China's Emergence and Impact on Technology in East Asia: The Case of Machinebuilding

Two Taiwan-based economists estimate the technology content of exports by the machinebuilding industry of the East Asia region during 2004-2008, using comparative analysis to clarify changes in the relative competitiveness of four East Asian nations (China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) accompanying the formation of a regional trading bloc and production networks. In particular, they examine the technology content of these countries' machinebuilding sub-industries' exports within the Southeast Asian market (documenting the rise of the machinebuilding industry in China) as well as the penetration of Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese sub-industries into China's market. The results point to areas of emerging competition among China, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan for East Asian markets, which can only be expected to intensify in the future. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F14, F15, F36, O14, P23. 7 tables, 36 references.     

Japan's response to China's rise: regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post‐Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan–China–US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a ‘concert of democracies’ involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values‐based diplomacy to check the so‐called ‘Beijing consensus’. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.     

China's New Generation of Leaders and Regional Challenges in East Asia

A pair of Hong Kong and U.S. specialists on China examines the dynamic international environment China's new leadership now faces, focusing on East Asia. They first examine the complex balance the leadership seeks to strike between: (1) China's projection of increasing economic, military, and political power internationally; (2) the primary domestic goals of economic growth and stability; and (3) rising public awareness, demand for information access, and (in some quarters) nationalism among the Chinese people. The authors then proceed, in successive sections of the paper, to assess in greater detail China's international and regional security environment, Sino-American relations, China's relations with its East Asian neighbors, and the complex interconnections between the country's domestic and foreign policy. They conclude that Sino-American relations will continue to be pivotal to Beijing's foreign relations in general and its relations with countries in the East Asian region more specifically.     

Converging anticipatory geographies in Oceania: The Belt and Road Initiative and Look North in Fiji

Anticipatory geographies are state-driven initiatives promoting economic hope through the language of rejuvenation, prosperity and connectivity. As a discursive process, anticipatory geographies reconfigure spaces and identities. These narratives have proliferated in an age of intensified connectivity as states aim to imprint their political and economic visions. Oceania has become a site of multiple anticipatory geographies external and internal to the region with the presence of China as an enabling factor. In 2006, Fiji reintroduced a Look North policy to globalize economic connectivity placing Fijian agency at the centre, and in 2015, Beijing included Oceania into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. This work examines the processes when two anticipatory geographies meet. Adapting critical geopolitics, the research presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of Chinese and Fijian texts referencing Look North and BRI. The work reveals the entanglement of anticipatory geographies in Fiji has generated a co-produced discourse of prosperity displaying continuity from Look North to the BRI. Although there is a shift toward defining the Sino-Fijian relationship through BRI, it does not signal an overwrite of an indigenous policy framework. I argue Look North has been ‘re-placed’ into the BRI to co-produce a narrative that permits the ongoing articulation of Fijian interests. With the Belt and Road becoming the defining framework for China's relations with countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, this work suggests Fiji's handling of BRI's impact on its domestic spaces and policies is an indicator of how other states will reposition their promises of economic hope to civil society.     

The rise of the Indo-Pacific: understanding ideational change and continuity in India's foreign policy

In 2011, the concept of the Indo-Pacific began to appear in India's foreign policy discourse. This article argues that rather than signalling a dramatic shift in India's foreign policy, however, the way in which the Indo-Pacific has been interpreted by the Indian leadership suggests significant continuity as well as change, which is contrary to the goals of the concept's most fervent proponents in India. The article seeks to develop a framework for understanding ideational change and continuity in foreign policy by theorising the interplay between ideas, political and economic flux, and social expectations related to effective and legitimate state-building. It is argued that the Indo-Pacific concept has instigated a new emphasis on regional architecture-building to manage the ongoing regionalisation in the area between the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a result of heightened trade flows and production and investment linkages. Yet, the Indo-Pacific concept, like the new policy ideas on regional engagement that preceded it—the Look East policy and the ‘extended neighbourhood’—has been articulated in ways that are also compatible with long-standing ideas—such as non-alignment—about what constitutes appropriate international behaviour. This reflects the nature of the broader state project that has emerged since 1990, which, while encompassing a new focus on economic growth and competitiveness as being essential to effective state-building, continues to prioritise older ideas about what constitutes effective and legitimate state-building.     

