Introduction

Abstract

In Southeast Asia, China's growing economic and political strength has been accompanied by adept diplomacy and active promotion of regional cooperation, institutions and integration. Southeast Asian states and China engage in ‘strategic regionalism’: they seek regional membership for regime legitimation and collective bargaining; and regional integration to enhance economic development, regarded as essential for ensuring national and regime security. Sino-Southeast Asian regionalism is exemplified by the development plans for the Mekong River basin, where ambitious projects for building regional infrastructural linkages and trade contribute to mediating the security concerns of the Mekong countries. However, Mekong regionalism also generates new insecurities. Developing the resources of the Mekong has led to serious challenges in terms of governance, distribution and economic ‘externalities’. Resource-allocation and exploitation conflicts occur most obviously within the realm of water projects, especially hydropower development programmes. While such disputes are not likely to erupt into armed conflict because of the power asymmetry between China and the lower Mekong states, they exacerbate Southeast Asian concerns about China's rise and undermine Chinese rhetoric about peaceful development. But the negative security consequences of developing the Mekong are also due to the shared economic imperative, and the Southeast Asian states' own difficulties with collective action due to existing intramural conflicts.

Notes

¹See, for instance, Michael E. Brown et al. (eds), The Rise of China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross (eds), Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (London: Routledge, 1999); and Herbert Yee and Ian Storey, The China Threat: Perceptions, Myths, and Reality (London: Routledge, 2002).

²David Shambaugh, ‘China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order’, International Security, vol. 29, no. 3, Winter 2004–2005, pp. 64–99.

³See Evelyn Goh, ‘Southeast Asian Perspectives on the China Challenge’, Journal of Strategic Studies, forthcoming, August 2007; Thomas Christensen, ‘Fostering Stability or Creating a Monster? The Rise of China and US Policy Toward East Asia’, International Security, vol. 31, no. 1, Summer 2006, pp. 81–126; Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu and Jing Dong Yuan, China and India: Cooperation or Conflict? (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).

⁴On the strategic continental–maritime divide in Southeast Asia, see Ross, ‘The Geography of the Peace: East Asia in the Twenty-first Century’, International Security, vol. 23, no. 4, Spring 1999, pp. 81–118; Goh, ‘Introduction’, in Goh (ed.), Betwixt and Between: Southeast Asian Strategic Relations with the US and China, IDSS Monograph no. 7 (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, 2005).

⁵The ‘old’ ASEAN consisted of the five member states that founded the organisation in 1967 – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, as well as Brunei, which joined at independence in 1984. The ‘new’ ASEAN states joined after the end of the Cold War – Vietnam in 1995, Laos and Myanmar in 1997 and Cambodia in 1999.

⁶Other key elements are the China–ASEAN Free Trade Area and regional institutions such as the ASEAN+3 grouping and the East Asia Summit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evelyn Goh

Dr Evelyn Goh is University Lecturer in International Relations and Fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford. Her research interests are Asian security, US–China relations, US foreign policy, and international relations theory. She has a long-standing academic interest in environment and development issues, and has studied the geopolitics of the Mekong region for ten years.