Abstract: The situation in Southeast Asia brings attention not only to the regional countries, but also to the great powers. The growing People’s Republic of China’s economy and military especially causes concern regarding the stability of the whole Southeast Asia region. Smaller Southeast Asian countries may be overwhelmed by China. Amongst these countries is Malaysia, which tries to secure its national interest in the region, especially in the South China Sea. Malaysia faces some maritime security threats caused by its stakes in the Spratly Islands dispute. The article attempts to elucidate the contemporary condition of the Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN), especially in the field of warships. Moreover, the study tries to answer the question of why the RMN is an important branch of the Malaysian Armed Forces and plays a vital role in securing Malaysian safety. The article is divided into two parts. The first describes the problems which Malaysia faces in the field of maritime security. The second elaborates the assets of the RMN, mostly in major combatant ships. This paper concludes with a summary of the RMN’s major vessels that have been and will be developed from 1990 to 2025. Full text available here.
Country or Region: China
Haong, Hai Ha
Abstract: The paper explores the development of Vietnam’s bilateral defense diplomacy with world and regional powers including the United States, India, and Japan, with a particular focus on the period from 2009 to 2018. The paper finds that Vietnam’s multidirectional defense diplomacy is fundamentally shaped by its historical experience, the contemporary shift in the balance of power and the strategic challenges caused by China’s emerging power. By pursuing a multi–polar balance among major partners, Vietnam avoids being pulled into their rivalry, and keeps its non-alignment as well as strategic autonomy. The international defense cooperation has become further deepened and more substantive to satisfy Vietnam’s strategic interests including national security, territorial integrity, economic development and regime legitimacy. However, domestic and geo–strategic constraints, and asymmetrical economic interdependence with China lead this paper to suppose further challenges in the future of Vietnam’s defense diplomacy. Full text available here.
Ohm, Tae-am
Abstract: The Republic of Korea, now more than ever, faces more security challenges, strategic dilemmas, and policy tasks. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, after consolidating his power base internally and with his nuclear and ICBM programs completed, has begun negotiations with President Donald Trump of the United States to guarantee his regime security. Although a reconciliatory atmosphere within inter–Korean relations continues cautiously after the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and the Panmunjom Inter–Korean Summit, many issues remain before tensions disappear from the Korean Peninsula. The U.S.–DPRK Summit in Singapore resulted in an overall direction of “efforts” to resolve the North Korean nuclear problem. However, Korean people, well aware of North Korean behavior in the past, are in no hurry to predict its resolution. The trade war between the United States and China, being a global power struggle at its core, might become fiercer until it reaches climax. The Trump administration has ended sequestration—a legacy from the Obama administration—and significantly increased its defense budget, while slashing foreign aid and demanding that major allies, such as NATO member states and the ROK, take on a bigger burden of shared defense costs. The United States seeks to cement its superpower status for the future. China is undertaking some countermeasures, i.e., continued defense investments; a second sea trial for its aircraft carrier, which is a part of a wider program to acquire ten aircraft carriers by 2049; building military bases on artificial islands in the South China Sea; strengthening its economic and military partnership with Russia; and dramatically expanding its cyber forces. As the growth of Chinese military power has become a concern for countries in the region, the ROK confronts a particularly notable strategic dilemma. This is because inter–Korean relations, the ROK–U.S. alliance, and ROK–China relations are intricately overlapping in all areas. For the ROK, the security alliance with the United States continues to be a critical security asset. Full text available here.
Satake, Tomohiko
Abstract: This paper will analyze why and how US-Japan-Australia security cooperation developed in the 2000s, mainly from the allied perspective (Japan and Australia). Existing literature notes that the United States aimed to form an alliance opposing China from the start of the 2000s by strengthening relationships with its allies. In contrast, Japan and Australia’s perception of China was different to that of the United States. This especially applied to Australia, geographically distant from China, which prioritized strengthening its relations with China through diplomacy and trade over direct antagonism. Regardless of this, both Japan and Australia worked to strengthen security cooperation between Japan, the United States, and Australia based on a strategy of “supplementing” the United States’ regional and global role by furthering cooperation between its allies in peacekeeping operations and non-traditional areas of security. The strengthening of security cooperation between Japan, the United States, and Australia during the 2000s developed in order to maintain and enhance the United States’ presence based on the “hub and spokes” alliance system, rather than to directly oppose China. Full text available here.
