The commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the
ASEAN-China strategic partnership this year will be met by greater skepticism
than at its launching in 2003. Recent developments in the East Asian region
point to still huge mistrust between the two sides, particularly between China
and the ASEAN states that are embroiled in territorial and maritime disputes
with China in the South China Sea. Of late, security tensions have been
compounded by escalating geopolitical rivalry between China and the region’s
other big powers -- the United States and Japan, both also vital partners of
ASEAN.
That said, healthy skepticism underscores the challenges but
does not belittle the importance of this relationship between East Asia’s now
preeminent economic and rising military power on the one hand, and its most
successful regionalist collective and key catalyst of multilateral dialogue and
cooperation on the other hand. It may be argued that ASEAN-China cooperation is
bound to have even greater impact in the near future, not only on their current
shared bilateral interests such as free trade, economic cooperation and
infrastructure connectivity, but also on matters beyond their own geographic
reach. Much, however, depends on each side’s vision of its own regional role.
There are certainly reasons why ASEAN would want to push for
greater strategic unity and influence. First of all, as ASEAN moves slowly but
surely toward the vaunted ASEAN Economic Community and even the
political-security and sociocultural areas of community building, it will need
more than ever a peaceful and orderly regional environment. This requires mitigating
intra-ASEAN conflicts as well as any major security problem involving ASEAN
member states and external players. Fortunately, intra-ASEAN tensions remain manageable,
and since embarking on political reform, the Myanmar situation is no longer the
obstacle to cooperative relations with the West that it once was. However, ASEAN
is now witness to resurgent big power competition that once more (as it did
during the Cold War) risks polarizing the member states as well as infringing
on its collective autonomy. Preventing such an outcome requires an ASEAN proactive
and possibly preemptive strategy, and a unity of perspective that simply is
lacking at the moment.
China, for its part, needs its immediate neighbors’ recognition
of its new status and future power aspirations, or at the very least will seek
to neutralize ASEAN support for other powers who may be perceived by China as
seeking to curtail its influence. At a time when its defense concerns with
Japan, the United States and even India are growing, China cannot afford (politically)
to antagonize all of its neighbors, let alone fight even limited wars simultaneously
on several fronts. The territorial and maritime disputes that embroil China
with specific ASEAN states (Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia)
but which have vital economic and security implications for the ASEAN region
and beyond, serve as the test of China’s readiness to look beyond its own
national sovereignty into the legitimate interests of its smaller neighbors as
well as issues affecting the public good such as freedom of navigation. Its assertive
actions in the last few years have unfortunately led to reduced confidence and
effectively set back decades of erstwhile successful diplomacy with ASEAN. Whether
and how China can successfully pursue a more assertive stance on territorial
sovereignty in the South China Sea while at the same time extending assurances
to its neighbors of its benign intentions is anyone’s guess. In the midst of
this kind of uncertainty, an effective and binding ASEAN-China code of conduct
can have a constructive role to play.
China appears to want to promote maritime cooperation with
ASEAN as one of the centerpieces of the strategic partnership. In Beijing’s
view, rather than resolving territorial issues, cooperation may be pursued
initially by picking low lying fruit – e.g. working together on shared concerns
such as marine environment, navigation safety, search and rescue, transnational
crime. Beijing has established a $3 billion fund for this purpose. Because the
shared ocean space between China and ASEAN is no less than the disputed South
China Sea (enclosed in the Chinese national mindset as the 9-dashed line), such
maritime cooperation may be viewed in a number of ways, including as a Chinese
gambit to expand its influence over the yet evolving rules governing activities
at sea, or – arguably from rose-tinted glasses - as a window of opportunity to
develop cooperative regimes that may gradually erode the 9 dashed-line mindset,
metaphorically speaking.
ASEAN, the Philippines, Vietnam, the US, Japan, India or any
other country cannot deny that China has legitimate maritime security interests
in Southeast Asia and beyond. It is always only a matter of time before new
powers step up to claim more influence. A China that is actively involved in
cooperative maritime regimes operating based on internationally accepted norms
and principles should be a welcome development to all coastal states.
At the same time, however, China in turn has to learn to
accept that it is not the only big power in the region nor will it be in the
foreseeable future. And that there are rules and laws in place such as UNCLOS
precisely intended to check abuse in the exercise of power by anyone and
against anyone. Moreover, small and medium powers, no longer consenting to be
pushed around by big ones, will seek recourse to somehow push back. The Philippines,
by seeking a ruling by an arbitral panel under UNCLOS on the legality of the 9-dashed
line and other Chinese actions on Philippine EEZ, has tried to open an
alternative arena for dispute settlement based on accepted norms. However, Manila
must be realistic enough to see international law as a subset of international
politics, and to consider the perspective that legal decisions may work best if
they operate as complementary to, rather than as a subtitute for, efforts to
arrive at win-win political-diplomatic solutions.
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