Where Great Powers Meet: America & China in Southeast Asia | David Shambaugh

[Music] well good afternoon everybody i'm steve orleans president of the national committee on u.s china relations and i'm thrilled to be joined by my old friend david shambo um you see right here a copy of his new book which is actually being published today and this is his first book program that he's doing so we're thrilled that our old friend david shambo is able to join us today for what is a fascinating walk through southeast asia which talks about how the united states and china each have these differing influences and what it's going to look like going forward it is a fascinating wonderful read so i will have david speak for you know neighborhood of 15 20 minutes i'll ask him some questions and then some audience members have submitted questions so and you can also submit questions through the q a function off on your on your screen uh for those of you who don't know david if you're on this call and don't know david i'd kind of be surprised because he's one of america's best known china scholars his title is the gaston seeger professor of asian studies political science and international affairs and the founding director of the china policy program at the elliott school of international affairs at gw um he's written so many books and articles that if i started to go over each of them we wouldn't have any time for the program today but suffice it to say that i he has been a resource for me in the committee over many decades and truly is one of the great scholars who when he focuses on an issue you really learn about it i could talk about various books and how they've affected the way i think about china but david i can't thank you enough for joining us today i can't thank you enough for everything you do for u.s china relations and for the national committee as well as me thanks david uh steve thank you um indeed uh very much uh for that overly generous introduction um but also i'd like to just start by thanking the national committee for all it does and all you do to contribute to our um fraught relationship trying to make it less fraught with china um and to margot landman in particular who has been working behind the scenes to make today's event um happen smoothly technologically and otherwise um so really it's it's a great pleasure i have to say um to launch my book this is indeed the birthday of the book today is the official launch date i was telling someone the other day that you know it's like having had a four-year pregnancy and you finally give birth not that i've had that experience but this book has been four years in um research and writing and today you know it's finally um out so um we're going to have time good ample time for question and answer and and conversation between us steve and i look forward to that so what i thought i'd like to try and do is to just provide our our viewers with a general overview of the book first um nothing else to maybe entice you to go out and order a cup you know christmas is coming makes a very nice gift for your loved one um in all seriousness um let me just uh begin by trying to do three things i guess first offer a few disclaimers and preliminary explanations about the book and how i got into it secondly to kind of give you some of the major uh takeaways and and conclusions of the book and then to wind up um peering into the future um and tell you what i think some of the possible alternative futures or scenarios are for uh the united states and china and in southeast asia so that's a little bit of a road map for for where i want to go and then we can get into our conversation and q a so first in terms of the subject matter this um is both an extension of work i've done previously on on china's foreign relations with different parts of the world as well as the international relations of asia but it's also very new to me this is new terrain i've never really worked uh specifically on southeast asia nor surprisingly if i spent all that much time in southeast asia singapore yes couple visits to vietnam many decades ago to thailand in in burma but southeast asia i have to say is very new to me and so when i had a sabbatical um back in 2017 um i considered going back to china um but that was a little difficult i'd had some difficulties and and still do with uh going in and doing research in china is the number of my colleagues are too but i had a really great opportunity to go to singapore to the rajaratnam school of international studies there about which i cannot say enough they were very hospitable so i went there um for half a year and initiated the project i was also i should say the beneficiary during that period of the department of state's international speakers program so that got me around the region uh and india i gave you know i don't know 40 lectures and 10 countries or something in that period of time and then i went back the following i hadn't quite finished all the the field work so i went back the following summer in 2018 um for a couple more months um based again it's in singapore but at a different institution institute for southeast asian studies who are also extremely hospitable so i have um great uh gratitude to both isis and rsis so um that's the first disclaimer secondly um this is not just a book about china and southeast asia of which there have been several published just recently four by my account um there's a little miniature uh cottage industry or tsunami or whatever occurring which is great because the field has needed new work on china and southeast asia and my book does look at china's southeast asia but also looks at the united states in southeast asia and i think that distinguishes it somewhat from these other recent books that have come out so the role the u.s and the region is very much part of the story i try and tell and it may surprise you as a number but as an american um i was unfamiliar with a lot of that part of the story the american part of it um so that was a bit of an education third disclaimer um is that this is not just a study of of contemporary affairs it's very much a book of history which is also not my discipline by training there are two full chapters and half of two others in the book that deal with pre-21st century events in the case of the united states this goes back to the first american council that was assigned to what was then known as the dutch east indies otherwise known as indonesia who arrived there in 1802 and then that chapter proceeds through the america america becoming a pacific imperial and in the case of the philippines of course a colonial power following the spanish-american war it then goes through the naval and commercial expansion of the united states in the early 20th century in southeast asia than the