by the West and Japan in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is not just that China is
aggressively challenging the maritime and territorial claims of Brunei, Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, through which the
majority of China’s seaborne trade passes. It is also that Mr Xi’s call for “Asian people to
run the affairs of Asia” sounds like code for China running Asia. As a Chinese foreign
minister once told a gathering of the ten-country Association of South-East Asian
Nations (ASEAN): “China is a big country and [you] are small countries, and that is just a
fact.”
On the other hand, while ASEAN members welcome America as the dominant military
power in the region to counter China’s growing heft, they know that conflict would be
disastrous for them. South-East Asian diplomats did not loudly cheer the anti-China
rhetoric of President Donald Trump’s administration, which is unlikely to soften much
under Joe Biden. And no wonder. Many of the region’s governments are hostile to
democracy, and few see America’s political model as one to emulate.
Above all, China is too close and already too mighty to turn against. It is by far South-
East Asia’s biggest trading partner and its second-biggest investor, behind Japan.
ASEAN’s prosperity is as bound to China as its supply chains are. And as Sebastian
Strangio, a perceptive observer of the region, points out in a new book, “In the Dragon’s
Shadow”, South-East Asia has a powerful stake in China’s growth and stability:
historically, turmoil in China has spread instability southward.
So, how not to get caught between the two giants? The region’s strategists remind
themselves that, when it comes to great-power rivalry, things have been worse. At the
height of the cold war, bloody conflict in Indo-China, along with communist insurgencies
elsewhere, threatened to reduce South-East Asian autonomy to zero. Those concerns,
and the need for a mechanism to manage their mutual mistrust, were catalysts for
Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore to form ASEAN more than
50 years ago. And today? At least, the strategists say, with black humour, China and the
United States have not carved up the region between them.
As for 2021, the region’s experience in managing great-power rivalry will come to the
fore. South-East Asia has lived under China’s armpit for millennia, and ASEAN’s member
countries have dealt with the American presence since the second world war. The
approach will be to “hedge, balance and bandwagon” between the two, says Bilahari
Kausikan, formerly Singapore’s top diplomat. Students of international relations are
usually taught that only one of these three approaches is possible at any time. Yet
pragmatic South-East Asians, Mr Kausikan argues, have a knack for doing all three. One
example in 2021: just as the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte will keep
wooing Mr Xi over Chinese investment, expect a rapid improvement in once-strained
military ties with America. South-East Asia in 2021 will also do more to invite other
powers, notably Japan, South Korea, Australia and India, to share in both regional
prosperity and security.
Hedging, balancing and bandwagoning rests, admittedly, on one big assumption: that
neither America nor China really intends to decouple their two economies entirely. That
calculation is probably right, and even if hard-nosed competition and negotiation