China Gazes West: Xinjiang's Growing Rendezvous with Central Asia

A senior American specialist on the geography of China surveys that country's enduring interest and involvement with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, increasingly on the basis of Xinjiang's role as a bridgehead for economic linkages. Among the key features of this growing involvement reviewed in the paper are the establishment in 2001 of a regional security alliance (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) to combat Islamist extremism as well as separatist activities; growing commercial linkages (especially with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) in tandem with improved transport links and increasing crossborder movements of merchants, traders, and tourists; and China's growing need for oil and increasing reliance on Kazakhstan as a key source for petroleum. China's growing engagement with Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries is examined within the context of both opportunities as well as challenges, the latter reflecting the increasing complexity of Han Chinese and Uyghur/Turkic relations owing to increased Uyghur ties to affiliated populations in the Central Asian states.     

Metallurgical traditions and metal exchange networks in late prehistoric central Myanmar,c. 1000 BC to c. AD 500

Myanmar has been notably underrepresented in recent studies of archaeometallurgy in Southeast Asia, despite its richness in both mineral and cultural resources and its potentially central role in long-distance exchange networks linking India, China and peninsular neighbours. Here, we present original analytical data on copper-base artefacts from several Bronze Age and Iron Age sites in Myanmar. Observed microstructures range from as-cast, worked, to fully annealed; compositions include leaded copper, low-tin to high-tin bronzes, and arsenical copper/bronze. Lead isotope analyses indicate that the metal originates from different geological sources, including several that match the lead isotope signatures of known prehistoric copper mines in Thailand and Laos. These archaeometallurgical data, including evidence for secondary copper-base production, more than double those currently available for Myanmar and document the presence of multiple local alloying and working traditions, perhaps chronologically differentiated, as well as identifying possible links to primary mineral sources across the region. Overall, this adds significant new information to the emerging picture of Southeast Asian prehistoric metallurgy at the crossroads of several major ancient cultures.     

Central Asian and Russian perspectives on China's strategic emergence

This article employs fieldwork research and literature analysis to examine contemporary perceptions of China's emergence in popular and elite opinion in Russia and the Central Asian states, particularly Kazakhstan. It initially establishes a framework for understanding China's emergence, emphasizing a trilateral dynamic between the hegemonic position of the US in Asia, the evolution of the strategic choices of China's neighbours and the development of strategic regionalism as a mechanism for managing regional spaces. Choosing to take the Commonwealth of Independent States as a particular case of this framework, it argues that the interaction between Russia, China and the US remains highly fluid, particularly under the conditions ‘of re‐setting’ the US‐Russian relationship. This means that regional contexts are highly significant; and it establishes Central Asia as an important new strategic region for working out relations between Russia, China, and the US through their interactions with regional states. The second part of the article examines Russian and Central Asian responses to China's emergence. It looks at three categories of motivation in China's regionalism: its system for accumulative growth; its problems with weak constitutionality and transnational security in its western regions; and its concern with US/NATO encroachment on its western frontier and the US attempt to turn Central Asian elites away from their traditional alignments. The third part looks at China's promotion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as its mechanism for strategic regionalism in Central Asia. The article questions the SCO's significance in terms of its capacity for governance and functionalism, and points to the problem of institutional competition, notably with Moscow's preferred structure of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The article concludes that China will be an unconventional superpower that presents different facets of itself in different regional contexts. There will not be a single model of China's emergence and it will continue to develop its international role through a mix of adaptation and experimentation. However, China's strategy will pose a problem for Russia and Central Asia since it seeks to create a strategic space that does not challenge the West, but exists substantially outside the West. Russia, in particular, has to decide whether it will be able to maintain its current stance of independence between Europe and Asia as China's rise shifts the frontiers between East and West.     

Regional Responses to the Southeast Asian Financial Crisis: A Case of Self-Help or No Help?