Kurita, Masahiro
Abstract: The nuclear dimension of the China-India relationship has a striking feature vis-à-vis other nuclear rivalries. Due to significant asymmetries in their second strike capabilities, their deterrence relationship should lack military stability and entail risks such as potential nuclear use or threat of use, and nuclear arms race. In reality, however, the manifestation of such risks has been contained to a considerable extent. This situation can be explained by the features of the overall China-India relationship, the stability of the balance of conventional forces, the consolidation of confidence-building measures, the absence of the “stability-instability paradox” discourse, and the political conception of nuclear weapons in both countries. Full text available here.
Cottey, Andrew
Abstract: China’s disputes with its South East Asian neighbours and Japan in the South and East China Seas have emerged as important tests of the implications of China’s rise, posing dilemmas not just for regional states but also for other global actors, including European states and the European Union (EU). European responses to these disputes have pulled in three directions: a normative approach emphasising the resolution of disputes within the framework of international law; a power balancing approach, led by France and the United Kingdom, involving support for freedom of navigation operations and strengthened bilateral and EU ties with other Asian states; and de facto acquiescence to Chinese advances in the region. In terms of understanding EU foreign policy, this case suggests a sequence: a normative approach as the initial default EU policy; a turn to power balancing when the effectiveness of that policy is called into question, but also the possibility of acquiescence and consequent divisions amongst EU member states. Europe faces dilemmas in balancing support for the United States, Japan and the South-East Asian states with its strategic partnership with China, but in practice European policy is much closer to that of the former group than that of Beijing. Full text available here.
Alexis-Martin, Becky
Abstract: This paper provides a review of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) nuclear warfare and uranium mining programs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Its scope spans from the PRC’s first nuclear weapon test in Lop Nor, to contemporary issues surrounding in-situ leach uranium mining in the Yili basin, which now provides a third of PRC’s uranium. By exploring these scenarios, a lens can be placed on the parameters and limitations to Uyghur life within a nuclear state. This paper draws on the work of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, whereby power is persistently exercised as violence, to consider the entangled aftermath of nuclear imperialism and its effects to Uyghur bodies, environment and culture. While racialized nuclear imperialism presented Uyghur lives as inconsequential to progress in Xinjiang, post-Cold War necropolitics presents Uyghur culture as a direct threat to the progress and values of the PRC sovereign state. This paper proposes that the ongoing exploitation of nuclear Xinjiang provides an additional motivation for state-imposed necropolitical sanctions upon Uyghur people. This paper also presents a new theoretical contribution, the “nuclear imperialism-necropolitics nexus”, which offers a way to consider the entangled legacies of spaces of nuclear activity, from nuclear imperialism to the post-Cold War world. Full text available here.
Kenderine, Tristian, and Peiyuan Lan
Abstract: China’s greater Middle East geoeconomic strategy is centered on an external trade and industry policy. This trade and industry policy combines geopolicy and geoeconomic policy to export industrial capacity bases in what amounts to a geoindustrial policy and a parallel trade strategy. Practical coordination is under the umbrella of the central International Capacity Cooperation macro-policy. China’s provincial governments are then tasked with offshoring China’s industrial capacity to Middle East economies through specialized International Capacity Cooperation funds, which are then coordinated by sectoral industry associations: International Capacity Cooperation Industry Enterprise Alliances. The final industrial policy is then deployed by matching China’s provinces and prefectures to external geographies. This amounts to a State Outward Direct Investment Strategy. This paper uses primary sourced Chinese policy documents from central and provincial state administrative agencies to build a historical institutional record. We then employ a Polanyian analysis of the embeddedness of State functions in China’s external investment activities and industrial transfers, analyzing China’s external trade and industry policy in the Middle East in terms of state–market institutional interrelationality. Full text available here.
Jia, Fanqi, and Mia M. Bennett
Abstract: The Chinese government actively engages in infrastructure diplomacy, with the state financing and constructing capital goods multilaterally under the Belt and Road Initiative and bilaterally in countries like Russia. There, Chinese infrastructure diplomacy is making inroads, especially in Russia’s transportation and energy sectors. New bridges and pipelines will soon link the two countries across the Amur River border. While some scholars see infrastructure diplomacy as dependent on bilateral relations, we argue that the type, location and scale of a project also affect its implementation. By analyzing government documents and media reports, we consider Chinese infrastructure projects in Russia across two categories – energy and transportation – and two locations – cross-border and interior – to answer three questions. First, what distinguishes bilateral cooperation in transportation infrastructure from bilateral cooperation in energy infrastructure? Second, how does cooperation on cross-border projects differ from projects located wholly within the recipient country’s territory? Third, what is the significance of the imagined scale of a project for its realization? We conclude that energy projects in a country’s interior are more likely to succeed than cross-border transportation projects. This finding suggests Chinese efforts to enhance infrastructural and “people-to-people” ties in cross-border locations may prove problematic. Full text available here.
