THE ASIAN CONTINENT HAS A MORE COMPLEX TAPESTRY THAN ANY other. Central Asia is made up mostly of the former Soviet republics, and was in Russia’s arc of influence, but now is increasingly in China’s. Geography divides India-dominated South Asia and the more prosperous East Asia, comprising a richer mix of cultures, including the economic and democratic successes of South Korea and Taiwan. In recent years, the frosty relationship between China and Japan has cast shadows over those achievements.
China chose initially to test its strength in the South China Sea and Southeast Asia which, unlike Europe, Latin America, or the Middle East, has no predominant culture, way of life, or standard of living. The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of the city-state trading center of Singapore is close to $87,000, against Cambodia’s $3,700.17 In the European Union the GDP of the poorest country—Bulgaria—stands at $20,100 against Luxembourg’s $102,000, a difference of five to one against Southeast Asia’s almost twenty-five to one.
In Europe, Christianity is by far the dominant religion, averaging more than 70 percent in most countries. Islam has the biggest following in Southeast Asia, but is followed by only about a third of its more than six hundred million people. The Philippines is mostly Christian. Indonesia and Malaysia are predominantly Islamic. Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand are Buddhist. Nor are religions confined to national borders. The southern Philippines has a restless Muslim population, as does southern Thailand. Myanmar is weakened by numerous running ethnic insurgencies and stands accused internationally of repressing its sizable Muslim Rohingya population.
Amid all this live about some fifty million overseas Chinese whose communities drive the region’s economy. Indonesia has more than 7 million out of a population of 250 million; Malaysia has 6.5 million among its 31 million people, and the Philippines has 1.3 million out of its nearly 100 million. The percentage varies greatly from country to country, as does the impact. Singapore was forced to separate from Malaysia in 1965 precisely because it was so predominantly Chinese. After race riots in 1969, Malaysia introduced laws that favored the native Malay population, and Indonesia has been wracked with anti-Chinese sentiment since the eighteenth century. In 1998, when anti-Chinese riots broke out in Jakarta, Beijing took the unprecedented step of ordering Jakarta to protect the Chinese community there. During the Cold War, Chinese throughout Southeast Asia were routinely accused of procommunist sentiment.
When Beijing’s reforms began in the 1980s, China was bruised and poor from Mao’s failed policies. These overseas Chinese families from Southeast Asia pioneered inward investment, laying the groundwork for its economic success today. “The idea of one China is deeply embedded in the minds of all Chinese people,” writes former Singaporean cabinet minister George Yeo, arguing that this is down to the impact of Chinese Confucian culture which focuses on family and respect for hierarchy. “The Confucianist idea of society being one big happy family is programmed into young minds. The political idea of one China is also a cultural idea. This distinguishes Chinese cultures from other ancient cultures. For example, Jewish culture is as tenacious as Chinese culture but it does not put the same emphasis on political unity. While Hindu culture encompasses political ideals, it does not program into all Hindus the idea of one India, as Chinese culture does.”18
Southeast Asia, therefore, is exposed to an expanding China that has a hold not only over its trade but also over its psychology. It believes it can call on the loyalty of the Chinese business communities, which have been so crucial in lifting the regional economy. China also has an added card when it comes to competing against Japan or Western powers. Like Southeast Asia, China suffered from the brutalities of colonialism.
After the Second World War, as Southeast Asian countries were gaining their independence, the United States attempted to forge a pro-Western defense alliance based on the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was protecting Europe. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) came about in 1955, but the region was too diverse, the governments too new, weak and corrupt to hold it together. In 1977 SEATO was officially dissolved, and further attempts to revive the idea of a regional defense alliance in Asia have failed to get off the ground.
Instead, there is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was created in 1961 and carries an ambitious slogan, “One Vision, One Identity and One Community.” This grouping has worked better. It has a policy of not interfering in the running of each country, has worked toward setting up a free trade area, declaring the region a nuclear-weapons-free zone, and has an emphasis on quiet, nonargumentative diplomacy and consensual decision making. ASEAN had been examining a gradual move to closer integration based on the European Union (EU), but that slowed after Britain’s decision to leave the EU and uncertainty set in over Europe’s long-term future.