The currency-cum-financial crises of the 1990s, particularly that which hit Southeast Asia after the devaluation of the Thai baht on 2 July 1997, are suggestive of the relevance and pervasiveness of contagion or negative spillover effects that are largely regional in scope. As such, one of the mantras since the onset of the Southeast Asian financial crisis has been the need for 'regional solutions to regional problems'. Given that the two focal institutions in Southeast Asia, namely the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), were perceived as being successful in their past attempts in problem-solving, there were high expectations that such regionalism would be the key in finding solutions to the Southeast Asian financial crisis and mitigating the aftershocks. Accordingly, this paper evaluates the regional responses to the crisis, taking stock of both preventive and curative initiatives of significance. While the focus is on ASEAN and APEC, consistent with the concept of 'loose' or 'non-institutionalised' regionalism in Southeast Asia and the larger Asia-Pacific regions, other ad hoc unilateral or bilateral initiatives of significance by other Asian member countries in APEC are also examined, particularly those by the region's dominant economic power, Japan. Current regional responses have not been very successful. This has led to a shift in the emphasis to unilateral and bilateral arrangements. Japan's contribution has been by far the largest relative to others. The crisis and the responses to it have revealed that unless there is greater institutionalisation, ASEAN countries would continue to look outside the region for assistance to facilitate their recovery.     

Rising Sino-Japanese competition: perspectives from South-East Asian elites

One of the biggest challenges for the East Asian region today is the Sino-Japanese relationship. Starting with the fishing trawler incident in September 2010, followed by Japan's nationalisation of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, this relationship is experiencing an escalation of tensions in most, if not all, areas of the bilateral relationship. In response to the intensifying competition, China and Japan have elevated the importance of South-East Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in their foreign policy strategies. Focusing on how elites from five South-East Asian states—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam—perceive the engagement of China and Japan with the region, this article poses two questions: (1) How do South-East Asian elites view the Sino-Japanese competition? and (2) How do South-East Asian elites view the role of ASEAN in managing the competition? The analysis here concludes that while some South-East Asian elites see opportunities in the Sino-Japanese competition, they nevertheless do not perceive it as an issue of critical significance. Instead, the concern lies generally with major-power dynamics, and particularly with Sino-US relations. ASEAN is viewed to lack the ability to manage the negative consequences of the Sino-Japanese competition, although its external balancing function has perceptibly helped to restrain any escalation of major-power tensions.     

Security and democracy: the ASEAN charter and the dilemmas of regionalism in South‐East Asia

In November 2007, the heads of the ten member governments of the Association of South‐East Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a charter that will, once ratified, give the association a legal personality. The charter, significantly, requires more of its members than a reassertion of the traditional ASEAN norm of non‐interference and the practice of consensus. The charter lists a number of novel goals among the organization's purposes: ‘to strengthen democracy, enhance good governance and the rule of law, and to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.’ In view of the wide economic and political disparities between the member states of ASEAN, this article examines whether strengthening democracy would in fact facilitate ASEAN's goal of becoming an integrated political, economic and security community. Rather than enhancing an integrated community, democratization would arguably create a faultline between the more politically mature and economically developed states and a northern tier of less developed, authoritarian single‐party dominant regimes in South‐East Asia. Moreover, given China's emerging political and economic importance to the region, such a strategy would, as if by an invisible hand, draw the more authoritarian ASEAN states into China's less than democratic embrace. This article concludes that rather than strengthening democracy, ASEAN's charter needs urgently to reinforce practices of rule governance and mechanisms of market integration to enhance both ASEAN's economic profile as well as the region's autonomy.     