second world war in the pacific and on the asian mainland southeast asian mainland the entire cold war of course of which a big part was the vietnam war so um so there's a whole chapter on on all of that uh in the case of china it goes back obviously much further goes back to the qin dynasty 221 bc uh to 206 bc is when the first recorded records of interactions between the han chinese and what were then known as the yeah people basically everybody south of the yongsa river they called them the bay yeah a hundred years um and the dai people who inhabit yunnan uh to this day so that chapter traces um the also the history of the non-high non-young um trading uh period and the so-called tribute system uh it also looks at the protracted animosity between china and vietnam including the um really 900 plus years of chinese occupation subjugation of vietnam it looks at southeast the southeast asia during the early 20th century when sunyat sen and the nationalists used uh different um countries in southeast asia as a refuge really and bases from which to plan the revolution that finally overthrew the qing then it goes through the interwar period and finally the post 1949 history of the prcs interventionist i think is the only word for it and and subversive policies towards southeast asia through the support of insurgent movements in every single country as well as its role in the uh non-aligned movement and the bandung uh period so you know if you're looking if people are looking for information about contemporary southeast asia and the region's interactions with the us and china this is also the book it's very much contemporary it's got several chapters on uh the current period the last few years but i just want to give readers or potential readers a warning in advance if you're just looking for a kind of snapshot of where things are today you're going to get a big dose of history if you buy this book uh fourth and and the last disclaimer i guess is i proceed in the book from the premise and i believe in general that the united states and china are now locked into indefinite comprehensive competition across all functional domains political systems diplomacy commerce security military espionage ideology values technology education research public diplomacy soft power culture media global governance and so on i see the us and china as uh competitive uh in all of those functional domains and i see the united states and china um as competitive in all regions of the world this is a global competition as my previous book china goes global began to dig into what six years ago so this is the overriding defining characteristics of international relations today and i think well into the future so that's my starting point and southeast asia is a really interesting microcosm of that competition because it brings all those elements those functional elements together into one geographic space in in the region and across um 10 members of asean timor-leste is also a southeast asian state that's not yet a member of asean um so it's an interesting way prison uh a microcosm through which to look at the u.s china competition i think um so those are the disclaimers now what are the main findings and and takeaways um first is southeast asia's own intrinsic importance this is a region um that is no strategic or no geoeconomic backwater it is extremely important in its own right and and the book does not just look at it as a kind of arena in which this the big powers are playing um it very much makes the case of the importance of southeast asia this is a dynamic and sprawling region it spans more than three thousand miles from east to west and over two thousand miles from north to south between australasia and the southeast to obviously india and south asia to the west to east asia to the north it includes as i say 11 states 10 of which are members of the association for southeast asian nations has a population of 636 million people uh is one of the most heavily uh and densely populated regions of the world and has extraordinary diversity and heterogeneity in virtually all dimensions cultural ethnic economic political there are no fewer than five different distinct political systems in the region um so and diversity really defines everything which is one of the lessons i learned in researching this book is it's impossible to generalize about southeast asia it's one should not try second thing i learned is asean does not represent southeast asia do not start with asean if you're trying to understand southeast asia asean's an important institution but it doesn't represent it's not the kind of institution many americans would expect it to be or like it to be now asean um is the sixth largest economy in the world on aggregate uh with a nominal gdp of three trillion dollars in 2018 so as i say this is no backwater this is a very important region um and one that the united states i think as i'll tell you in conclusion in a moment should pay much higher attention too second big conclusion is that while this sino-american competition comprehensive competition um is already broad and intensifying it's what i describe in the book as a soft rivalry not a hard rivalry yet what do i what's the distinction there well a hard rivalry um in my mind it was a cold war kind of u.s soviet rivalry where it was a tit-for-tat rivalry washington did a moscow did b washington then did c to counter moscow it was really a very reactive competition between the those two superpowers we don't find that uh or i don't find that in southeast asia the two powers are both maneuvering i argue on their own it's kind of like shadow boxing looking over their shoulders watching the other very intently but they aren't promising their actions and their policies based on the other yet this could happen and i'll get to that in the in a moment when i get to the conclusions about the potentials for polarization but i see this as a sort of soft dynamic fluid competition um at present third takeaway um is that the united states and china are not the only actors in this drama um indeed there are other regional so-called middle powers that are that are important to consider japan india australia europe europe is the largest foreign investor in southeast asia it may surprise some of our viewers even south korea has now a new south southbound policy i was in the audience in singapore when um president moon unveiled that a couple of years ago and asean itself possesses substantial agencies so this is not and the book really doesn't try and paint a picture of two elephants fighting this is a very complex region of which the united states and china are two significant players and powers but they're not the only that's not the whole story um fourth uh and last conclusion takeaway uh is that i come