China, the United States, and order transition in East Asia: An economy-security Nexus approach

Abstract

A dualistic-order thesis has been emerged as a widely-used concept to describe East Asia’s regional dynamics. According to the thesis, the economic and security spheres of the region have become divorced from one other, whereby China and the United States dominate the economic and security realms, respectively. This paper demonstrates the deficiencies of this thesis, based on a comprehensive assessment of the economic and security developments in the region, as well as the strategic choices of small and middle regional powers. In order to form a more accurate and systematic understanding of regional prosperity and stability, this paper develops an economy-security nexus approach by integrating the interactions of regional actors in both the economic and security realms into a unified framework. From this perspective, East Asian regional order is sustained by a delicate coupling of regional economic and security configurations: ‘hot economics’ is accompanied with cooperative security interactions. Although China and the United States are not the dominant actors in either field, their relatively benign interactions in both realms collectively play a significant role by shaping the strategic environment for regional actors, allowing them to enjoy a large degree of strategic flexibility and increase their security and prosperity.

Keywords:

• East Asia
• order transition
• economy-security nexus

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their sincere appreciation to Antonio Douglas, Joshua Peace, and Thomas Shrimpton for their assistance and to Tom Christensen, Xiaoyu Pu, Kai He, and Falin Zhang for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Here, ‘East Asia’ refers to the eastern part of Asia, a broader region comprising the two sub-regions of Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.

2 For the following discussions see Acharya (2013); Feigenbaum and Manning (2013); Alexandroff (2013).

3 SWIFT. Follow the Internationalisation of China’s Currency. Available at https://www.swift.com/our-solutions/compliance-and-shared-services/business-intelligence/renminbi/rmb-tracker

4 OECD Statistics, available at http://stats.oecd.org/.

5 Information Office of the State Council. 2014. China’s Foreign Aid, 2014. July. Available at http://www.scio.gov.cn/zfbps/ndhf/2014/Document/1375014/1375014.htm.

6 RIETI-TID 2016, available at http://www.rieti-tid.com/.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported by a research grant led by Kai He and Huiyun Feng at Griffith University from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Grant No. 16-1512-150509- IPS).

Notes on contributors

Feng Liu

Feng Liu is Professor and Associate Dean of the Zhou Enlai School of Government, Nankai University. His current research interests focus on international relations theory, international relations in East Asia and China’s foreign policy.

Ruonan Liu

Ruonan Liu is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Politics, University of International Business and Economics. Her research mainly deals with international relations of Southeast Asia, with a special focus on the security strategies of the Southeast Asian States and China-ASEAN relations.