Unlike the EU, ASEAN has a mix of government systems, and Western-style democracy has failed to take root in its member countries. The closest so far are Indonesia and the Philippines, both sprawling archipelagos with thousands of islands to control. Their per capita GDPs are twelve thousand dollars and eight thousand dollars, respectively, and they remain far from becoming developed societies. Both were controlled by American-backed Cold War dictators. The Philippines had President Ferdinand Marcos, who was overthrown in 1986, and Indonesia was ruled by President Suharto, who oversaw brutal anticommunist massacres in the 1960s and was ousted in 1998.
Thailand has veered back and forth from experimenting with democracy and retreating into military rule. Neighboring Myanmar is in the paradoxical position of being run by the military and the now tainted one-time democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi. Cambodia has been ruled by the same leader since 1979, and is one of the world’s poorest and most corrupt countries. Next door, Laos remains a one-party communist state, as does the larger and more robust Vietnam, which, together with the Philippines, has openly challenged Beijing over the South China Sea. Tiny oil-rich Brunei, nestled within Malaysia on the northern Borneo coast, is run top-down by Sultan Hassannal Bolkiah. Malaysia’s ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation, has been in power since independence in 1963, as has Singapore’s People’s Action Party. Both govern with authoritarian mechanisms set up under British colonialism and now criticized by Western democracies. Both have led the way in creating the concept of the Asian economic tiger.
In many respects, Singapore represents the geographical and intellectual heart of Southeast Asia. It lies at the mouth of the Strait of Malacca, the shipping artery that links the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. More than 75 percent of its six million people are Chinese, and it is because of this demographic that Singapore was forced to separate from Malaysia in 1965. It had been simply one of the fourteen Malay states, but would have economically smothered the newly independent Malaysia. Here was evidence that Chinese communities and ethnic tensions were part and parcel of Southeast Asian life. Singapore went on to forge itself into an Asian trading hub. Its authoritarianism tempered racial tension and delivered an exceptionally high living standard. It is this Singaporean model that China drew upon when it embarked on its own reforms in the 1980s. Although far from being a compact city-state, China has achieved comparable levels of success, and now has the wealth and confidence to challenge a long-held Western argument that elections and democracy deliver the most stable form of government.
“With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries,” said the late Lee Kuan Yew, founding leader of Singapore, whose position over the decades had underpinned the intellectual argument for authoritarian government. “Asian values may not necessarily be what Americans or Europeans value. Westerners value the freedoms and liberties of the individual. As an Asian of Chinese cultural background, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient.”
In the maelstrom of Southeast Asia, Singapore is a tiny, lone star. Its government might be corruption-free, but others are not, leaving the region weak and unable to counter Beijing in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Cambodia and Laos are now regarded as little more than colonies and Chinese vassal states. Beijing’s use of Cambodia is particularly telling. The Chinese government has been drawing Cambodia within its arc since the early 1990s, giving its former royal head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, sanctuary and cancer treatment in Beijing until his death in 2012. It befriended the prime minister, Hun Sen, even though he had sided with Vietnam against China in the 1980s. Over the past decade, Chinese money has transformed Cambodia’s landscape. Between 2011 and 2015, it accounted for 70 percent of all industrial investment. Long before that, in 2006, Hun Sen described China as Cambodia’s “most trustworthy friend,” a compliment returned by President Xi Jinping, who categorized Cambodia as “an iron clad friend.” All three of the past Chinese presidents have visited.
Cambodia became a crucial diplomatic component in Beijing’s South China Sea strategy, and its foresight paid off in February 2012 when ASEAN foreign ministers met in the capital Phnom Penh. At the top of the agenda was creating an agreed-upon negotiating position with China on the South China Sea. China had always insisted that negotiations should be bilateral. Hun Sen backed Beijing and, for the first time in its forty-five-year history, ASEAN failed to issue a joint statement at the end of the summit, giving Beijing a clear victory.