to a couple of counter-intuitive conclusions in the book the first is what i call i describe china as an overestimated power while i describe the united states as an under appreciated power now let me elaborate briefly on what i mean by both of those so if you travel around the region um one is struck by overwhelmed by i would say this pervasive region-wide narrative that china is already the dominant power and that b this is a kind of natural state of affairs and china is rapidly sucking all the regional states into their sphere of influence a kind of 21st century tribute system if you will and everybody needs to get on the bandwagon that is an overwhelmingly dominant but i would i argue in the book an incorrect narrative i argue that um china that this narrative is overstated and i find that there's substantial uh ambivalence and suspicions about china in every country throughout the region and if you look at public opinion polls that isis in singapore has have done for example that is sustained in in surveys like that second thing i find about china is it's a very uneven power same argument i made in my previous book china goes global southeast asia is also not an even power it has some strengths in certain areas economic primarily but relative weaknesses in many i would argue that china's diplomacy soft power security assistance programs and united front activities and its relations with the overseas chinese diaspora are all weaknesses um that's a kind of caveat on this pervasive narrative um and the third caveat is that the bri uh which is i should emphasize is welcomed by most in the region it's needed more importantly mike lampton's recent book i think is does a brilliant job of describing that this is very needed infrastructure and most countries in the region are on board the bri train to some extent or another so don't get me wrong there but i find that china is overreaching overstepping and encountering pushback and difficulties in a number of countries around bri now it's too early to say where that's going to go i think we have to wait five years frankly before we can come to any collective judgments but i argue in the book that we may see more what i call myanmar moments or malaysia moments now in myanmar's case that is reference to the 2011 sony dam um decision by the burmese government to stop the building and to pull back from china and to open relations with the united states malaysia moment that obviously has to do with maha tears pulling back from najib's all in china approach i think you're going to see more uh countries having such moments if you will with china and we'll see the big question is whether china will recalibrate its approaches as a result of pushback or not now for the united states um for its part as i say it gets next to no coverage in the regional media and social media the united states government has a major public diplomacy challenge here i would argue uh and southeast asians have little appreciation or sense really of the breadth and depth of the american presence in china one of my counter intuitive conclusions is that while the u.s does have weaknesses in the region it has substantial strengths and this may surprise viewers i argue it has greater strength than does china i know many of you are sitting out there thinking what does he why does he think that well if you empirically go through category by category i would i which i do in the book i think the u.s has a substantial you know it just dwarfs china in the security assistance sphere its soft power is greater uh its diplomacy is a weakness we have a real uh neglect we have this tendency to what i call fly in fly out diplomacy secretary of state flies in gives a couple reassuring speeches flies out isn't seen for another six months southeast asians are rightfully skeptical of of the us diplomacy but american universities popular culture and he can even economics the united states is no shrinking violet here we do 350 billion dollars in trade with southeast asia that's not the 587 billion that china does but it's not insignificant then if you look at foreign direct investment um people will be surprised to find that the american foreign direct investment in 2018 the last year we have good statistics for was twice the amount of china yes 25 25.9 billion for the united states 12.9 for china if you look at total stock of fdi this is my favorite statistic american fdi into southeast asia is greater than china japan and south korea combined so um even and we have 4200 companies american companies operating in the region so i just find this narrative that one encounters throughout southeast asia is to be empirically untrue um so what about the future let me conclude with a few uh brief thoughts about um where the region may be going and where this competition may be headed so i posited in that in the last uh chapter four scenarios number one further bandwagoning with china oh and maybe you could put up the um graphic i have one one graphic this is a visual depiction of where i see the 10 members of asean today and as you'll see most of them are on the beijing side of the neutral line so one can dispute you know is that the right way to place each country but that's my net assessment after four years of research but this is a fluid and dynamic not a fixed or a static spectrum two years ago in fact it was slightly different and some of the countries would not have been in the same order as they are today this is a kind of 2020 spectrum and if we revisit this one or two years from now there may be some further movement along that spectrum so so but the first scenario is that there will be continued bandwagoning as this spectrum illustrates um second scenario is continued what i call soft rivalry i just explained and the good news to soft rivalry is it produces what i call competitive coexistence it's not a tit-for-tat zero-sum cold war kind of rivalry um you can take down the slide now if you like unless people want to die you can leave it up so people can digest it i suppose if they're interested so second possibility is competitive coexistence both sides shadow boxing watching the other doing their own thing building their own relations but not in a direct competition not in an action reaction kind of dynamic the third scenario is an action reaction dynamic what i call hard rivalry which would cause a polarization of the region and then the fourth scenario is what i call more neutral hedging now hedging is a term that one encounters frequently in the region is kind of in the dna of southeast asians um not they don't want to be tilting one way or the other and they don't want to be forced to choose so to speak um it's a false choice and for the united states it's very important the u.s understand that that's a false false