China’s International Strategy and Its Implications for Southeast Asia

Amid worldwide salutes and suspicion, China’s international strategy took full shape in 2015. While many observers find increasing opportunities in China’s multiple initiatives to enhance regional and global development as well as economic cooperation, others see an ever more assertive China, projecting might with its growing wealth. Especially for Southeast Asian nations, the most susceptible to China’s moves due to their proximity to and close economic ties with China, the many new Chinese initiatives have brought both hope and challenges. Now that three years have passed since President Xi Jinping took office and the basic framework of China’s international strategy has been established, it is time to examine the new features of China’s international endeavours and draw salient implications for the future trends of its political, security and economic relations with the world, and in particular with its closest neighbour, ASEAN.

From the author’s perspective, despite its widely perceived image as a revisionist, hegemony-seeking power, China has maintained its course of peaceful rise, and its new international strategy features more continuity than change. Nevertheless, with the evolving geopolitical environment of the world and bigger stakes in regional stability and global economic well-being, China has made many adjustments to its international strategy under the new leadership. If effectively implemented and well understood by other nations, this strategy will not only help achieve the grand “Chinese Dream”, but also boost global peace and development as well as regional stability and integration.

Old Ambition, New Approach: Five Changes to China’s International Strategy

The peaceful and inward-focused nature of China’s rise was reaffirmed when President Xi put forward China’s strategic goal to achieve the “Chinese Dream”, a new name for the century-long ambition for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, on 29 November 2012, only two weeks after he was elected as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Despite occasional headstrong behaviour since then, China has in general demonstrated a peaceful and constructive stance in the international arena, and domestic reform and development have remained its first and foremost strategic targets. Facing the new global political, security and economic realities, however, the Chinese leadership is taking a new approach to achieve this old ambition, mainly reflected in the following five aspects:

Peaceful Rise: From Peace Maintenance to Peace Promotion

In view of its deficient security infrastructure and acknowledging the United States’ fundamentally stabilizing role in the Asia-Pacific, China had kept a low profile in the global and regional security realms from the late 1970s to early 2010s, and endeavoured to maintain a peaceful environment for its rise by working closely with its security partners like Russia, the United States and ASEAN, as well as by enhancing regional community building in all directions. However, as the U.S. rebalancing moves since 2010 triggered growing tensions between China and its Pacific neighbours,¹ China has come to realize that, with its growing power, its quiescent peace-maintaining stance is neither convincing to its neighbours nor sufficient for protecting its expanding overseas interests. Thus, it has adopted many proactive measures to consolidate regional peace and stability as well as to foster its global image as a peace-promoting responsible power.

Indeed, the past three years have witnessed much more active Chinese engagement in addressing salient regional security issues, including maintaining stability on the Korean Peninsula, nuclear non-proliferation, building security infrastructure in Afghanistan and Africa, and working with related countries mainly in areas such as peacekeeping, counterterrorism and anti-piracy. For instance, to strengthen its strategic trust with ASEAN, China proposed to institutionalize an informal meeting mechanism for Chinese and ASEAN defence ministers, set up the China–ASEAN defence hotline, and establish a law-enforcement institute for training ASEAN personnel.² For another example, despite the criticism from many international observers that China was trying to “block progress” in the Iranian nuclear talks,³ China’s positive role in generating a final deal between Iran and the P5+1 — the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France, plus...