Since then China’s grip on Cambodia has only tightened, and Beijing scored a clear win in 2017 when Cambodia canceled routine joint exercises with the United States and held them with China instead. Four months later, Cambodia expelled a small US Navy unit that had been involved in school and health projects for nine years. In return, it was given a billion dollars for a sports stadium, a new airport, and other projects.19
China has made inroads into Thailand since the military takeover in 2014. While the United States imposed sanctions and demanded a return to democracy, Beijing stepped in with money, plans for high-speed rail networks and other infrastructure building, and weapons (including submarines). In return, Thailand has been earning its spurs by helping China round up dissidents who sought sanctuary there. They include a hundred Xinjiang Uighur activists who were forcibly repatriated to China on July 9, 2015. On August 17 a bomb at a Bangkok tourist attraction, the Erawan Shrine, killed twenty people and injured more than a hundred with suspicion falling on insurgents sympathetic to the Xinjiang independence movement. The Thai military government was also tacking an insurgency in the south of the country, highlighting a risk that its embrace of China may only have served to make the country more unstable.
Thailand’s southern neighbor, Malaysia, has become vulnerable to China because of a corruption scandal in which hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen from a state-owned Malaysian investment fund. Malaysia was once hailed as a pioneering Asian tiger, but the scandal revealed a country rotten at the highest level. China stepped in with four billion dollars to buy out assets held by the broken fund.
Saudi Arabia, the biggest exporter of extremist Wahhabist Islamic doctrine, became involved with the discovery that it had made substantial deposits into the bank account of Malaysian prime minister Najib Tun Rajak. The Saudi involvement highlighted concerns about how Islam has slowly been taking a hold in Malaysia, and to retain power, the ruling party has been incorporating religion into mainstream legislation. In what used to be a relatively easygoing country for Muslims, there are now laws about fasting during Ramadan, premarital sex, and criticizing Islam. Malaysia’s most successful prime minister was Mahatir Mohammed, in office during the boom years of 1981–2003, who concentrated on the economy. His successors’ lack of leadership skills is blamed for Malaysia slipping back into high levels of corruption and religious politics.
Indonesia, the world’s biggest Muslim country, is more unwieldy, has more people, and covers more territory, but in an attempt to embed its democracy, the government is having to make similar accommodations toward Islam. Early on in its transition from being a secular dictatorship, Indonesia decided to bring extremist Islamic groups into the political process. While this helped stabilize the nation, Islamic missionaries trained in Wahhabism are having an impact. Southeast Asia is unlikely to suffer the extreme divisions of the Middle East, but Islam is taking hold and challenging governments inclined toward developing democracy.
The influences of Confucian China and a hard-driving Middle East–inspired Islam are converging influences in Southeast Asia. Western hopes that the region could become a gathering of secular Asian democracies have long faded. It is now a question of keeping as many governments as possible either in a US-led camp or staying neutral, a challenge that could prove difficult.
IF SINGAPORE IS Southeast Asia’s intellectual heart, Indonesia, with its eighteen thousand islands and 260 million people, is its litmus test. Forty percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. More than 85 percent are Muslim. Some seven million, just 3 per cent-percent, are Chinese, but various studies, often disputed, over the past quarter century have put the Chinese community as controlling up to 70 percent of the Indonesian economy. Indonesia swings between embracing and rejecting its Chinese community, and there has always been friction. During the Cold War, the Chinese were suspected of supporting communism. In the 1960s, they became targets of anticommunist killings in which at least half a million died. Muslim gangs were responsible for much of the slaughter. In 1998 riots originally aimed against the dictatorial rule of President Suharto also targeted Chinese businesses and in 2016 the governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, sparked riots after arguing that the Koran did not ban Muslims from voting for non-Muslims. Basuki was elected to office in November 2014 after serving two years as deputy governor, but was then sentenced to two years in jail for blasphemy against Islam. His success at being elected showed that Chinese community leaders could break through into politics. His conviction exposed the tide of Islamization creeping into the country’s once secular institutions.
As with the rest of Southeast Asia, Indonesia is faced with growing religious influence against a secular US-supported status quo and the pull of China as a new colonizing or hegemonic power. Only the brave and foolish would try to predict how this will develop.