choice so where do i see the region going um i would argue that there's going to be more neutral hedging because i think china i already see evidence that china's overreaching overstepping alienating others and the more china does that and this is the big question for the future if you ask me you know what's the major thing david to keep your eye on i would say it's china's own behavior china can do itself a lot of damage in southeast asia as it is i would argue elsewhere in the world or china can listen better and can pay greater attention and be more sensitive to the concerns of other countries and if it does that it's going to get along better but i foresee that china i argue in the book is on a kind of autopilot they're tone deaf they live in an echo chamber they believe their own propaganda and they don't listen well so as a result they're alienating others now what does that mean just to conclude for the united states just be there provide southeast asians an option to china when china becomes too omnipresent two overbearing two proximate two manipulative and two interventionist so washington keep your cool but get in the game so let me stop there that's the kind of synopsis of of the book hopefully incentivize you to go get a christmas gift for somebody i think that was that was a a great gig tempting people to buy the book giving a nice overview which really i think left people hungry to read a lot about it one question you use the term interventionist about china in southeast asia you were referring to the pre-79 period it wasn't clear um what you were referring to there yeah i was referring to the pre-78 period 79 period when china supported communist parties insurgencies in every single country um during that period don xiaoping came to power in 1978 as we all know and one of the first things he did with the exception of the burmese communist party was to tie them off cut them off so you're on your own uh we will be morally supportive but no more arms no more money no more transmitters no more uh real support and they basically did that to the burmese communists by 82. so that's that's the period he also then decided to fight a war with vietnam that was an intervention no i'm sorry it was a self-defense counter-attack how many chinese it was i think more people may have died in that several months more chinese died in that several months than u.s soldiers died in the entire vietnam war close but not quite and we don't have real figures but the best estimates we have from several scholars who have looked at this is in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 000 chinese in one month or six weeks yeah obviously the united states was almost 60 000 in over 10 years but you know that wasn't exactly a success story for the people's liberation army yes um what i found so so interesting i mean it's a it's a great book it's real it's a wonderful read and it's got it's so interesting that we have a china scholar writing about southeast asia can you talk a little and we have this and it's good for america by the way we have this what you call it a mini tsunami of of books about southeast asia talk about a little bit more about your decision because it really is unusual and where beneficiaries in our southeast asia policy is going to be a beneficiary but but talk about it a little bit well as i say it was largely circumstantial for me um you know one of the nice things one of the best things of being an academic is to have a sabbatical every seven years on in 2009-10 i went to beijing i was a full senior fulbright scholar in the academy of social sciences institute of politics economics it was not the easiest experience i had that was just at the beginning of china's turn i would argue if we all look back on when did china make its turn to harsher repression domestically and assertiveness externally i argue it predated xi jinping it happened in and in retrospect i could see now the early warning indicators uh there that year i got my research done that book result that research resulted in china goes global but it was it was a tough uh period anyway seven years later i had a sabbatical china obviously had changed and become even more repressive during that period one of the aspects of repression were more difficulties for foreign researchers and in my own particular case i published an article as you are no doubt aware in 2015 in wall street journal they did not like the chinese government and i have there's been i've been under a kind of soft ban an invitation ban ever since so i didn't really want to go back even if i could have gone back to beijing for a sabbatical then i had this wonderful invitation to go to singapore and i thought great why not and it was just somewhat circumstantial but once i got there and i began to see the richness of this region as i say i wish you know i discovered this 20 30 years ago in my research in my career but better late than never i took great and there's some great irony in it because you have a quote um at the beginning of chapter four from alex woodside um who was the person in my life who was responsible for getting me to study chinese that he was my professor of vietnamese history um in 1970 and i went to him and i said i need to understand he was an august harvard professor i was an undergraduate and i said i need to understand why good people the american government do bad things the war in vietnam so i want to start to study vietnamese he said steve you can understand about southeast asia by studying chinese it's actually a better path and you know it may be useful in the future um after this war is over so why don't you start down that path and that was about the length of the conversation he then got me a fellowship to begin the study of chinese in the summer of 1970. so when i saw that in your book i said here it's the reverse david one of america's great china scholars is now writing obviously partly about southeast asia um but partly about china and southeast asia but mostly about about southeast asia um geographical determinism uh you know my father was a professor of geography and he was what i would almost call a geographical determinist in the end say looking 10 years out with bri going full force with mike lambton writing about the rivers of of of iron and a number of other projects are we going to be able to compete even with your suggestions that we show up and even with china's overreach we being the united states we the united states right um i think so i was surprised i say it's a kind of counterintuitive conclusion i didn't expect to find that the americans have a great depth of position in across a number of spheres in the region intrinsic strengths and respect yes i must quickly caveat that by saying that as in other parts of the world there