By virtue of its size, contiguity, economic weight, and crucial role in the world economy, China will always enjoy considerable influence in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia. But for those same reasons, China will also always arouse anxieties in Asia and indeed the world. Deng Xiaoping\u2019s approach of hiding China\u2019s power and biding time stems from his awareness of this paradox. Big countries need to reassure small countries on their periphery. Deng recognized this and acted on it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But by the end of the Hu Jintao era, Deng\u2019s wisdom was either forgotten or ignored, perhaps because Beijing over-read the implications of the 2008 global financial crisis and, just as the United States had over-read the end of the Cold War, invested it with a universal significance as heralding Karl Marx\u2019s long-predicted decline and eventual collapse of the West, specifically the United States.<\/p>\n
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This article has been adapted from The Myth of the Asian Century<\/strong><\/em> by Bilahari Kausikan (Lowy Institute and Penguin, 128 pp., $6.99, October 2025). <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In July 2010, at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Hanoi, then-Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi imperiously proclaimed: \u201cChina is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that\u2019s just a fact.\u201d Yang was reported<\/a><\/u><\/span> to have been looking at the Singaporean foreign minister when he issued this warning because Singapore had been audacious enough to defy Chinese wishes by talking about the South China Sea.<\/p>\n In September 2005, Zheng Bijian, an influential intellectual and senior advisor to the Chinese government, published an article<\/a><\/u><\/span> in Foreign Affairs<\/em> titled \u201cChina\u2019s \u2018Peaceful Rise\u2019 to Great-Power Status.\u201d This became the dominant theme in Chinese foreign policy discourse, though \u201crise\u201d was later deemed too provocative and replaced by \u201cdevelopment.\u201d China recognized that falling out with the United States and its allies could derail China\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n But after Xi Jinping took power in 2012, \u201cpeaceful development\u201d faded from the Chinese foreign policy lexicon. Instead, the dominant note was struck by the slogan \u201cthe East rising and the West declining.\u201d China became more aggressive, not just in the South China Sea but against Hong Kong, in the East China Sea, around Taiwan and Australia, and in the Himalayas. This has raised anxiety levels across Asia.<\/p>\n It does not, however, follow that Asia will meekly submit to China\u2019s wishes. ASEAN members have continued to discuss the South China Sea. The United States has continued to conduct regular freedom of navigation operations in the area. Japan, Australia, and India have conducted naval patrols. Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries have also occasionally sent their naval vessels to the South China Sea, investing the issue with an international dimension that Beijing had tried to avoid.<\/p>\n Crew members push an unmanned helicopter on the deck of a U.S. Navy ship at Changi Naval Base in Singapore on Oct. 16, 2016. Roslan Rahman\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n An important but inadequately recognized development over the last three decades has been an unarticulated but perceptible shift of attitude towards the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia in response to anxieties about China. Diplomatic partnerships such as the Quad (between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States), security agreements such AUKUS (the Australia-United Kingdom-United States pact), Japan\u2019s increase in defense spending and more proactive external posture, and India\u2019s abandonment of purist interpretations of nonalignment are all responses to China and have attracted attention. But what has quietly occurred in Southeast Asia is also consequential.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Singapore has never been shy about making known its view that the U.S. role in maintaining a regional balance was irreplaceable. But when Singapore offered the U.S. military the use of some of its facilities and signed a memorandum of understanding to that effect in 1990, all hell broke loose. Indonesia and Malaysia reacted hysterically, as if Singapore were conspiring with the devil to sell their children into slavery. Immense pressure was put on Singapore by its closest neighbors to rescind the memorandum. Of course, Singapore did no such thing. Fast forward to 2019 when the 1990 MOU was renewed with full publicity at a signing ceremony between Singapore\u2019s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and U.S. President Donald Trump, held at the United Nations in New York. What happened? Nothing, not even a whimper of protest.