In Asia, Washington Loses Ground to China
By Tim Shorrock
WASHINGTON (IPS) — The United States is losing regional influence in South-east Asia to China with its overly narrow focus on terrorism and a propensity to place bilateral ties above multilateral relationships, U.S. and Chinese analysts said.
ASEAN is the acronym for the 10-nation Association of South-east Asian Nations, which comprises Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines.
The United States is "notoriously bilateral, and almost gratuitously so in South-east Asia," she said. The fact that U.S. officials are not attending the first East Asia Summit in Malaysia in December underscores U.S. alienation from the region, she said.
Moreover, by emphasising South-east Asia as the second front in its global war on terror, the Bush administration has signalled that "we care less about other areas of policy," Dalpino said, speaking at a November forum on China and South-east Asia sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA.
Minxin Pei, the director of the China Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed that the United States "has ceded the region to China's initiative."
He said U.S. military policies following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks 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 United States 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, said 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 during the early 1990s. Since then, their "mutual needs" for economic and military security "have been the driving force behind the relationship," said Ren.
In 1992, for instance, China and several South-east Asian nations formed a subregional group within the Asia Development Bank. Two years later, China became a charter member of the ASEAN Regional Forum, an influential discussion group where military officials from around the region meet to discuss missile defence, piracy and other security issues.
But the 1997 financial crisis was a watershed event, largely because China's decision not to revalue its currency "helped stabilise the regional economic order," said Ren. Shortly after this event, at ASEAN's initiative, China, Japan and South Korea began holding annual discussions with South-east Asia under a formula now known as ‘ASEAN-plus-three.’ "It was here that the East Asian cooperation process started," he said.
In 1999, after the United States and China reached an agreement on China's accession to the World Trade Organisation, ASEAN governments began to worry about the impact of Sino-U.S. trade relations on their region. As a result, China proposed a China- Southeast Asia Free Trade Agreement. The framework for such an FTA was signed in 2002.
Over the past three years, the SARS epidemic, the threat of piracy and the rapid increase in intra-regional trade drew China and South-east 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 United States, 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 U.S. dollars by 2010, Ren predicted. That trade has grown nearly 40 percent since 2002, and hit 106 billion dollars in 2004.
China, Ren stressed, has built its ties with South-east 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 neighbouring area."
But Pei, the Carnegie scholar, suggested that China wants to preserve its big-power status and minimise 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 South-east 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 Condolleeza Rice's decision to skip the annual ASEAN meetings and dialogues with foreign governments in July "was a big mistake."
Pointing to the lack of U.S. participation in December’s East Asia 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 South-east Asia was in October, when Eric John, a deputy assistant secretary of state, was asked at a congressional briefing why the United States 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. (Inter Press Service)
