Changing mood in Southeast Asia amid rivalry between the US and China – Asia Times
Southeast Asia is still reluctant to take sides when it comes to rivalry between the United States and China in their region, according to the latest 2022 State of Southeast Asia study from the respected ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
More than a tenth of respondents in a regional survey published this month said they believe “remaining neutral is impractical” and that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc should choose between the two superpowers.
“Hedging is a luxury between powers can not afford for long, especially when efforts are high, superpowers are intrusive and rivalry intensifies,” said Rahul Mishra, an associate professor at the University of Malaysia’s Asia-Europe Institute.
As competition escalates, a growing number of researchers and opinion leaders believe that the region’s traditional “hedging” between the two superpowers should be replaced by something new, according to the 2022 State of Southeast Asia report published last week by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute
About 11.1% of respondents said the region should now choose between one of the two great powers, up from just 3.4% in the 2021 survey. Compared to the previous year’s report, fewer respondents felt that ASEAN should continue its position of not taking sides with any of the superpowers, down to 26.6% from 30.6%.
“Practically speaking, it is easy to remain neutral for issues that are without consequence, but for important strategic issues, sometimes it may not be an option to be neutral, it can also be seen as a form of strategic weakness,” said Joanne Lin, a lead researcher at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s ASEAN Studies Center and one of the study’s authors.
“Should tensions between the United States and China increase, with a decoupling of the two superpowers,” she added, “it will be even more challenging to remain neutral, as the world is interconnected and somehow ASEAN will end up having to choose. a specific supply chain, technology provider or position in the South China Sea. “
Hunter Marston, a researcher in Southeast Asia at the Australian National University, pointed out that most respondents still support ASEAN in improving its own resilience, and “the number of those advocating for neutrality and for choosing sides is really a minority.”
The study’s questions also concern what ASEAN should do, not what individual states should do, he added.
But when broken down by country, the results are sharp. The percentage of Burmese respondents who said ASEAN should choose between one of the two superpowers rose from 8.3% in last year’s survey to 30.6% in the recently released survey.
This can be expected due to the ongoing crisis that started with last year’s military coup.
However, the percentage of Vietnamese respondents who agreed that “remaining neutral is impractical” rose from 1.1% to 9.7%, and the percentage of Singaporeans and Indonesians rose three times and more than doubled, respectively. .
No Cambodian respondents agreed with this position last year, but 13.6% now say they were in favor of choosing side.
Each year, respondents are asked by the study’s authors: If ASEAN was forced to join one of the two strategic rivals, the United States or China, which would it choose?
In last year’s survey, only 46.2% of Cambodian respondents said China – and the rest said the United States. According to this year’s survey, around 81.5% of Cambodian respondents now believe that ASEAN should choose China over the United States, only less than one percentage point less than Laos, which has long thought the same.
When asked about their thoughts on China, about 25.9% of Cambodian respondents now see it as “a benign and benevolent power”, up from just 3.8% last year. The second highest national cohort that agrees with this view is Thailand, but only 9.4% of Thai respondents said China was a benevolent power.
Cambodians were also outstanding when it came to the question of whether China is “a revisionist power and intends to make Southeast Asia its sphere of influence.” Only 16% of Cambodian respondents agreed, compared to a regional average of 41.7%.
About 29.6% of Cambodians said they were “very confident” that China would “do the right thing” to contribute to global peace, security, prosperity and governance, up from 3.8% last year.
“The data illustrate a huge fluctuation over the last year in Cambodian perceptions of the United States and China, where the Kingdom appears to be somewhat of a divergent compared to other ASEAN states,” said Bradley Murg, a prominent senior researcher at Cambodia. Department of Cooperation and Peace.
“Perhaps most interesting is that on a number of issues it is difficult to find a ‘Southeast Asian view’ [on China and the US] in view of the significant variation in the responses when broken down at national level, ”he added.
There was a slight increase in Filipinos and Vietnamese who chose China over the United States, but the vast majority of respondents from these countries still favored Washington. Remarkably, the percentage of Indonesians who chose China increased from 35.7% to 44.3%.
There was also a noticeable decline in support for China in Myanmar – down to 8% from 51.9% last year, which was probably due to the military coup – as well as from Singaporeans, Malaysians and Thais.
Today, more than two-thirds of Cambodians and Laos believe that ASEAN should side with China. Most Brunei respondents also agreed with this.
But more than two-thirds of Burmese, Filipinos and Singaporeans now say America. And it seems that the typical hedgers, such as Singapore and Malaysia, are moving further towards the United States.
Nearly half of those surveyed in the latest survey of the State of Southeast Asia still believed that ASEAN should “strengthen its resilience and unity to ward off pressure from the two great powers.”
But there was an increase in the number of people who believed that the best option was to seek out “third parties” to expand its strategic space and opportunities.
Again, however, there also seems to be greater uncertainty about which ones. The European Union remained the first choice as a preferred “third party” to diversify Southeast Asia’s opportunities, but the number of respondents who chose it fell slightly. Japan, still in second place, saw its support fall from 37.4% to 29.2%.
All of this points to what analysts are saying is greater uncertainty among Southeast Asians about how to respond to the increasingly strained US-China rivalry, as well as their concerns about how well-suited the ASEAN bloc is to deal with these significant issues.
About 70.1% of respondents felt that ASEAN was “slow and inefficient and therefore unable to cope with fluid political and economic developments.”