Two views of Southeast Asia have emerged in recent years. One is of sun-drenched tourist beaches, cityscapes lined with glass-fronted skyscrapers, and busy factories feeding global supply chains while wealth spreads through communities. Southeast Asia prides itself on its development being far removed from the bloodshed of the Middle East and the poverty of Africa and South Asia. That is accurate just as another view is also accurate, of a region that has been trampled by outside powers for centuries, has failed to break through decisively on tackling the negative forces of poverty, corruption, and ethnic tension, and is now bracing itself for another Cold War–style conflict.
“Southeast Asia is cast as the nut between the giant arms of a geopolitical nutcracker,” explains Michael Vatikiotis of the Singapore-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. “Governments are not banking on a US defensive shield beyond a token military presence and the odd bout of sabre rattling from an Aegis destroyer or Nimitz-class carrier.”20
Vatikiotis has long experience in attempting to mediate various Southeast Asian conflicts, such as the Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand. He envisages a Southeast Asia that a few decades from now will begin to resemble more the region it was before European powers arrived in the fifteenth century. “China’s advantages of geographical and cultural proximity will be magnified by the weakening of strong centralized states and the emergence of smaller autonomous entities relying on trade orientated toward the Middle Kingdom,” he argues.21
To some degree this is already happening. Beijing has a history of supporting insurgencies that weaken governments, whether it be through Pakistan into Kashmir or the Shan State, which operates under its own government within Myanmar. Already, the Islamic province of Aceh in northern Indonesia has a special autonomy arrangement, as does Mindanao in the Philippines. Other insurgencies will at some stage have to settle, including the Christian Karens and Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, the Muslims in southern Thailand, possibly the Balinese Hindus, and the animists in Indonesian Papua. Each agreement would draw power away from the central government.
Indonesia has no claim to the South China Sea, but has found itself being drawn in because of fishing boat intrusions into its exclusive economic zone. As I will examine in chapter 16, many Chinese crews are tasked directly by the military to harass other boats and test borders. They are known to defense analysts as the maritime militia. Indonesia has captured and burned fishing boats from China and other countries and, in 2016, its navy fired warning shots at a Chinese vessel near the island of Natuna off the north Borneo coast. The message was that Indonesia would not allow breaches of its territory regardless of which country was responsible. Then in July 2017 it ratcheted things up by renaming the area of the South China Sea within its control as the North Natuna Sea, drawing objections from Beijing.
Malaysia has had lesser but similar problems and, surprisingly, in 2016 even Singapore found itself targeted. Beijing’s operation also drew in the former British colony of Hong Kong, which under an international treaty should be able to operate independently of Beijing’s interference until 2047.
In November 2016 Singapore shipped nine armored vehicles to Taiwan for joint military exercises. On their way back, the vehicles were seized when the ship carrying them docked in Hong Kong, with Beijing saying openly, “The Chinese government is firmly opposed to any forms of official interaction between Taiwan and countries that have diplomatic relations with us, military exchanges and cooperation included.”22 It took more than two months for Singapore to negotiate the vehicles’ return.
Along with the Philippines and Vietnam, Singapore has been one of the loudest critics of Beijing’s South China Sea policy. Shipping and trade are Singapore’s lifeblood and should the Asian shipping lanes fall under Chinese control, the autonomy of this city-state could be under threat.
China had known about the annual Singapore-Taiwan exercises for years, but felt confident enough to intervene in a way that struck on three fronts: it targeted Taiwan in an attempt to isolate it further; it underlined to Hong Kong that, despite the treaty with Britain, China could step in at any time; and it sent a warning to Singapore and any other Southeast Asian country not to cross China. Beijing flatly refused to allow Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong to the May 2017 summit on the Belt and Road Initiative despite invitations issued to the leaders of Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Philippines.
All this raises a question as to why China would create more regional animosity by involving governments staying neutral in the South China Sea dispute. Unless, of course, it believed its economic and military weight were now enough to win around the region through the doctrine of punishment and reward.
