Abstract: Economic growth and arms race are interesting phenomena in Southeast Asia. Contrary to the view of a majority of scholars that arms race has generally negative impact on economic growth, this article argues that the arms race between China and the United States in the South China Sea helps to create a balance of power, which reinforces regional political stability and further drives economic growth. Thus, in an indirect way, the arms race aids economic growth in Southeast Asia. Elaborating on a discourse that arms race is a natural reality in international politics which must be responded to by a positive approach, this study aims to open a new space for debate and further research and offers a new perspective to understand the phenomenon. Full text available here.
Country or Region: United States
Khan, Zahid, Guo Changgang, Riaz Ahmad, and Fang Wenhao
Abstract: Intended as a pilot flagship project under the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has received relatively positive responses from actors in and outside the South Asian region. Islamabad, New Delhi, and Washington have offered their support to the project to varying degrees, because the financial commitments made by Beijing can help narrow the substantial funding gap for regional infrastructure connectivity. Nevertheless, enduring animosity and mistrust between India and Pakistan and growing strategic competition between Beijing and Washington present the biggest challenges to the project’s sustainable progress. Although the unfolding U.S.-China competition has not tangibly affected regional cooperation, as Washington’s enthusiasm for and investment in the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Corridor (IPEC) remain low compared with China’s down payment, the potential change in the balance of power in South Asia has triggered increasing concern from and collaboration between the United States and India. By highlighting the positive-sum logic of improved infrastructure interconnection as well as greater economic integration, and contributing to a more stable geopolitical environment in South Asia, Beijing can help alleviate the longstanding enmity between India and Pakistan and assuage Washington’s and New Delhi’s skepticism about its strategic intentions. Full text available here.
Song Wei
Abstract: As China projects itself as an emerging donor of development aid, its development cooperation with Africa has garnered unprecedented attention from the world. While China is faced with many challenges in aid practices in Africa despite its remarkable achievements over the past decades, both developed countries and African countries set high expectations for China’s potential contribution. Against this backdrop, it is crucial for China to enhance trilateral cooperation with developed donors and share experience with them on how to manage aid programs. Based on successful cooperation in the past, China-U.S.-Africa trilateral cooperation will not only strengthen China-U.S. bilateral ties, but also improve China’s overall aid effectiveness to Africa. In the future, China should initiate more development cooperation programs and work to create a coordinating mechanism with the United States in areas of their common understanding and interests; it should also go beyond traditional means of assistance and try to get involved in the U.S.-led public-private partnership (PPP) projects. Full text available here.
Sun Tianhao and Wang Yan
Abstract: Although the intensified trade disputes between China and the United States accord with the basic theory of international political economy, they are unlikely to escalate into a trade war in a world characterized by the inexorable forces of globalization. What lies behind the Trump administration’s aggressive trade policy toward China is a bipartisan consensus on the growing need to reduce U.S. trade deficits, rein in China’s non-market economic forces, slow down China’s technological innovation and industrial upgrading, as well as to create political pressure on China to rectify its allegedly malign practices in global economic arenas. Motivation analysis suggests that the ongoing trade disputes are a product of the United States trying to coerce a potential challenger into adjusting its industrial development strategy and to prevent a determined rising power from pursuing national revival on its own terms. Lessons drawn from the trade conflicts between Japan and the United States in the 1980s suggest that Beijing may encounter even more trade frictions with Washington in the next few years. China must stand its ground under growing political and economic pressure, define trade disputes in strictly economic terms, and deal flexibly with their impacts. The lasting trade tensions between China and the United States has also exposed Beijing’s strategic shortcomings and forced China to enhance its innovation capacity while fostering independent intellectual property, so as to consolidate its comprehensive national power. Full text available here.
Steinbock, Dan
Abstract: With high growth rates during the past two decades and the largest trade surplus with the United States, China is the primary target of the U.S. trade war efforts. Tariffs are the first shot in bilateral tensions that are multilateralizing and injuring global economic integration, coupled with ever more intense technology competition. The evolving global scenarios of U.S.-China trade and technology conflicts are the outcome of an ever more anxious America forsaking its multilateral cooperative stances for primacy doctrines. In the worst case, these conflicts may escalate into a “decoupling” of both economies and cause lasting global recession and new geopolitical confrontation. This gloomy scenario has become viable with the exceptional use of executive power by the post-9/11 U.S. administrations. The Trump administration, in particular, is predicated on “imperial presidency” that relies on an emergency status quo, new campaign finance, and “big money,” which poses significant risks not only to U.S.-China relations, but also to American democracy and existing international order. Full text available here.