is the view that american democracies become dysfunctional we have all kinds of social uh inequalities um systemic racism we've withdrawn from multilateralism you know the last four years have not done the american image much good in southeast asia either but if you dig down and you have conversations with people say about china it's not long before you quickly unearth this anxiety and this latent ambivalence and suspicions and um that are deep in southeast asians perceptions it goes way back you know passed down through generations i would argue it's not just about the south china sea you know or current things going on similarly if you have conversations with southeast asians about the united states you quickly find admiration of but not really a great appreciation for the range of things americans are involved with uh in the region so i go through that in some detail in a couple of chapters um i'm not you know because i'm an american i'm not making that argument in that case if i was from another country i would look at the empirical data and come probably to the same conclusion but as i say i think united states is an underappreciated power and china's an overestimated one so to you know answer your question um we have a real strong foundation steve i think the united states does in the region across you know these are ten countries stronger and some weaker than the others american position in cambodia allows not terribly strong but there there is an intrinsic reservoir of of appreciation of the united states um fears of china you know so the u.s is seen as an offshore balancer all the military the national security establishments in southeast asia with one exception really two exceptions myanmar and cambodia you know are oriented towards the us universities soft power and so on so i think we have a good position to build upon but uh we've got work to do you know this we can't just uh sit back and the tyranny of you to speak of geography the tyranny of distance has always been a great um inhibitor um barrier for the united states and the region particularly our diplomats takes a long time to fly you get to beijing in only 13 hours well i'm sorry it takes 22 to get to southeast asia um and then you know so distance is a factor but we've just got to make the effort our government has to make the operation especially in vietnam you know here vietnam is you know 50 yards from china um do they and you have them on the pro-american side of your of your chart do they worry about our reliability do they worry that in other words we've especially in the last four years i would argue the kurds were sold down the river did that raise concerns um among the vietnamese where they are just so close right well maybe margot could put that slide back up for a second because one thing i want viewers to note is the position on the spectrum of where these countries are so vietnam singapore and the philippines are on the american side of the spectrum but they're very close to the neutral line they're not out towards the end that's intentional and why do i raise this because i think there's a mis perception here in washington um that vietnam is our southeast asian ally first of all they're not an ally thailand and the philippines are allies although the thai alliance is a not really an alliance anyway there you can see the point i want to make though is that the vietnamese and i go into some depth about this um welcome the relationship with the united states as we showed with them we have overcome a lot of difficulties from our own war experience with each other but the vietnamese are very reticent to get too close to and particularly in the defense realm i talked to the defense attaches in our embassy in hanoi and i elaborate in the book how the vietnamese are slow walking the defense relationship with the united states the u.s wants to go much further there's all kinds of limits that the vietnamese are putting on it moreover if you look at the vietnamese china relationship it's a lot closer than most americans appreciate and understand economically party-to-party relations yes they have south china sea disputes uh they have history that is not uh pleasant but anyway i'm just trying to note that um vietnam uh is pursuing its own interests and the united states is helpful to it in certain regards vis-a-vis china but um it's not going to get too close to the united states same with singapore you know and then philippines is another story has singapore philippines is describable to one variable duterte duterte leaves the scene uh and philippines i would assume or predict we'll go back on the other side of the or sorry we'll stay there but move closer to the united states so this is a fluid dynamic set of orientations these countries have i think thailand is really the swing state in this competition i make the case in the book yes thailand has a so-called alliance with the united states but you dig down it's not really an alliance and thailand has been drawn very much into into the beijing's orbit in the last few years and the united states and the united states after the coup in 2014 because of congressionally mandated legislation we had to cut thailand off in a number of areas so that didn't exactly help the u.s thai relationship so i don't know if that gets to your question about vietnam but i don't want to no i think it does and two of the three countries on the american part of the slightly american part of the ledger uh have disputes with china over land features in the south china sea how big a role does that dispute play in kind of southeast asian views of china very big role for vietnam um less of a role i would say for the other uh four southeast asian disputants uh yeah it depends whether you count indonesia's disputing over the natunas or not um i find that maybe another counter-intuitive conclusion i stumbled across i find the southeast asia there's sorry south china sea issue to be of greater salience here in washington dc than it is in fact in the region now why these countries are not happy the other claimant countries malaysia brunei um um the philippines and vietnam they're not happy with these with china's nine-dash line and and rejection of the hague um ruling and everything else in the militarization the islands they're not happy about it at all but there's they can't do anything about it there's the kind of what can we do about it attitude um that one hears repeatedly you know they like the americans to undertake their phone ops but there's a kind of acquiescence to to it but a frustration with it so it's not the front and center issue for southeast asians if you ask southeast asians what is your biggest problem with china um believe it or not they come back and they say uh too much commerce too much business