<\/p>\n The change in responses between 1990 and 2019 was not so much a brilliant success for Singaporean diplomacy; it was much more due to the failures of Chinese diplomacy. While attitudes towards China and the United States vary from country to country and are in any case complex, rising anxieties about China now make Singapore\u2019s anchoring of a U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia something of a regional public good, even if some of the country\u2019s neighbors will never acknowledge it as such.<\/p>\n Domestic politics sometimes places constraints on what ASEAN members can do with the United States or are willing to admit doing. Nevertheless, several ASEAN members have been quietly expanding defense ties through participation in military exercises with the United States and its allies, port calls by U.S. naval vessels, base-sharing agreements, and procurement of U.S. military equipment. Shifts by Vietnam, which fought a bitter war with the United States and still has more than 200,000 soldiers missing, and Indonesia, with its strong tradition of nonalignment, are particularly instructive.<\/p>\n Today, anything an Asian country, especially a Southeast Asian one, does with China is often seen as at least a potential concern for the United States. China has a parallel attitude, displayed by its insistence that Asian problems should be solved by Asians and the over-used trope of the American century being replaced by an Asian century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Asia is one of the most diverse continents, consisting of 48 countries with a population of 4.6 billion speaking approximately 2,300 languages, including more than 1,000 in Southeast Asia alone. Reducing this complexity to a kind of geopolitical Rorschach test that betrays your deepest fears or hopes\u2014or a blank sheet on which you project abstract universals or simplistic binaries\u2014is analytically unsound. Unfortunately, it is all too common. One could call it the Binary Trap.<\/p>\n Singapore\u2019s Yusof Ishak Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) has conducted surveys of the region\u2019s experts and opinion leaders each year since 2019, and these paint a far more complex and accurate picture. The surveys have consistently shown that, while China is widely recognized as very influential, it is also widely and deeply mistrusted. U.S. intellectuals, who are sometimes overly self-critical, may be surprised to learn that the 2024 survey showed that 42.4 percent of respondents were confident or very confident that the United States would do the \u201cright thing\u201d to contribute to global peace, security, prosperity, and governance. The comparable number for China was only 24.8 percent. The United States\u2019 principal regional ally, Japan, has consistently been the most trusted external power.<\/p>\n All opinion surveys must be used with caution. But what the ISEAS surveys show is that no power is entirely trusted, although some are more trusted than others. They are trusted or distrusted for different reasons in different domains. It is futile to try to force attitudes into any consistent pattern.<\/p>\n For instance, despite the official caution most ASEAN governments express towards the Quad, the 2023 ISEAS survey showed that 50.4 percent of policy elites agreed or strongly agreed that strengthening the Quad was positive and reassuring for Southeast Asia. In 2024, 40.9 percent believed cooperation with the Quad would benefit the region. Only minorities thought the Quad would provoke China (7.4 percent) or force ASEAN to choose sides (7.9 percent).<\/p>\n Yet this positive attitude towards the Quad does not equate to confidence in the United States. Only about 35 percent considered the United States a reliable security partner in 2024, compared to slightly more than 47 percent in 2023. But if you really think the United States is unreliable, why improve defense ties with it or think the Quad, which has the United States at its center, is not a bad thing?<\/p>\n To adapt a saying attributed to the great U.S. novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, most of us Asians have absolutely no difficulty in holding two or more opposing ideas in our minds at the same time while still retaining the ability to function. That is how our diplomacy usually works. In this respect, Fitzgerald\u2019s quip provides deeper insights into Asian statecraft than do many political scientists and experts on the region. Asia is a messy place, and a frame of mind that seeks to impose orderly answers on disorderly reality can lead to dubious conclusions. Better to embrace the contradictions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This often baffles outsiders, particularly when Southeast Asians say \u201cwe do not want to choose\u201d between the United States and China. When we say it, we do not mean we want to be \u201cneutral,\u201d because neutrality is a status that has to be accepted and respected by other parties, and we have no confidence they will do so. We do not mean that we want to be \u201cequidistant\u201d between the United States and China, because we are not sure what that means\u2014and even if we were to find out, we are uncertain that it is even possible. And we certainly do not mean lying low, staying mum, and hoping to be left alone, because Southeast Asian history in the second half of the 20th century has provided tragic examples of countries that tried to do just that.