Alice D. Ba

Is China leading? China, Southeast Asia and East Asian integration

In East Asia, China’s growing economic weight and economic initiative, along with the corresponding intensification of intra-East Asian economic ties, has renewed debates about the roles played by major power leadership in regional integration. Focusing on China’s particular relations with Southeast Asian states, this article investigates the extent to which China can be said to be substantiating or redirecting existing patterns of East Asian integration. It does so by considering some basic markers of Chinese influence in trade, investment and aid, as well as the domestic-political and regional-political dimensions of leadership that can complicate the ability of otherwise materially able powers to lead. While recent economic initiatives like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank suggest that China is turning to a more proactive approach to East Asian integration, this article also highlights how any prospective leading Chinese role seems likely to be conditioned by a system of expectations and interests constituted by Southeast Asian states and their historical relations with the US and Japan.

The United States and Southeast Asia

The development of what has come to be thought of as Southeast Asia has been profoundly shaped by its interaction with other, more powerful, forces from outside the region. Whether this has been the impact of religious traditions from other parts of Asia, the impact of expanding economic relations within Asia itself, or the more recent and revolutionary impact of ‘the West’ (Beeson 2001a), the contemporary nature of the Southeast Asian region is in large part a consequence of influences from outside the region itself. As earlier chapters in this volume have demonstrated, in the last two hundred years or so European powers, and more recently the United States, have had a major impact on Southeast Asia’s development (see McCloud 1995). This pattern of regional susceptibility to external influences and power shows no sign of abating.

The Environment in Southeast Asia: Injustice, Conflict and Activism

As demonstrated throughout this volume, the types and severity of dilemmas facing states within Southeast Asia can vary enormously depending on their history, culture, politics and level of social and economic development. This is partially true of environmental issues, but many environmental concerns fail to respect the otherwise tangible privileges of economic development, just as they often ignore state boundaries. This situation was amply demonstrated by the choking haze - the worst ever - from primarily Indonesian forest fires engulfing Singapore and other countries in late 2015, and severely interrupting the otherwise largely First World daily existence of its citizens. nTransboundary environmental issues are often focused on mainland Southeast Asia, with the sharing of water resources from transboundary rivers a key example (Boer et al. 2016), but the haze covering most of the region clearly demonstrated that oceans are also no barrier to the transit of environmental problems. Similarly, climate change is likely to be the dominant overarching environmental issue for the foreseeable future and in this case regional, and even global, transboundary environmental pollution affects both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia equally. Southeast Asia is particularly at risk to weather extremes exacerbated by climate change; it includes four out of the ten countries globally most affected by extreme weather events between 1993 and 2012 (Kreft and Eckstein 2013).