China in northeast Asia and ASEAN in southeast Asia are emerging centres of growing influence in East Asia, for decades the world’s most economically dynamic region. Relations between China and the nations of southeast Asia have generally been positive and developed over millennia, including in the Ming period, when China was a superpower. While the situation today has seen important changes, some positive aspects of the past remain, but not without certain challenges. ASEAN, as a vital contemporary institution of southeast Asia, has seen impressive growth in regional trade and investments with China, which are anticipated to grow further as China’s economy continues to develop, Bunn Nagara writes.
China is a large, important and very old country, which nonetheless exerts an increasingly modern influence in Asia and around the globe. The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the region’s most important multilateral institution, among the most reputable regional associations in the world, and an international platform of growing significance. ASEAN-China relations are of vital importance not only for Asia but also the international community. Understanding these relations as they evolve is therefore crucial for every region.
In Asia, history plays a critical role in interstate relations, particularly ASEAN-China engagements, comparable to that of their respective foreign policy postures.
Engagements between China and South-East Asia predate ASEAN’s formation in 1967, particularly given that formal relations between sovereign nations in the region and China date back some two thousand years. These relations have been positive, based on mutual benefit, and unproblematic as they are largely the result of trade. China had been the sole regional superpower for centuries, but this has not been a problem for other sovereign nations since sovereignty was mutually respected.
Unlike the European powers, the United States or Imperial Japan, China never exercised colonial domination or even suzerainty over South-East Asia. Peace prevailed based on mutual respect for one another’s culture and administrative systems, as well as a sense of equality in each nation’s sovereign prerogatives. South-East Asia was regarded as being within China’s imperial sphere of influence as part of the “Middle Kingdom’s” tributary system, but this amounted to little more than regional states acknowledging China as a larger and better resourced country.
Sovereign nations pursued their own foreign policies so long as they did not destabilise the region. Acknowledging China as the biggest regional power was reciprocated by a sense of Chinese guardianship in guaranteeing regional peace and prosperity – an obligation of limited efficacy. In this way, the Malacca Sultanate grew and developed into the Malacca Empire, but Portugal’s 1511 attack and occupation of Malacca infuriated a China that could do little against it. China was somewhat more successful in restraining Burmese attacks on Siam and Siamese forays into the Malay states to the south.
In the early 20th century, China faced internal turmoil against the late Qing dynasty. The 1911 Xinhai Revolution to establish a republic gained traction despite lacking funds. Some of the leading campaigners established themselves in parts of South-East Asia like British Malaya, engaging with the overseas Chinese community that had settled there earlier as traders and merchants and who donated generously to the cause. Their crucial support has been appreciated and remembered, even after the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
The decolonisation era of the mid-20th century saw the emergence of independent nations in South-East Asia. They shared a common aspiration for a regional community of sovereign nations engaged in peaceful cooperation, and proceeded to experiment with several regional organisations. Several initial attempts at a proposed regional identity were unsuccessful, including a US-led equivalent of NATO in the ill-fated South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Countries in the region understood that a workable regional organisation had to be functionally non-aligned as much as it needed to emphasise sovereign equality and non-intervention in one another’s internal affairs, with all of them focused on economic development.
By the 1960s, intra-regional differences over disputed territories and historical frictions resulted in the creation of ASEAN. Even US allies Thailand and the Philippines aspired to a neutral regional identity, an objective facilitated by the closure of US military bases on their soil. However, a sense of a US alliance lingers in some countries, and in certain national institutions or administrations more than others, since ASEAN does not mandate a common foreign policy. Nonetheless, the region’s broad, implicit shift towards deeper non-alignment continues over the longer term as nationalism develops and regional geopolitics evolves.
Contrary to some common misperceptions, ASEAN was never a product of the Cold War or a “pro-West” organisation. It has no specific ideological inclination or preference, being realistically open to all political and economic systems within its membership and beyond. ASEAN accommodates political diversity both in and outside the region. In the 21st century, the ASEAN priorities of peace, stability and prosperity have spread beyond South-East Asia, guided by an ASEAN Centrality averse to any major power assertions, rivalry or conflict.