In defence of the Indo-Pacific: Australia's new strategic map

The 2013 Australian Defence White Paper categorically termed Australia's zone of strategic interest the Indo-Pacific, the first time any government has defined its region this way. This raises questions about what the Indo-Pacific means, whether it is a coherent strategic system, the provenance of the concept and its implications for Asian security as well as Australian policy. Indo-Pacific Asia can best be understood as an expansive definition of a maritime super-region centred on South-East Asia, arising principally from the emergence of China and India as outward-looking trading states and strategic actors. It is a strategic system insofar as it involves the intersecting interests of key powers such as China, India and the USA, although the Indo-Pacific subregions will retain their own dynamics too. It suits Australia's two-ocean geography and expanding links with Asia, including India. The concept is, however, not limited to an Australian perspective and increasingly reflects US, Indian, Japanese and Indonesian ways of seeing the region. It also reflects China's expanding interests in the Indian Ocean, suggesting that the Chinese debate may shift towards partial acceptance of Indo-Pacific constructs alongside Asia-Pacific and East Asian ones, despite suspicions about its association with the US rebalance to Asia. Questions about Australia's ability to implement an effective Indo-Pacific strategy must account for force posture, alliance ties and defence diplomacy, as well as constraints on force structure and spending.     

Tribal diplomacy and frontier territoriality in modern China: Hunza and Nationalist China, 1947–1948

In the immediate post-World War II period, the Chinese Nationalist regime was eager to consolidate its position and formulate a proactive policy toward China's traditional Central Asian peripheries. Postwar Nationalist China's momentary confidence in extending central influence into the Pamir and Kashmir regions can be understood in such a geopolitical context. The withdrawal of British colonial rule in India further increased Nanjing's optimism about bringing Hunza, a Muslim tribal state in northwest Kashmir, under its territorial and administrative sway. To prevent possible infiltration of Soviet influence in Central Asia, the Nationalists at one point even considered resorting to the restoration of imperial “tributary ties” as a political expedient in their dealings with postwar China's frontier territorial issues. A careful examination of the Nationalists' previously unknown abortive attempt to reclaim Hunza enables us to fill an important scholarly lacuna in the history of modern China's external relations with its South and Central Asian neighbors. This reevaluation, moreover, may also lead us to further reconsider modern China's intriguing and complicated frontier diplomatic and territorial scenario, as well as how that scenario could have been manipulated by a certain group of ambitious distant Nationalist border officials during the course of postwar China's problematic frontier undertakings.     

Japan’s strategic interests in the South China Sea: beyond the horizon?

Japan has a national interest in the South China Sea issue. Although its direct commitment is ultimately limited in a material sense due to a lack of military capabilities, as well as political and constitutional constraints on the Self-Defense Force, Japan has maintained its firm stance to uphold international maritime rules and norms, and nurtured strong diplomatic relations and conducted maritime capacity-building programs with the South-East Asian states, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. These actions contribute to consolidating the rule of law at sea and provide those claimant states an opportunity to withstand pressures from China. Given the Trump administration’s unclear South China Sea policy and South-East Asia’s strategic uncertainty, Japan is becoming a key player in maintaining regional maritime stability in East Asia through diplomacy.     

Competing Visions of the Rule of Law in Southeast Asia: Power,Rhetoric and Governance

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue on the emergent relationship between the rhetoric and implementation of the rule of law concept in Southeast Asia. It thematically introduces four country case studies (Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam), and the case of ASEAN’s adoption of the rule of law in region-building, which are included in this special issue. We highlight how ideals that are arguably central to the “tradition” of the rule of law are being excised, marginalised, defended and/or undermined in Southeast Asian contexts. We emphasise how the very concept is deeply contested and far from neutral – at stake is the very notion of “law” for whom, and for what. The article offers insight into the social dynamics affecting how the rule of law is being interpreted by political actors and how it is being contested and consolidated via governance practices in the region, and proposes new avenues for research in assessing how the rule of law is operating in transitional and authoritarian state settings.     