and geographic proximity and diplomatic manipulation they're they're concerned about being overwhelmed by manipulated by penetrated by china south china sea is not a front i find my colleagues may dispute this it's not as much a front burner first order issue for these countries as it seems to be here in the united states you can take the slide down i guess um admiral blair denny blair asked about indonesia who was the traditional leader and obviously he was our commander at pacom indonesia was traditionally the leader of southeast asia what role is it playing now now and is there any prospect of it resuming a leadership role uh denny um i hate to tell you but i didn't find much evidence of that indonesia leads from behind at best i have never been to a country that especially a country of that size that is so insular so self-possessed um and consumed with domestic issues as indonesia um from that's a variety of reasons but this is obviously the largest country it's the net what many people think should be the natural leader of asean other asean countries by the way are quite frustrated with indonesia they'd like indonesia to lead but over the last three indonesian administrations one doesn't see any evidence of that it's just a very domestically preoccupied state um and it's you know huge four thousand islands six you know so um i wouldn't look to jakarta to become a kind of regional actor this is another mistake americans tend to make um when they look at southeast asia they just look at the map and think oh indonesia there's the biggest country that's where we have to concentrate our diplomatic energies um don't think so when i was in jakarta a a wealthy chinese uh indonesian businessman and i had dinner at his home and he showed me the back door exit um in the event there were anti-chinese riots in indonesia again and they've obviously occurred in other places malaysia has a whole system in a lot of ways that discriminates against people of chinese ethnicity and rewards those of malay ethnicity how strong a factor is kind of almost a racist view of chinese in southeast asia in their relationship with china it's pretty strong it varies again by country uh it's probably the most pronounced in indonesia i was driven past in in jakarta these these um attacks on ethnic chinese and ethnic chinese businesses occur from time to time i think the last one was 2016. um and i was driven past this neighborhood in jakarta oh probably a square mile that had been torched and is still charred literally they have not rebuilt the buildings and there may be some messages there about why they haven't demolished them and rebuilt them but it it just flares up and i have a quotation in the book from a very leading indonesian think tanker who said this is a fire just waiting to ignite so the um and of course we all know about 1965 uh horrible um uh killings that went on after the failed coup nearly two million ethnic chinese um were killed in a six week period of time you might have seen the movie the year of living dangerously and others so i would say indonesia it's it's very heightened but malaysia two great sensitivities in malaysia about it um the chinese ambassador there who used to be my student has and his predecessor have both made public statements and taken actions uh that have alarm malaysians about this so-called fifth column approach their sensitivities in singapore even though singapore's a predominantly chinese city-state so the ethnic the diaspora issue is still very much alive and it's simmering in several of these countries including cambodia and even in vietnam and i'm not sure that western uh scholars and analysts of the region appreciate the kind of uh ongoing sensitivities there uh concerning it it was so it was ironic so we had a coup in thailand when when takshin shinawatra was the dually elected prime minister of of thailand and he was thrown out in a military coup and he ended up being in china so the great irony was china was protecting a democratically elected tie no of course of chinese distinct um but was protecting him while we even though we did put in place sudden sanctions continue to have a relationship with the thai military yeah as i say thailand is really to me the most interesting case in amongst these 10 countries and has is the one case that has really swung into the chinese orbit there are different explanations for it um one is the ethnic chinese composition of the thai population 40 percent i think of thai's trace chinese ancestry the princes in thailand speaks fluent chinese uh practices calligraphy xi jinping even gave her one of these friendship medals right they give out every year to the best foreign friend she received it a couple years ago in the great hall of the people um the thai uh then there's the bri dimension that mike lampton's book i think really brilliantly uh shows us the military though you ask about now this is a military that's been trained by the united states for decades but now close to 40 percent of the thai officer corps have had some type of training in china the chinese there's a joint munitions factory in thailand it's the first time china's done this outside its borders where they're producing i'm told on good authority from the pla actually that it's an assembly facility um you know of chinese uh our personnel carriers in particular they're being assembled in thailand the thais have bought three u.n class submarines from china in the last two years um cost a lot of money um training and exercises intelligence sharing the thai china military security relationship um is from an american perspective too close for comfort but you know if you're a thai and the americans cut you off as we did in 2014 again because of congression because of law and congressional mandate if there's a coup you have to stop security assistance even though we kept some of the cobra gold exercises going on a lower level some of the ship visits but you know if you're the thai military and this is a bigger point about america in the region we're not predictable we're not always there um sometimes we are sometimes we're not they want constancy uh whether it's in the security sphere or or diplomatic or others in the united states if we can do one thing southeast asia it's to be constant be there show up be dependable uh helena kalinda asks a question related kind of discussion of of chinese but asked it slightly of chinese in southeast asia can you comment on the role of southeast asian americans in the region region a level of influence in the formation of u.s policy so that would be you know thai americans malaysian americans indonesian americans kind of lobbying the u.s government to make policy towards southeast asia is that a helena that's a really interesting question um and thank you