The prompt that led to several Southeast Asian governments asking for US help came seven years earlier in 2009 when China submitted its Nine-Dash Line claim to the UN. There were already winds of unease about maritime sovereignty that led Malaysia and Vietnam to apply in May 2009 to extend the boundaries of their continental shelves. The United States answered the appeal when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attended an ASEAN summit in Hanoi in July 2010, by which time she was already formulating a policy that became known as the American Pivot to Asia.
Clinton declared that the South China Sea was an area of American national interest, adding, “The US supports a collaborative diplomatic process by all claimants for resolving the various territorial disputes without coercion. We oppose the use or threat of force by any claimant.”23 The emphasis there was that the United States was very much involved and supported ASEAN working as one unit in negotiations with China. Her Chinese counterpart, the Chinese Yang Jiechi, was having none of it. “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact,”24 he said, throwing down the dividing gauntlet of a struggle for power in Southeast Asia.
In October 2011 Clinton elaborated on her theme with an article in the prestigious magazine Foreign Policy. “As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point,” she wrote. “In the next ten years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy. … One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region.”25
A month later, President Barack Obama formally announced the Pivot to Asia in a speech to the Australian Parliament: “As we end today’s wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and missions in the Asia-Pacific a top priority,” he said, adding that marines would be based in the northern city of Darwin.26
The Pivot was immediately read as being a new US policy to contain or at least stop China’s rise and expansion. It is not difficult to see how wires between China and the United States became so crossed over the Pivot.
“The declaration was a public-relations disaster,” writes defense analyst Harlan Ullman. “Allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia were very concerned, if not frightened, by this seemingly dramatic shift, made without much prior consultation. China was angered, regarding the Pivot as a direct challenge to its sovereignty and standing.”27
Kurt M. Campbell, who helped Hillary Clinton design it, has argued that the Pivot merely represented Asia’s new reality in the world. “It is the leading destination for US exports, outpacing Europe by more than 50 percent,” he writes. “The verdict on which economic principles will define the twenty-first century will be reached in Asia, home to three of the world’s four largest economies and increasing levels of interdependence. On so many issues central to the world’s future, Asia is at the center of the action.”28
Obama, too, tried to stress that this was not an anti-China policy. “We’ll seek more opportunities for co-operation with Beijing, including greater communication between our militaries, to promote understanding and avoid miscalculation,” he told the Australian Parliament. “With most of the world’s nuclear powers and some half of humanity, Asia will largely define whether the century ahead will be marked by conflict or co-operation, needless suffering or human progress.”29
Beijing was skeptical. Yes, there was cooperation with the United States at so many levels, including finance and climate change. But that didn’t mean China wasn’t still vulnerable to its defenses being breached, leading to another Century of Humiliation. “America’s pivot to Asia sent a very wrong and confusing message,” the International Studies Institute’s Ruan Zongze told me. “It divides ASEAN countries, and damages the US-China relationship. We ask them, For what? What is this pivot? They tell us that the US only wants to reassure its allies in the region. We say, For what? So, they can think they have Uncle Sam behind them so they can kick China around?”
Whatever message the United States tried to get across, the Pivot announcement was a public relations disaster, not least because it would not end up deploying more American warships to Asia. US budget cuts in defense meant that even though the percentage of ships might rise (to 60 percent), there would be fewer naval vessels in the Asia-Pacific. Within a year, China Coast Guard crews were confronting the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal. Beijing intensified its island building in 2013 when the Philippines took the Scarborough Shoal case to an international tribunal while, fired up and confident, President Xi Jinping announced his Belt and Road Initiative to expand China’s influence throughout Asia and across to Europe and Africa. There was no war, military or economic, but the gloves were off.
Southeast Asia’s confrontation with China has been led by the Philippines and Vietnam, who were the region’s bookends during the Cold War. Philippine troops fought with the Americans in Vietnam. American planes and warships were based in the Philippines, and Soviet ones in Vietnam. Both have put up a brave front against China, but both have already been forced into compromises. Yet neither is fainthearted when it comes to a fight, and China would have noted their histories. Vietnam was the first country to expel a colonial power through war, and went on to beat both America and China in further conflicts. The Philippines became the first country in this present cycle to overthrow a pro-American dictator through the “people power” of street protests.