Establishing the Prehistoric Cultural Sequence for the Lopburi Region, Central Thailand

This study comprises the first archaeologically-defined chronological and cultural sequence for central Thailand. Based on collaborative research between the Thai–Italian Lopburi Regional Archaeological Project and the Thai–American Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project, the results of excavations at seven pre- and protohistoric sites that witnessed three millennia of local cultural development, from the early second millennium BC onward, are synthesized herein. This study fills a significant gap in Thailand’s prehistory, also identifying important cultural interactions ranging into southern China and Vietnam that led to the formation during the second millennium BC of a ‘Southeast Asian Interaction Sphere’. This interaction sphere, at the close of the second millennium BC, facilitated the transmission of the knowledge of copper-base metallurgy from southern China into Thailand, where it reached the communities of the Lopburi Region who took advantage of their ore-rich environment. At the end of the first millennium BC, strong South Asian contacts emerge in Southeast Asia. Among this study’s salient contributions is the characterization of these critical prehistoric antecedents, which culminated in a process of localization of exogenous elements, usually termed ‘Indianization’. The impact of this dynamic process was initially felt in central Thailand in the late first millennium BC, leading over time to the rise there, by the mid first millennium AD, of one of Southeast Asia’s first ‘state-like’ entities.     

Can Asia lead? Power ambitions and global governance in the twenty‐first century

Is the much hyped ‘rise of Asia’ translating into global public good? The leading Asian powers, China, India and Japan, demand a greater share of the decision‐making and leadership of global institutions. Yet, they seem to have been more preoccupied with enhancing their national power and status than contributing to global governance, including the management of global challenges. This is partly explained by a realpolitik outlook and ideology, and the legacies of India's and China's historical identification with the ‘Third World’ bloc. Another key factor is the continuing regional legitimacy deficit of the Asian powers. This article suggests that the Asian powers should increase their participation in and contribution to regional cooperation as a stepping stone to a more meaningful contribution to global governance.     

U.S. and Japanese Foreign Direct Investment in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis

East Asia has led the world in economic growth and export expansion in recent decades. The phenomenal rate of economic growth among the so‐called “four little tigers”—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—enabled them to achieve newly industrializing country (NIC) status in the 1980s, followed by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Earlier studies explained the development from the government‐led development paradigm, or the so‐called the statist approach. Scholars also argue that foreign direct investment (FDI) played an important role in the economic development, thanks to technology transfers. Kojima and Ozawa and later Kohama, however, argue that Japanese FDI help East Asian economies while U.S. FDI do not because Japanese technology transfer practices are appropriate for East Asian countries but not the United States'. Thus, we revisit the issue of East Asian economic development and test the economic effects of FDI from the United States and Japan. Using a Barro‐type growth model, we test the effects of FDI from the United States and Japan on economic growth in East Asian NICs. We find that FDI from both the United States and Japan helped economic growth in the “four little tigers,” but not in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.     

China and East Asia: An Appraisal of Regional Economic Integration

Three Taiwan-based economists evaluate regional economic integration in East Asia, using trade indicators to analyze the degree of trade concentration among East Asian nations, and employing the gravity model to identify key factors influencing bilateral trade flows among them. China is expected to play a key role in East Asia's economic development, and empirical analysis for the period 1990-2005 indicates that East Asia has already evolved into a trading block, expected to become one of three dominant blocks in the global economy. The study, which highlights the key role played by geographical distance and market size, suggests that the impact of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for East Asian trade will remain limited in the future. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F15, F31, O53, P33. 7 tables, 41 references.     

Not-so-new silk roads: Japan's foreign policies on Asian connectivity infrastructure under the radar

Scholarly narratives concerning China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) tend to contextualise this project within China's rivalry with the United States and Japan. Such interpretations often reduce and misconstrue Japan's initiatives in Asian infrastructure finance as mere reactivity to China's advances. This paper will showcase Japan's own foreign and financial policies regarding infrastructure in Asia and the New Silk Road regions since the end of the Cold War. I argue that Japan's presence in that field is underappreciated and under-researched, as Japan's infrastructural footprint in the New Silk Road significantly pre-dates the BRI. Furthermore, I stress the fact that Japan's foreign policy in Asian infrastructure finance featured important cooperative postures toward China, especially within multilateral development banks. The paper makes a contribution to emerging scholarship on the BRI—often reliant on strategic communications and projections—by highlighting Japan's role in regional infrastructure to show how our understanding of international relations and international political economy in Asia can be better informed by economic history and area studies.