From as early as 1989, China, it could be said, morphed from strategic partner to strategic competitor for ASEAN, with the settlement of the Cambodian conflict and normalisation of ties between Beijing and various South-East Asian states, beginning with Indonesia. That said, China was less a competitor—if by this we mean a countervailing power—than a hegemonic presence for the considerably weaker ASEAN states, whose relations with China focused principally on managing their respective vulnerabilities and dependencies vis-à-vis the latter (Ba 2005). If anything, the sheer enormity of the Chinese presence in the region was something that could be neither ignored nor, for that matter, refused by China’s considerably smaller and/or weaker regional counterparts. As Michael Mandelbaum once mused about America: ‘If you are the 800-pound gorilla, you are bound to be concentrating on your bananas and everyone else is concentrating on you’ (Sanger 1999). In the same way, no amount of protestations to the effect that China’s rise in the post-Cold War period is inherently ‘peaceful’ will likely convince all South-East Asians to be completely reassured about Chinese intentions, not least when China’s prodigious growth might (or, for some, has already) come at the ASEAN region’s expense (Wu et al. 2002). ^[5]

Indeed, so acute was the perception of the threat that China apparently posed to ASEAN states in the immediate post-Cold War period that the prospect of China resorting to direct military coercion in support of its territorial claims in the South China Sea could not be discounted (Leifer 1991). In this respect, instances of China’s territorial disputes with several ASEAN states—with the Philippines over Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal and with Vietnam over their land and sea borders in the 1990s—have since become, for the association, a stark reminder of unwarranted presumptions about China’s goodwill. If anything, Chinese actions in the South China Sea, correctly or otherwise, gave credence to regional worries that the ultimate strategic objective of China would be, in the words of a Malaysian maritime specialist, to ‘convert the entire South China Sea into a Chinese lake’ (Acharya 1996:199). This thinking has clearly not gone away. For example, a recent study argues that Chinese strategic thinkers are predisposed to regard the South China Sea, through a Mahanian lens, ‘as a preserve where commercial and political imperatives demand dominant [Chinese] naval power’; in short, China views the South China Sea as its own ‘Caribbean’ (Holmes and Yoshihara 2006:79). A difficulty complicating reassurance efforts has to do with China’s lack of transparency concerning its security policy, which has hampered attempts by ASEAN security planners to form assessments of Chinese intentions and likely actions. More crucial than prospects for potential conflict, however, is that all sides have by and large sought to avoid tensions and promote an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation (Lee 1997:251). Elsewhere, it has been argued that the South China Sea has remained primarily a political rather than a military consideration due to China’s desire to accommodate South-East Asian concerns and the limited naval capabilities of the various claimants (Emmers 2005).

Remarkably, it was against this backdrop of strategic asymmetry and pervasive regional circumspection regarding China’s strategic intentions, and initial Chinese reservations about participating in ASEAN-centred regional arrangements, that marked improvement in China–ASEAN relations during the 1990s nevertheless occurred. It reflected the growing agreement on questions of regional peace, prosperity and security and the ways those questions were best approached. Such progress was, however, measured best not in terms of ‘headline-making cooperative ventures’ but by a process of gradualism or ‘mundane accomplishments’—that is, various minor achievements in the minutiae of functional cooperation (Ba 2006:160; Khong 1997:291). A variety of parallel frameworks for dialogue emerged within the decade. Beginning in 1991, when Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen was invited to attend the opening ceremony of the twenty-fourth ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, China became a consultative partner (the next year), joined the ARF as a founding member (in 1994) and ‘graduated’ to become official dialogue partner of ASEAN (in 1996). A year later, the first ever China–ASEAN summit was conducted in Malaysia, where President Jiang and his ASEAN counterparts issued a joint statement on the collective decision to establish a partnership of good neighbourliness and mutual trust between the two parties, thereby providing the groundwork for the so-called ‘Joint Declaration of the PRC and ASEAN State Leaders: A strategic partnership for peace and prosperity’, announced in 2003.