Ling Shengli and Luv Huiyi
Abstract: With the rise of China and relative decline of the United States, the question of whether both countries will fall into the so-called “Thucydides’ Trap” — an analogy to the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece — has triggered heated debate within international academia. By discussing the misunderstanding about the concept and conducting a three-level analysis of modern Sino-U.S. relations, this article identifies a few major flaws in making a simple analogy between the Athens-Sparta confrontation in ancient Greece and the Sino-U.S. relationship today. It concludes that a war between China and the United States is unlikely to take place thanks to the confines of the international system, the different nature of alliance networks from the ancient Greek period, the economic interdependence among countries, and the changing public attitude toward war. It also suggests both countries expand their economic, political, security and cultural cooperation, so as to ultimately overcome the “Thucydides’ Trap.” Full text available here.
Tao Wenzhao
Abstract: Since the normalization of China-U.S. relations in 1979, there have been various disputes and friction between both countries. But their common interests far outweigh their differences and win-win cooperation has been the defining feature of the bilateral relationship. Over the past four decades, both countries have benefited enormously from their stable and healthy interactions, which contribute to peace, stability and prosperity of the world. However, the Trump administration has deliberated major shifts to the U.S.’ China policy, labeling China as a “revisionist power” and “strategic rival” while setting many barriers to trade, economic, technological, educational and cultural exchange and cooperation. Despite the ongoing transformation of the strategic relationship between both countries, China and the United States are unlikely to enter into a “de-coupling” or a new Cold War. Faced by growing strategic uncertainties, it is still possible for both countries to maintain a generally stable relationship based on their vast common interests. For China, it is important to exercise utmost strategic patience and stamina to ease friction and manage competition with the United States while also promoting the positive aspects of their bilateral relations. Full text available here.
Young, Jason
Abstract: Responses to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been mixed. Many commentators have welcomed the opportunity for infrastructure development and projects to build economic, political and social connectivity across the region. Others have been openly critical or slow to formulate a clear position. In general, advanced economies have responded less positively than developing economies. This paper employs a constructivist approach to interpret responses to the BRI in advanced economies through analysis of commentary in the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It identifies a diversity of responses within and among these economies and a strong ideational coherence in the frameworks used to assess the BRI. It is concluded that the reception of Chinese-promoted concepts in international affairs, like the BRI, remains challenging due to the dominance of liberal and realist assessments and the accompanying political values. This suggests a need for greater intellectual engagement and more substantial feedback between China and the advanced economies, so as to open the way for a long overdue regional conversation on how development is conceptualized and co-created in a region with diverse approaches to regional economic policy. Full text available here.
Huang, Jaw-Nian
Abstract: This article provides an international-political-economy explanation of the development and degradation of Taiwan’s press freedom from 1988 to 2016. It argues that Taiwan tends to have more press freedom when it depends economically on a liberal hegemon (such as the United States) and less press freedom when it depends upon a repressive hegemon (such as China). The underlying mechanism is norm diffusion in which local state–business elites introduce media norms from the hegemon and institutionalise them in Taiwan. The Taiwan case implies that transnational economic linkages do not always bring about domestic improvements in human rights, but may damage them when relations of economic interdependence involve powerful authoritarian countries, and that norms may diffuse not only from liberal contexts to repressive states, but also from powerful authoritarian countries to weaker liberal countries.
Pempel, T.J.
Abstract: This paper examines the interactions between the USA and the expanding ecosystem of East Asian and Asia-Pacific institutions. Concentrating on the period since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009, it analyzes the ‘rival regionalisms’ that are now mushrooming throughout the region. Critical is the competition between nominally cooperative institutions and continued state-to-state suspicions that handicap efforts to forge regional institutions able to redress the region’s most contentious issues. Nonetheless, national mistrust of regional bodies is less evident in areas such as trade and finance where many actors envision the possibility of win-win solutions even as they remain more difficult to envision in issues touching on hard security The paper concludes by exploring what looks to be a new American disengagement from Asia-Pacific regional institutions as a consequence of the presidency of Donald Trump. Full text available here.
