Leaders of southeast Asian countries gathered in Laos this week for the annual ASEAN summit and the concurrent East Asia Summit attended by major global partners. China, represented by Premier Li Qiang, hailed the “substantial conclusion of negotiations” on an upgraded free-trade agreement with ASEAN member states, according to China Daily. But most of the discussions were dominated by concern over the ongoing civil war in Myanmar and rising tensions in the South China Sea. Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos used the platform to criticize China for its aggressive behavior and told Li, “you cannot separate economic cooperation from political security.” Panu Wongcha-um from Reuters described the bloc’s urgent calls for finalizing an ASEAN maritime code of conduct to better manage the conflict:
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr pressed Southeast Asian leaders and China at a regional summit on Thursday to urgently speed up negotiations on a code of conduct for the South China Sea, while accusing Beijing of harassment and intimidation.
Speaking in Laos to leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Marcos said substantive progress was necessary and all parties must “be earnestly open to seriously managing differences” and reducing tension.
[…] “There should be more urgency in the pace of the negotiations of the ASEAN-China code of conduct,” Marcos told the meeting, according to a statement from his office.
[…] Marcos voiced frustration that parties involved could not agree on even simple things, adding “the definition of a concept as basic as ‘self-restraint’ does not yet enjoy consensus.” [Source]
Jason Tower from the United States Institute of Peace argued that the ASEAN summit “illustrated the ongoing failure of ASEAN to make any progress in compelling the Myanmar military to end violence against the people, to release political prisoners and to permit humanitarian access.” Tower highlighted China’s role in supporting Myanmar’s military junta and thereby undermining ASEAN’s leverage:
Growing Chinese support for the regime and moves to bring the junta into China-dominated multilateral security platforms have resulted in ASEAN losing any leverage it might have once held over the military regime. Following major regime loses on the battlefield, China became openly hostile toward Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) and demanded that powerful ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in its sphere of influence cut off resource flows to the resistance, end all revolutionary activity and even abandon liberated territories in the northern part of the country. This has given the junta cause to dramatically scale up violence against the EAOs with the hope that Chinese pressure might help it recover lost territory while undermining resistance unity.
Meanwhile, China has also invited senior leaders of the Myanmar army and junta ministers to participate in high-level multilateral platforms like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, among others. In doing so, China and other participants in these platforms have legitimized the regime’s violence, sending a signal that the junta need not fear international isolation or consequences. These moves by China have reduced the junta’s reliance on ASEAN for legitimacy, particularly given that multiple ASEAN states have joined Chinese-led platforms offering the junta new options. [Source]
The elephant in the room was the U.S., whose Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful actions” in the South China Sea. Premier Li retorted by criticizing “external forces [that] frequently interfere and even try to introduce bloc confrontation and geopolitical conflicts into Asia.” Major Western media outlets have indeed framed southeast Asian geopolitics through the lens of zero-sum competition between the U.S. and China. Recent headlines in Foreign Affairs and The Economist read, “America Is Losing Southeast Asia” and “America is losing South-East Asia to China.” But other voices are pushing back against this framing. Natalie Sambhi argued in a commentary for Brookings last week that “ASEAN should not be a US-China battleground.” And last month, Bryanna Entwistle highlighted the U.S.’s historically poor human rights record in the region to explain why “Southeast Asia Doesn’t Want to Choose between China and the U.S.”:
[Former Singaporean diplomat Kishore] Mahbubani, who served two terms as Singapore’s representative to the U.N., is one of many prominent Southeast Asians increasingly frustrated by external pressure on their countries to “choose” between aligning themselves with the U.S. or with China. Over the past 10 years, the U.S. has framed its vision for the region as the democratic, human rights-focused alternative to Xi Jinping’s world order, but many Southeast Asians doubt America’s commitment to upholding ASEAN interests alongside their own.
“For Southeast Asian countries, they cannot square the U.S.’ fixation with democracy, human rights and values, and the perceived inconsistencies in the U.S.’ actual policies and practices when realpolitik considerations kick in,” says Lee Sue-Anne, Senior Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a Singapore-based think tank. “Southeast Asians pointing out ‘whataboutisms’ and hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy behaviour has been a constant feature of anti-U.S. sentiment in the region.”
[…] ASEAN states are experienced in the practice of “hedging” and shifting alignments when necessary, but several countries have expressed a fear of being treated as proxies should a great power conflict break out between the U.S. and China. At the 2024 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto reiterated Indonesia’s intention of not aligning with either the U.S. or China, mirroring current President Joko Widodo’s previous vow to not let Southeast Asia become the front line of a new Cold War. [Source]
