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APLN member Rajaram Panda analysed China’s relationship with the smaller nations in Southeast Asia.

China’s conduct of diplomacy backed by its economic strength and military power has emerged as the topic of analysis by experts who try to understand what could be China’s long-term goals. Its relations with the US are under stress. Its relations with its neighbours – Japan and South Korea – are problematic over a host of issues. Its cosiness with North Korea is another worrying issue. The Ukraine crisis has brought both China and Russia closer now than ever before. These are troubling developments.

Against these developments, what remains as the main driver is China’s economic interconnectedness with most of the Asian countries, including India, which empowers China to play its economic card as convenient to it. This dependency relationship puts considerable limits to other sovereign states to play their own independent roles, thereby conceding leverage to China. There is no easy answer how to get out of the rigmarole as the dependency relationship gives China an edge over its smaller partners whose vulnerability China is expert in exploiting.

Against this background, China has focussed in tightening its noose on the smaller countries in Southeast Asia by not only binding those into a kind of economic relationship from which they find it difficult to extricate themselves but now attempting to bind those states into a network of military cooperation. This article makes an attempt to analyse this dimension of China’s relationship with the smaller nations in Southeast Asia.

The full article can be accessed here.

Image: iStock/Sunshine Seeds