Beeson, Mark
Abstract: East Asia has many distinctive features that set it apart from other comparable regions, not least attitudes to regional development and cooperation. Despite a growing number of regional initiatives in East Asia, however, they are generally distinguished by their ineffectiveness. It is entirely possible that ‘institutional balancing’, like its more well-known power balancing counterpart, is designed not to facilitate but to prevent something from happening. The sort of ‘multilateralism 1.0’ developed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has a lot to answer for in this regard: having established its own pattern of institutional effectiveness ASEAN’s ‘leadership’ has caused it to be replicated under the new wave of ‘multilateralism 2.0’. Consequently, I suggest that not only is China very comfortable with the idea of a rather feeble and ineffective institutional architecture, but the USA is also unlikely to do anything to change this picture, especially under a Trump administration that is highly skeptical about the efficacy of multilateral institutions at the best of times. Full text available here.
Tow, William T
Abstract: The Indo-Pacific region’s security landscape is unfolding in highly uncertain and potentially explosive ways. The postwar American-led network of bilateral alliances – underpinned by concrete guarantees of extended deterrence and containment – is now yielding to a more diverse set of alignments and coalitions to manage an increasingly complex array of regional security issues. Multilateralism and minilateralism have emerged as two increasingly prominent forms of such cooperation. Minilateralism’s informality and flexibility appeals to those who are sceptical about multilateralism’s traditional focus on norm adherence and community-building even as great power competition in the Indo-Pacific is sharply intensifying. However, minilateralism’s track record in the region is underdeveloped. The potential for this policy approach to be applied by the United States and its regional security partners as an enduring and credible means of diplomatic and security collaboration in the region will remain unfulfilled as long as the Trump administration’s own geopolitical orientation remains uncertain. Full text available here.
He, Kai
Abstract: This article proposes a new concept of ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ to describe the puzzling institutional building efforts by non-ASEAN members after the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) in the Asia-Pacific. It suggests that different to ‘multilateralism 1.0’ of the 1990s, which was mainly led by ASEAN, this wave of multilateralism has been initiated by other powers, such as the United States, China, Japan, Australia and South Korea, either by forming new institutions or by reinvigorating existing ones. This article advances an institutional balancing argument. It suggests that ‘contested multilateralism 2.0’ is a result of institutional balancing among major states under the conditions of high strategic uncertainty and high economic interdependence after the GFC. One unintended consequence may be that it could well lead to a more peaceful transformation of the regional order in the Asia-Pacific if regional security hotspots, such as the Korean crisis and the South China Sea dispute, can be managed appropriately. Full text available here.
Chung, Jae Ho
Abstract: Based on the premise that perception operates either as a catalyst or a constraint for a hegemonic war, this study examines ‘national perceptions’ (i.e. how the citizens of the two states view each other) and ‘official views’ (i.e. how the two governments perceive each other) between the US and China of the post-Cold War period. As for the national views, (1) American perceptions of China have generally become more negative than Chinese perceptions of America; (2) little congruence is found between the two powers on key values and norms; and (3) perceptions are generally getting far ahead of the realities. As for the official views, formal documents do not fully reveal their real state of minds. Diplomatic courtesy and strategic self-esteem runs through them. Yet, America’s strategic concern and growing will to manage China from a position of strength is increasingly more discernible. From the Chinese documents, on the other hand, signs of inferiority have gradually disappeared. In sum, perceptions between the two are working more as a catalyst for strategic competition than a constraint on it. Full text available here.
Ishibashi, Natsuyo
Abstract: Japan’s policy toward India since 2000 appears to be a sign of new directions in Japan’s security policy since its decision to establish a strategic partnership with India is different from the previous policy of exclusive bilateralism centering on the US–Japan alliance. Nonetheless, Japan’s recent security partnership with India is part of Japan’s long-term effort to support the US-led liberal political and economic order in East Asia. This paper argues that Japan’s policy toward India since 2000 has evolved toward becoming fully aligned with US policy toward the Indo-Pacific region. The critical shift in Tokyo’s policy toward India came in spring 2005, when Japanese political leaders and policy elites came to recognize India as an important balancer against China as a result of the violent anti-Japanese demonstrations in China. They decided to support including India into the East Asian Summit and incorporated India into their new values diplomacy. This shift in Japan’s policy toward India, along with efforts to increase interoperability between Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces and Indian Navy, coincides with US strategy to bring India into the US-led coalition to balance against China