for it off the top of my head i would say the filipino american community of course is very active uh in this country um as is say the indian-american community oh that's not part of southeast asia um thai americans are too um but um natural if what you're asking about are naturalized americans uh from different southeast asian countries playing a role in the american policy process i don't see a lot of it you don't see well vietnamese americans i need i don't know that much about and need to learn more one may find greater activism in that community than i'm aware of um but what you do find is activism in the region constantly wanting greater interactions with the u.s government greater interactions with amchams and our am champs are are actually quite active and very engaged i say there are 4 200 american companies operating across the region um they want more engagement not less and and so there's a lot of agency that southeast asians are exhibiting towards the us in the region but i think your question had to do more with those here in the united states influencing yeah um interesting question from bing wade do you you know who's the founder of the world international inc do you think there will be an age asian union similar to european union does asean remain what it is does it grow into more of a uh of a stronger union uh no i don't anticipate that occurring and that's one of the mistakes that americans tend to make when they look at asean is to sort of take the eu template and think this is some sort of asian version of the eu you know the eu itself has all of its own uh intrinsic peculiarities believe me i've spent a lot of my time and career uh working on transatlantic issues in in brussels or the eu but asean asean is a it's an institution with a small eye first of all it doesn't coordinate very well it doesn't represent very well uh it's an assemblage of its members but without a strong secretariat at least in brussels on trade policy for example and their strong leadership asean for its own intrinsic history and reasons including the funding of it um is not a strong institution so americans are misplaced to look at and think that it is um and i even though they've just had a new charter now five years ago and they've been they've had their 70th anniversary i'm also of the view that i'm not dismissive of asean a lot of a lot of american analysts are i think overly dismissive it's accomplished a lot in various spheres including non-traditional security spheres and the absence of war there has been no interstate war since the end of the american vietnam war and that wasn't we weren't an intrinsic state to the region yes there's a lot of internal security issues anyway to answer your question i do not anticipate asean evolving into even a union in in southeast asia much less an asian union um you know there's not going to be an asian version of nato rsep which is now a reality you know it's not going to be what tpp was going to be and cttp is uh still so um yeah it's a set of expectations that i don't think we we should have of asean yeah um danny blair another question can you put the chinese dams on the mekong river in context for us yes another factor that alienates uh down river southeast asian countries from china there are 11 dams that the chinese have constructed or are in the midst of constructing on the upper mecon um and that's having all kinds of um bad effects on diversion of water um uh from the from laos from uh thailand and from vietnam uh and in cambodia so this is a big source of contention between those four states and china um uh as it is in south asia too i might might say the damning of the rivers off the tibetan plateau um so you know add that to the list of complaint uh and um sources of anxiety uh that the southeast asians have ash k smith asks you mentioned the importance of the u.s being there and this is true but the u.s as you just mentioned is neither a part of rsep nor the reform tpp how will china's presence in arsep affect its influence relative to that of the united states um great question um first i should note that china has an fta with asean already came into force in 2010 and it's been a great boon and facilitator of trade between china and those 10 member states so china is deeply embedded in the trade regime in southeast asia way before 10 years before rsep has now come into place our step as i understand it is is basically fta plus it's not anywhere near what tpp aspired to or what cttp has become um but it's better to have it um than not from the asian standpoint it's better to have china in it than not if china it's better to have china in institutions if they meet the criteria for membership um i'm all in favor of that so tpp um first of all the united states the biden administration should rethink and rejoin that's step one should go right there with the rejoining the world health organization climate change accord and the iran nuclear accord then you go you rejoin uh tpp if china meets the standards of tpp fine we can have negotiations to bring them in the united states needs to do that i would say yes is out of the game apec not a particularly important actor anymore uh it's a facilitator essentially a bilateral meetings between heads of state when they go every year um east asian summit mind you there's this whole architecture of multilateralism and what kurt campbell and others might call mini lateralism in the region and the us is an episodic presence and participant at best in these we've got to get in that game we've got to show up um and participate uh and be at the table i would argue in those and that means the president of the united states too has to fly out there it's a long way to go um but it's worth its uh pays multiple dividends steve jackson asks what role can the quad play in giving southeast asian countries a more subtle and flexible alternative to china strategically a great question steve in all disclosure steve and i were phd classmates of michigan together he's another uh product of michael oxenburg and alan whiting um and good question steve the quad of course southeast asia's not a member of the quad the quad is australia japan united states india and no southeast asian country including vietnam would want to join such a grouping the group is all about constrainment of china i would argue not containment but constrainment um and southeast asia doesn't want to be part of of um of constrainment you know they want to have they want to perhaps balance china but they don't want to get uh too deeply involved in the kind of security uh and intelligence relationships that do exist with the quad uh they want the sweet spot for southeast asia uh is their more autonomous neutral independent position they don't want to get too close uh to the u.s