As US-China tensions grow and temperatures rise in the South China Sea, Southeast Asia will only become more tense, anxious and constrained.
Making predictions is difficult, the old saying goes, especially when dealing with the future. The coronavirus pandemic has nonetheless prompted a raft of speculation about its geopolitical impact on Southeast Asia. Some observers have suggested Covid-19 will catalyse a regional pushback against China, others that the virus will lead to a new Chinese-led order in the Indo-Pacific.
As tempting as it is to predict grand transformations, the pandemic is unlikely to fundamentally alter the challenges China poses to Southeast Asia. Instead, it will simply sharpen those that already exist. Covid-19 will be a way station rather than a crossroads.
Since its emergence late last year, Covid-19 has prompted a steady deterioration in relations between the United States and China, an acceleration of pre-existing trends. As Beijing and Washington traded childish insults and conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, neither has done much to improve its image in a region that worries about nothing more than a runaway escalation in superpower tensions.
For Southeast Asia, Covid-19 has revealed the two faces of Chinese power: the benefactor and the bully. While Beijing has shipped masks and medical equipment to nearly every nation in the region, it has undercut this goodwill by stoking tensions with Vietnam and Malaysia in the South China Sea, and provoking showdowns with regional powers such as India and Australia.
Meanwhile, the belligerent performances of its officials – call it “own-goal diplomacy” – is doing little to engender warm feelings among Southeast Asians.
Of course, Southeast Asia has seen this before. As former Malaysian prime minister Abdul Razak observed in 1971, Southeast Asia’s proximity to China ensures its countries are the first to live with the consequences of Chinese policies. This proximity has long been a mixed blessing. Just as Southeast Asia has been buoyed by China’s meteoric economic growth since the 1980s, it has also experienced disruptive flows of immigration and investment, as well as the keen edge of Beijing’s growing naval and military clout.
Southeast Asian nations continue to distrust China on a range of issues from its maritime aggression to its outreach to the region’s overseas Chinese. It has nonetheless evolved into a close economic partner and, for some, a politically useful one.
Covid-19 is unlikely to alter this. The early stages of the pandemic exposed the region’s heavy economic reliance on China, prompting rumblings that some Southeast Asian nations would seek to reduce their economic reliance on mainland-centred supply chains.
This, too, is nothing new. Vietnam, for example, has long attempted to reduce its economic dependence on China, a concern that underpinned its enthusiasm for the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The coronavirus is unlikely to lead to any dramatic change soon in this regard. For one thing, shifting supply chains is hard. It is particularly difficult in the shadow of a looming economic crisis that could dwarf the impact of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the political aftershocks of which are still being felt.
China is the leading trade partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and eight of its 10 member states, which source most of their manufacturing-related inputs from the Chinese mainland. This ensures China will play an important role in Southeast Asia’s attempts to weather the economic and political effects of the pandemic.
The pandemic will further exacerbate the internal political challenges facing Southeast Asian nations. These run from intractable questions of national identity – who counts as a citizen, and who should have access to political power – to the economic nationalism that has long hamstrung regional integration into a single economic community. By initiating a regional turn inward, Covid-19 will only make it harder for the region to detach itself from China.
Add to this, the missteps of the US. In January and February, as the coronavirus was ravaging China, US officials and pundits delighted in depicting it as a by-product of China’s authoritarian political system. The unintended consequence was to invite a comparison between China’s ruthlessly effective containment of the contagion – early failures notwithstanding – and America’s own shambolic response. This has tarnished perceptions of American competence and leadership.
Despite Washington’s robust support for Southeast Asia’s pandemic fight, the administration’s withdrawal from the multilateralism that Asean cherishes has only reinforced prevailing regional perceptions of the US as an erratic power that lurches between episodic engagement and starkly ideological with-us-or-against-us rhetoric.
This has been encapsulated by the region’s response to the Trump administration’s attempts to blame China for the Covid-19 outbreak. Southeast Asian governments undoubtedly want answers about the origins of the virus and China’s bungled early response, but they have resisted being conscripted into a US-led fight with Beijing. Of the 122 nations that supported a draft motion at the World Health Assembly in the face of Chinese opposition, just two – Malaysia and Indonesia – were from Southeast Asia. A similar response greeted Washington’s push for the region to spurn 5G technology from Huawei.
While Southeast Asian nations are strongly supportive of a robust US presence as a counterweight to China, the Huawei and Covid-19 affairs have highlighted where American and Southeast Asian concerns about Beijing diverge.
By accelerating US-China tensions, the pandemic is dialling up strategic pressures on Southeast Asian nations and making it trickier to maintain the individual and collective balance they have always sought. The region that emerges from Covid-19 is set to be tenser, more anxious and more constrained – in short, more of the same.
Published in the South China Morning Post, June 26, 2020
