Exhaustive study of Beijing’s growing influence comes at a critical juncture
About two decades ago, the first articles written about China’s investments in Southeast Asia were met with skepticism. Predictions of China’s rise were dismissed as inflated and premature. After all, even if China’s economy was starting to show promising signs of growth and expansion, the country’s diplomatic and military clout was weak. Many people anticipated China’s collapse before its eventual rise.
A decade later, skepticism turned to mild apprehension, as China directed state corporations to establish beachheads in parts of the region considered strategic gateways, allowing China’s landlocked interior access to the sea. China’s preference for investing in infrastructure — ports, roads, railways and power-generating dams — was already starting to generate friction with local communities and raise nationalist hackles. At the same time, signs emerged that China’s strategic inroads had geopolitical implications as investment started to come with political and military strings attached.
Today, measuring the extent of China’s reach and influence in Southeast Asia has become a critical metric for the strategic rivalry between the United States and China that now dominates discussions of Asian security. U.S.-based Canadian researcher and veteran journalist Murray Hiebert’s exhaustive study of China’s influence in Southeast Asia comes at a particularly critical juncture, for never in recent history have these two great powers been so perilously close to conflict. Once again, Southeast Asia looks to be a proxy battlefield.
Hiebert asks an important question at the outset of “Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia’s China Challenge” — what is driving China’s expansion into Southeast Asia? Is it about commercial opportunities or the need for a defensive buffer to protect its own sovereignty? As the author reveals in meticulously researched detail for each of region’s 10 states, the picture is mixed.
There are strategic drives to build highways and railways linking China’s Yunnan Province with Myanmar and Laos, and by extension Thailand. There are also commercial ventures to develop property, casinos and tourist resorts for the growing legions of Chinese tourists and overseas workers. In this respect, the author quotes a former U.S. official saying: “Although it is true that China is engaged in mercenary and opportunistic economic activities, in some respects it replicates how other great powers have routinely behaved in the developing world.”
Normal as these impulses might be for a great power, they nonetheless generate apprehension on the ground in Southeast Asia, and much of the reporting in the book highlights these fears. Aggressive fishing, exploration for underwater minerals and expanding definitions of territorial waters in the South China Sea top the list of concerns for the maritime states of Southeast Asia, while China’s dam-building activity in the upper reaches of the Mekong River and a drive to make the waterway navigable for larger vessels is of great concern to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.