and an arrangement like the quad which uh necessitates that is not something i think southeast asian countries are necessarily comfortable with david i know you you have a uh you have a class to teach do you have an extra five minutes or no i do i told my class we'd start at 10 after the hour so okay good because there's some great questions that have come in and i and i really would want to ask them one is from mary gallagher how have southeast asian countries with large muslim populations reacted to the camps in xinjiang are they more vocally in opposition than governments in central asia great question mary um and it's one of these issues that i encountered multiple instances of in southeast asia when it comes to china where there's a lot of hand wringing and angst that goes on but is not voiced publicly there's a lot of concern from my last visits to indonesia and malaysia um just last year over the xinjiang internments but neither in both our predominantly islamic states is indonesia being the largest in the world but neither of those governments uh have gone public to condemn them or to express any kinds of of concern and so but that's not to say that there isn't concern it's just that this gets into the leverage that beijing has over these countries um i would argue and beijing has already acquired i argue in the book a kind of veto power over discourse in particular certain things that southeast asian countries would otherwise want to say and say publicly they won't say because there will be a cost um china has that capability that deterrent you might call it capability and so southeast asians are not at all happy with things like that or the south china sea or even tibet or chinese mercantilist practices or even bri there are a lot of issues that the southeast asians are not happy about with china but they don't go public on it and i would i would put the xinjiang issue in that category um and i'm not sure what it would take you know to get them to become more vocal same applies as you indicate mary to the central asian states and even turkey and beyond trying to answer these questions continue to flood in and they're great questions um uh sheldon pang see if you can be brief in this answer how would you describe the relationship between adb and aiib complementary or competitive oh very complementary and in fact the a iib template was really copied it was written by natalie lichtenstein and from a kind of world bank template but it's not dissimilar at all from the adb's template rules of governance and so on moreover they're cooperating together on a lot of projects in the region and c what is it um the a.d america rejoin should america join aiib i believe so yes um and and but just the adb estimates that there are 2.7 trillion dollars of needed infrastructure to be built in the region by i think 2023 and that um china adb world bank all the existing funders are never not even get to 50 of that level so the short answer is they're very complementary and we should be working with both all right second to last question um this one again from denny but i think they're so great the obama administration faithfully attended all the southeast asia uh gatherings yet i did not observe u.s influence in the region or any advantage over china from these efforts did you yeah i did denny actually and i argue in the book that america's relations with southeast asia were never better than during the obama years in general some of that had to do with obama himself having grown up six years of his youth in indonesia he himself visited i have the statistic in the book i believe um every southeast asian country except brunei and there was a visit that was canceled but the sultan of brunei came to the white house um and he showed up at the uh east asia summit once it was started and a number of southeast asians i interviewed for this book all spoke glowingly of the obama presence and efforts and cult it's that kind of intensive it's very labor-intensive it's not just symbolic it is somewhat symbolic to show up but you've got to uh do your work too um so i don't mean to disagree with you danny but i and you've had longer experience in the region than i have but i think it really resonated very positively actually with regional states which probably would tell us what your answer to the final question is going to be it's from mike coleman but if mike didn't answer ask it i would have asked it which is what are a few specific actions that the bad administration to take should take in southeast asia to kind of be more present and do um what you think they should do oh gosh right off top my head uh first thing is to nominate ambassadors for all 10 countries and get them confirmed within the first 90 days we've just gone through four years without an ambassador in singapore and i think some other places we've had long vacancies in bangkok and so on so we've got to have part of showing up is to have a presence in the ambassador core number two rejoin tpp number three launch negotiations for a regional fta with asean the same as china has um let's see number four keep doing what we're doing on the security assistance front a lot a good success story there number five increase scholarships for southeast asian students to the united states we already have 45 000 southeast asian students in american universities last academic year but that those could be easily doubled um so off the top of my head those are and then the secretary of state needs to visit quarterly um and as danny blair quite knows the sink pack commander does visit quarterly we have a very consistent naval and military presence in the region it's our civilians that are the problem i think and so we've got to get greater um circulation uh through the region and not just fly in fly out as i say that sort of parachute diplomacy the southeast asians expect of us and we've got to change that expectation yeah i believe the professionalism that that we're going to see in the u.s state department the national security council defense department etc are going to lead to i think a lot of the things that you're talking about this has given you a flavor um david's new book where great powers meet american china and southeast asia this has been a wonderful discussion and after this discussion i i expect your book sales to soar and i'm i'm so happy that you did your your launch with the national committee as an old friend and somebody who's provided enormous value to us over a very very long time david thank you so much and thank you all for joining us steve dorsey

Channel: National Committee on U.S.-China Relations

Views: 14,267

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Id: MUrEXnMbGgE

Length: 66min 43sec (4003 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020