What conceivably led the Chinese to set aside their initial reservations about joining and participating in the myriad regional arrangements, particularly the ARF, could be partly attributed to the process-oriented ASEAN way, the holistic emphasis of which, on the common search for new areas of agreement rather than on contractually driven cooperation, likely persuaded Beijing that its interests would not be discounted. The very principles of the ASEAN way, the avoidance by ASEAN states of discourse that defines China as a threat, and so forth, have clearly resonated well with China. As Alice Ba (2006:160) argued, the association’s pursuit of ‘complex engagement’—‘informal, non-confrontational, open-ended and mutual’—likely swayed China to reconsider its relations with ASEAN, to view ASEAN more positively and to be more responsive to ASEAN’s concerns. The readiness to grant China a say was clearly apparent, for instance, when the ARF acceded to China’s demand that the third phase of regional security cooperation as envisaged in the 1995 ARF Concept Paper—‘conflict resolution’—be amended to ‘the elaboration of approaches to conflict’ (Tan et al. 2002:8). In all this, ASEAN ‘second-track’ diplomacy has arguably facilitated the building of mutual confidence and the dissemination/socialisation of regional conventions and norms (Katsumata 2003; Kraft 2000; Simon 2002; Tan 2007).

That China shares in the so-called illiberal values held by many if not most of the ASEAN countries has likely worked in the latter’s favour (Kivimäki 2001). In this regard, it is possible that the controversial ‘Asian values’ debate of the 1990s, sparked by European criticisms of ASEAN and the rejoinders to that by some Asian elites—several from Singapore (Jones 1994)—aided ASEAN’s engagement effort, not least by proving to China that ASEAN was no lackey of the West. In this respect, ASEAN involvement in that debate—which had quietly dissipated by 1997 thanks to the Asian financial crisis—arguably served as a costly signal of sorts from ASEAN to China regarding the association’s ‘credibility’. ^[6] For its part, China’s growing involvement in and enthusiasm for ASEAN-based regionalism could also be viewed as a signal of its willingness to cooperate. More crucially, it could be seen as Chinese willingness to exercise strategic restraint (Ikenberry 2001).

In this regard, ASEAN’s engagement of China, in the hope that the Chinese will embrace regionalism and thereby apply self-moderation in the regional interest, is not without precedent. Here, the experience of the association’s own formation, and Indonesia’s role in that, has vital significance. It has been argued, for example, that Indonesia’s long-preferred formula of ‘regional solutions to regional problems’ has found little support among fellow ASEAN members, who view the Indonesian formula as a euphemism for Indonesian hegemony in South-East Asia and as such value access to external powers as sources of countervailing power (Leifer 1989:5–6, 2000:109). If anything, Malaysia’s and Singapore’s experience of confrontation with Indonesia in the mid 1960s rendered difficult any ready acceptance on their part of such a formula. Thus understood, ASEAN’s formation in 1967 required not only Indonesia’s agreement, but its readiness to forgo its hegemonic aspirations. In this respect, it has been argued that President Suharto of Indonesia understood the importance of restoring regional confidence and stability through locking Indonesia ‘into a structure of multilateral partnership and constraint that would be seen as a rejection of hegemonic pretensions’ (Leifer 1996:13). That Jakarta could be ‘coaxed’ into joining ASEAN indicated its willingness to cooperate with neighbouring states seeking to impose institutional constraints on it. More than anything else, Suharto realised the significance of reassuring his fellow ASEAN members by demonstrating good neighbourliness towards them (Narine 1998).

Crucially, to the extent that this example of ‘political self-denial in the interest of regional order’ on Indonesia’s part can be ‘emulated within the wider Asia-Pacific is central to any parallel between ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum’ (Leifer 1996:13). In other words, as an ASEAN-centred expression of pan-Asian security regionalism, the ARF is thereby an extension of ASEAN’s model of regional security, not only because it relies on the ASEAN way in its deliberations, but because the Indonesian example of strategic restraint via regionalism has become the de facto model for integrating hegemonic China into the regional order. It was Indonesia’s signal of its willingness to collaborate with its neighbours, at the expense of its own regional aspirations, that served as a key foundation for the success of ASEAN regionalism. In return, Indonesia received recognition from fellow ASEAN members of its primus inter pares status within the association. Has the Indonesian example proved a noteworthy precedent for China to emulate? According to one analyst, ‘Beijing’s move to involve itself in ASEAN activities since the early 1990s was part of the country’s “good-neighbourliness” [mulin zhengce] policy that aimed at strengthening its ties with the neighbouring countries in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident in 1989’, rather than a new orientation in the conduct of Chinese foreign policy (Kuik 2005:102). Whether the Indonesian precedent has influenced Chinese behaviour towards South-East Asia is uncertain. What seems clear enough, however, is ASEAN’s apparent belief that the Chinese penchant for good neighbourliness and strategic restraint is something that deserves strong encouragement and reinforcement, with the promise of regional recognition of China’s proper place as a regional leader, but one very much within an ASEAN-centred framework. It amounts to an invitation to China to assume its place in the regional order as a responsible stakeholder on ASEAN’s terms.