<\/p>\n What we mean is that we intend to exercise our sovereignty to choose according to our own national interests as we determine them. How we define our interests will vary from domain to domain. We see no need to neatly line up all our interests across all domains in one direction or another.<\/p>\n In the defense and security domain, Singapore long ago clearly chose the United States and the West generally. But on some political matters\u2014for example, the claim that the so-called universality of certain political ideas and rights gives countries a voice in how we in Singapore manage our internal affairs\u2014our attitudes are closer to those of China or Russia, which sometimes disconcerts the United States and other Western partners. And in economic relations, we are positively promiscuous and will negotiate with whoever offers a deal that is in accordance with our interests, prudence, and law.<\/p>\n To most of Asia, dealing with great power competition is a normal state of affairs, and hedging, balancing, and bandwagoning are not alternative strategies, as they are usually presented in Western international relations theory. Most Asians see no contradiction in simultaneously hedging, balancing, and bandwagoning in different domains vis-\u00e0-vis different external powers.<\/p>\n I do not claim that Asian countries always play this game well, but in principle this is what they usually try to do. Southeast Asian diplomacy, in particular, has almost always been polygamous or omnidirectional. Even U.S. allies like Japan have not forgotten the shocks Washington administered to them, such as Nixon\u2019s visit to China in 1972 that overturned a decades-old approach without informing any ally, or the 1985 Plaza Accord that precipitated a decade of slow growth. Their relationship with the United States, while close, has never been a starry-eyed love affair.<\/p>\n Cambodian students hold portraits of Xi and Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni in front of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 17. Tang Chhin Sothy\/\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Underlying this omnidirectional diplomacy is the most powerful force in Asia: nationalism. Nationalism overcame colonialism; it often frustrated the designs of the Soviet Union, China, the United States, and Europe. Nationalism underscores an important but under-analyzed fact of international relations: Even the smallest state in the most dire of circumstances always has agency. This is an intrinsic condition of international relations and if it were not so, Singapore would not exist as an independent and sovereign state, and neither would many others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mistakes occur, and examining the tragic mistakes made by Laos and Cambodia is instructive. Confronted with the spillover effects of the war in Vietnam, both countries first adopted an essentially passive form of neutrality\u2014lying low and hoping for the best. When this did not work, they joined South Vietnam in placing their fate in the hands of an external patron, the United States. Both approaches surrendered agency to others, with the consequences we now know. Today, these two countries seem on the verge of repeating their mistake with China as their new patron. But I doubt any other Asian country will again so totally surrender agency to an external power. That is why talking of Washington or Beijing having \u201clost\u201d or \u201cwon\u201d a country or region is condescending nonsense; the countries that make up Asia were never anyone\u2019s to \u201close\u201d or \u201cwin\u201d in the first place.<\/p>\n A particularly egregious version of this attitude is the assumption that because China is often the biggest trading partner, Beijing will call the shots. This is an insulting and ethnocentric attitude, since it assumes that we \u201cnatives\u201d are so venal as to sell our national interests for a mess of pottage or so stupid as not to know our own interests in the first place. It is also a gross simplification of how states make decisions and define their interests. Not every strategic calculation can be reduced to trade or economics.<\/p>\n In 2024, trade between the ASEAN states and China amounted to $982 billion; the figure for ASEAN and the United States was just under $477 billion. But if you factor in ASEAN\u2019s trade with U.S. allies\u2014the European Union ($279.9 billion), Japan ($239.5 billion), South Korea ($196.9 billion), Australia ($192.9 billion), and others\u2014ASEAN\u2019s trade with the West as a whole exceeded $1.4 trillion. Southeast Asia\u2019s overall economic orientation is not unduly skewed towards China.