ASEAN-China relations are predicated on mutual and complementary needs, as exemplified by their vigorous and steadily growing trade relationship. These relations are sustained by common values, principles and aspirations like the reciprocal acknowledgement of national territory, non-intervention, equality and mutual respect, economic development, and peaceable cooperation, as expressed in China’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and ASEAN conventions such as a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality, the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, and the South-East Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone.
However, despite formal agreement between ASEAN and China on such declarations and conventions, occasionally transgressions are perceived through rival claims to national territory. These centre on maritime disputes involving China and ASEAN members Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei in the South China Sea, and between China and Indonesia in the Natuna Sea. While the intensity of these disputes varies, they hamper better relations and continually limit their scope. The likely prospect of the China-led Maritime Silk Road as part of the Belt and Road Initiative is likewise constrained. The situation is complicated by disputes among the four ASEAN members themselves in the South China Sea; disagreements among them on how exactly to proceed, and reluctance by ASEAN as a whole to form a common position, as most ASEAN countries are non-claimants.
Nonetheless, the regional reality is that these disagreements and disputes do little to impede intra-ASEAN relations as well as China-ASEAN relations. Most relationships are centred on economics, principally trade and increasingly also investment. This preponderance of economics in the relationship between China and South-East Asia is many centuries old, deeply ingrained, and likely to grow stronger for more centuries. It represents the “low-hanging fruit” that all the countries concerned can develop not only for mutual economic gains, but also to mitigate the disputes over maritime territory.
This economic dimension in ASEAN-China relations is bilateral between China and individual ASEAN countries, as well as multilateral between China and ASEAN as a whole, and between China and larger ASEAN-led institutions involving other countries outside South-East Asia. China is the biggest trading partner of nearly all the countries in South-East Asia, including Timor-Leste. More notably, China and ASEAN are each other’s largest trading partner at a time when ASEAN is developing a common market in South-East Asia. China has remained ASEAN’s largest trading partner since 2009, and ASEAN has been China’s largest trading partner since 2020.
By 2023, China-ASEAN trade had grown to US$911.7 billion, some 16% of China’s total foreign trade. This continues to grow with China’s investments in ASEAN countries in particular: by mid-2023, mutual China-ASEAN investments had exceeded US$380 billion. The value of China’s trade and investment in ASEAN countries varies with the size of a country’s economy and its infrastructure development, with much of it in ASEAN’s founding members Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, as well as Vietnam. China has also joined ASEAN’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
China-ASEAN relations are capped overall by such ASEAN diplomatic initiatives as its Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for Peace and Prosperity. Following the 1989 Tiananmen protests in Beijing, Western countries marginalised China, but ASEAN took a different approach. Malaysia hosted an important delegation from China in 1990, and as ASEAN Chair invited China as an Observer to the 24th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 1991. At the 29th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Jakarta chaired by Indonesia in 1996, China became a full ASEAN Dialogue Partner. In 2003 China was the first Dialogue Partner to accede to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in South-East Asia, ASEAN’s most important treaty, and that year China became ASEAN’s Comprehensive Strategic Partner.
Even as the US-China trade war continues, Malaysia as ASEAN Chair this year maintains the ASEAN tradition of engaging China. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has invited Chinese President Xi Jinping personally to attend the ASEAN-Gulf Cooperation Plus China Summit and the ASEAN Summit as an Observer. China remains an important member country of such other ASEAN initiatives as ASEAN Plus Three, the East Asia Summit, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Both ASEAN and China have important stakes in peace, cooperation and development in South-East Asia and beyond.
The continual development of ASEAN-China relations is beneficial to both Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia in the larger context of East Asia. These relations cover economic, diplomatic and other areas of regional outreach. However, while the economic dimension has gained significant momentum with the participation of the business sector, more diplomatic efforts are needed in lingering disputes to avoid misperception and misunderstanding. ASEAN and China can be complementary partners in further promoting international law and norms. The promise remains for closer China-ASEAN relations to deliver more global public goods.
Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.