Author: Zhang Yunling, CASS
Since China’s reform and opening-up policies began in the 1970s, the country’s average annual economic growth rate has hovered around 10 per cent.
Currently, China’s gross domestic product is second only to the United States; it is the world’s largest exporter and importer and the largest holder of foreign exchange reserves. Along with China’s remarkable economic rise comes an increase in China’s role in both regional and global development and governance. Read more…
Author: Takashi Terada, Waseda University
ASEAN’s function is often described as being limited to a ‘talk shop’ that merely provides venues where ministers and leaders from larger states join together to exchange views on regional security and economic issues.
So long as the so-called ‘ASEAN Way’ — which informally stipulates non-intervention, non-binding and consensus-based decision-making approaches to regional cooperation — is maintained, ASEAN’s major role will not go beyond hosting the ‘talk shop’. Yet the talk shop’s value could be enhanced if delegates discussed the hard issues, regardless of whether any binding obligations ensued. Read more…
Author: Jennifer Chen, CSIS, Washington DC
Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay has opened up to foreign navy vessels after eight years of closure. Read in context, this decision is neither sudden nor unexpected. Why? Because the bay’s opening is part of Vietnam’s strategy to counteract Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea.
At the ASEAN Regional Forum in July 2010, Secretary Clinton offered to facilitate a multilateral dialogue between ASEAN and China to solve territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Read more…
Author: Jiro Okamoto, ANU
Mechanisms for political and economic integration and cooperation activities in East Asia have taken on a highly flexible character in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Rather than moving toward a coordinated ‘grand design’ of regional integration, the region has shifted toward a dynamic ad hoc method of integration based on diverse policy preferences and within the constraints of extra-regional partnerships. Read more…
Author: Andrew Sheng, University of Malaya and Tsinghua University
There are a lot of global architecture, theoretical, and micro-institutional incentives issues that Asia must address in the wake of the GFC.
Conventional wisdom is not helping to solve the dilemma of a global market that is still regulated at national levels. Read more…
Author: Andy Yee, University of London
At the 12th ASEAN Summit in the Philippines three years ago, ASEAN leaders affirmed their commitment to an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2015 and to transform ASEAN into a region with free movement of goods, services, labour and capital. Earlier this year ASEAN committed to further regional integration when FTAs with Australia, New Zealand and China came into effect on January 1. While the long-term advantages of closer regional economic cooperation are immense, one cannot help questioning to what extent economic integration can develop Asia. A large part of ‘Factory Asia’ is developed at the expense of export reliance to the West and inequality within countries.
To fully realise the region’s potential, East Asian economies need to re-balance their development strategy away from exports to the West towards fostering local demand. Read more…
Author: Kelly Gerard, University of Western Australia
The issues keeping policy makers awake at night increasingly demand concerted regional responses. Ideas, funds, people and services move rapidly across porous borders, and so do security threats. Financial crises, drug smuggling, people trafficking, climate change, and terrorist networks are just a small sample of security threats currently spreading across states’ boundaries.
Faced with this newly globalised environment, states have recognised a need for international cooperation; regionalism has been on the rise since the late-1980s. Read more…
Author: Aaron L. Connelly, CSIS, Jakarta
President Barack Obama’s political philosophy has been the subject of intense debate in the United States. The protean nature of the President’s pragmatism leaves hardened ideologues frustrated, unable to plot his views on a simple x-y axis. But if you want to know where Obama stands, you need only examine the moral philosophy that undergirds his politics. In this, the most explicit common thread has been the need for empathy in policymaking—placing the ‘empathy deficit’ alongside the budget and trade deficits as structural problems that American strategy must address.
This is no less true of Obama’s instincts on foreign policy than it has been of his instincts on healthcare or judicial nominees; in the preface to the second printing of Dreams from My Father, Obama speaks at length about the need for empathy in foreign policy. Read more…
Author: Parameswaran Prashanth, 2049 Institute
Washington’s future policy options regarding Asian regionalism are worth exploring, particularly given US President Barack Obama’s series of planned visits to Asia this year.
The alphabet soup of the so-called ‘regional architecture’ includes the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ASEAN Plus Three (APT), and APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation), to name just a few. The main question for the US is whether to join the East Asian Summit, a five-year-old body comprising the 10 countries of Southeast Asia as well as China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. Read more…
Author: Anthony Milner, ANU and University of Melbourne
Speaking at the Asialink/Asia Society National Forum last week, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd welcomed ASEAN’s desire to encourage deeper United States and Russian engagement in the evolving regional architecture. Mr. Rudd also noted the suggestion that these states meet with the current members of the East Asia Summit (ASEAN, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand). ‘This is what we are seeking’, he said, ‘engagement in a cooperative institution of all of the key players in the region.’
Does this suggest that Australia will now be giving less attention to advocating their Asia-Pacific vision for the region, and will work more closely with East Asian or Asian regionalism? The distinction matters. Read more…
Author: K Kesavapany, ISEAS
As the international centre of economic gravity moves towards East Asia, the challenge for the region is to develop a new architecture commensurate with its growing role in world affairs.
Consider East Asia. There is no doubt that East Asian countries are well-represented in the Group of 20, which is turning into a genuine platform for international economic cooperation. China and India, the two rising Asian giants, are prominent members of the G20. Read more…
Author: Daryl Morini, University of Queensland
Within Australia, Prime Minister Rudd’s call for an Asia-Pacific Community (APC) has recently been muted by a number of setbacks. Indonesia and Singapore have reacted in a highly qualified way to the proposal, and, at times, have veered close to outright rejection. The initiative also seems imperilled by recent tensions between Beijing and Canberra over the Stern Hu trial. Finally, the APC has been placed in jeopardy by increasing US-China tensions concerning the Copenhagen climate negotiations, Chinese trade policies and the Obama administration’s continued arms sales to Taiwan. In this context, how urgent is the implementation of the APC?
There are three main challenges that risk delaying the fulfilment of the APC: regional sceptics, the counter-challenge of the East Asian Community, and the ambivalent role of China. Read more…
Author: Mohamed Ariff, MIER
Having been in the thick of the global economic crisis, Asia can now play a pivotal role in the post-crisis rebalancing exercise.
Although regional cooperation efforts in Asia after the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis were largely reactive and inward-looking, it is important to note that individual economies in the region maintained their outward-looking posture. Read more…
Author: Simon Tay, SIIA
The ASEAN summit ended Friday 9 April in Hanoi not only with further plans for its ten members but also ways to widen Asian dialogues. Most agree to now include the USA and also Russia. There are however differences over how best to do so.
The differences are not well understood. One suggestion is to expand the existing East Asian Summit (EAS), in which ASEAN annually hosts the six leaders of China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. Read more…
Author: Donald Emmerson, Stanford University
Former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson entitled his 1969 memoir Present at the Creation — the creation of a global order from the rubble of World War II. Joining or ignoring the East Asia Summit (EAS), some might say, is a comparably weighty choice — between being present or absent at the creation of an East Asian regional order in the wake of the Cold War.
The choice is conditioned by time and space. The East Asia Summit has been meeting without the United States since 2005. The Obama administration, unable to travel back in time to the Summit’s creation, can only be present or absent at its maturation. Read more…
