useful partner for Myanmar’s government, as it comes under increasing Western pressure for the ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses that result from its deep ethnic and religious divisions. As a result, Myanmar will always be torn between resisting China’s pull and leaning on it for support.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Sebastian Strangio is a journalist, author, and analyst focusing on Southeast Asia. Since 2008, his writing from the region has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Republic, Forbes, Al Jazeera, and The Atlantic, among many other publications. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, where he spent three years reporting at The Phnom Penh Post, he has also reported from Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, South Korea, and the Russian Far East.
His latest book In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century is set to be published in August 2020.