Wong, Audrye
Abstract: Most analyses of China’s foreign and security policies treat China as a unitary actor, assuming a cohesive grand strategy articulated by Beijing. I challenge this conventional wisdom, showing how Chinese provinces can affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This contributes to existing research on the role of subnational actors in China, which has focused on how they shape domestic and economic policies. Using Hainan and Yunnan as case studies, I identify three mechanisms of provincial influence – trailblazing, carpetbagging, and resisting – and illustrate them with examples of key provincial policies. This analysis provides a more nuanced argument than is commonly found in international relations for the motivations behind evolving and increasingly activist Chinese foreign policy. It also has important policy implications for understanding and responding to Chinese behaviour, in the South China Sea and beyond. Full text available here.
Hirono, Miwa
Abstract: China’s efforts in conflict mediation are an important test of the durability of the principle of non-interference. By analysing the approaches and means of China’s post-2014 mediation efforts in Afghanistan, this article finds that China’s behaviour shows it engages in medium-level interference in domestic affairs, but mostly with the host government’s concurrence. This is because of the two forms China’s mediation takes. In a bilateral context, China’s mediation takes the form of “incentivizing mediation,” in which its economic power, and its omnidirectional foreign policy, provide incentives or leverage for warring factions to come to the negotiation table, but which also lets the warring factions formulate their own roadmap to peace talks. In a multilateral context, China sometimes engages in “formulative mediation,” in which the mediators, not the disputing parties, formulate a roadmap to peace talks. Full text available here.
Hirono, Miwa, Yang Jiang, and Marc Lanteigne
Abstract: China’s view on the sanctity of state sovereignty has slowly but inexorably been transformed, and the country has found it difficult to continue to adhere to the principles of non-interference and non-intervention with the same degree of rigour as during the Cold War era. This special section will explore what the principles mean to China today; why and how Beijing has become active in peacebuilding and conflict mediation; and what implication China’s approach to the principles has for its position in the global liberal order. This article sets the scene by firstly demonstrating that defining the principles has always been a political act, and secondly offering new discussions about how China’s expanding economic power forced the country to more actively engage in politics of conflict-affected regions. Finally, it offers a conceptual framework to explain why and how China has become increasingly active in peacebuilding and conflict mediation. Full text available here.
Sørensen, Camilla T. N.
Abstract: There is among Chinese international relations scholars an intense debate about how China can protect and promote Chinese global presence and interests while at the same time continue to adhere to the principle of non-intervention. New concepts, distinctions and approaches are developing as the debate progresses. The current Chinese foreign and security policy practice reflects a more flexible and pragmatic Chinese interpretation – and implementation – of the principle of non-intervention with different degrees and types of intervention. This article explores the search for “legitimate great power intervention” characterizing both the debate among Chinese international relations scholars and the current Chinese foreign and security policy practice, and uses this case as the departure point for a more general discussion of the drivers of change – and continuity – in Chinese foreign and security policy. Full text available here.
Liu, Hong
Abstract: Disputing research that depicts weak states getting overwhelmed by China’s financial might, this article argues that the political elites in a relatively weak and small state such as Malaysia are adept in engaging with a rising China to advance key projects, furthering their own agenda. In the case of Malaysia, the eventual outcome of this interaction is dependent on three key conditions: fulfilment of Malaysia’s longstanding pro-ethnic Malay policy, a mutual vision between the state and federal authorities, and advancement of geopolitical interests for both Malaysia and China. The article puts forward a typology illustrating various possible outcomes to examine the interconnections between key players at a time of Chinese ascendancy. Full text available here.
Shariatinia, Mohsen, and Hamidreza Azizi
Abstract: Iran is one of the countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). What effects will the realization of the BRI have on the geo economical and geopolitical status of Iran? On the one hand, this project can boost China’s presence and influence in the political economy of Iran and its neighborhood, and create new domains of competition between Iran and China. On the other hand, it could contribute to the revival of Iran’s historical role in the ancient Silk Road. Thus, to participate in this project, Iran is stuck between hope and fear. It is fearful for Iran because it has negative effects on Iranian interests, at the same time Iran is hopeful because it can enhance its economic development and raise its historical role as a bridge between the East and the West.
As a result, Iran tries at the same time to develop its relationships with the EU as well as cooperation with China in the framework of the BRI. Iran tries to maximize its interests from the project and reduce its negative effects on its geo economic and geopolitical interests. Maintaining this fragile balance could face Iran ’s active participation in the project with substantial challenges.
Full text available here.