<\/p>\n How patterns of trade will change during the second Trump administration is yet to be seen. What is already clear is that Beijing relies too much on its economic weight as a diplomatic tool, and Chinese diplomats and scholars sometimes appear somewhat puzzled and frustrated when trade, investment, and aid\u2014not to mention what are euphemistically called \u201cinformal payments\u201d\u2014do not win trust for China. I have had occasion to remind some of my Chinese friends that even the most corrupt individual can be a nationalist. Beijing\u2019s attempts at economic coercion have not changed basic strategic directions in Japan, South Korea, or Australia, and not even in a weak and corrupt country like the Philippines.<\/p>\n Indonesia fans cheer before the FIFA World Cup 2026 Asian qualifier match between Indonesia and China at Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta, Indonesia, on June 5. Yasuyoshi Chiba\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n No country will ever shun China. Every country wants as good a relationship with China as possible. But China\u2019s overall geopolitical situation is not favorable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Which countries in the vast arc from Northeast Asia down through Southeast Asia and into South Asia trust China or would meekly acquiesce to China occupying the apex of a regional hierarchy? Despite having absorbed much of Chinese culture, the core identities of Japan, North and South Korea, and Vietnam have for centuries been defined in opposition to China and the Sinosphere. They cannot subordinate themselves to China without such a wrenching redefinition of identity as to make every other alternative less painful.<\/p>\n Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan finally broke with the post-war Yoshida Doctrine that voluntarily subordinated Japan\u2019s security role to the United States. Under his leadership, Japan passed legislation that circumvented constitutional restraints on defense and began to play a more proactive external role. Even if weak post-Abe leaders slow this process, the direction will not change because it is a response to permanent changes in Japan\u2019s strategic environment.<\/p>\n In Southeast Asia, Indonesia is a strongly nationalist country that has followed its own path despite attempts by the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the Cold War-era United States, and Europe to capture it. Vietnam, too, is strongly nationalist. It is impossible for any external power to capture Southeast Asia without first bringing these two countries under its sway.<\/p>\n India is as ancient and populous a country as China and will never accept a subaltern status to it. Even in countries highly dependent on China, such as Pakistan, Laos, and Cambodia, ground-level attitudes towards Beijing are often at variance with those of their governments.<\/p>\n China\u2019s reputation is better elsewhere in the global south. But that term invests the motley group of countries it refers to with undue coherence. The global south represents only a mood based on grievances about colonial history and its effects on development, as well as a desire for a stronger international voice, not any real convergence of interests. The institutions that profess to represent this mood\u2014the Non-Aligned Movement, the G-77, and lately BRICS\u2014are rent with internal conflicts that make their ability to act in unison largely performative. India, a founding BRICS member, clearly mistrusts China. Egypt, another key member, is dependent on Western aid. Of the BRICS group, only Russia and Iran share China\u2019s anti-Western streak.<\/p>\n Xi arrives during the closing ceremony of the Chinese People\u2019s Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 10. Pedro Pardo\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n China is aware of its poor reputation. From the first year he took power, Xi emphasized the need for \u201ctelling China\u2019s story well\u201d and has repeatedly used the slogan. In June 2021, in the face of growing international criticism of its \u201cwolf warrior diplomacy,\u201d Xi told senior officials<\/a><\/u><\/span> that it was important to present an image of a \u201ccredible, lovable, and respectable China.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The harshest tones of \u201cwolf warrior diplomacy\u201d have since been moderated, but not its substance. There has been no change in Chinese behavior in the East and South China Seas, towards Taiwan, and in the Himalayas. Beijing seems to believe its own propaganda about the decline of the West, and it has prematurely abandoned Deng\u2019s approach of hiding capabilities and biding time. Some brave Chinese intellectuals have warned<\/a><\/u><\/span> about the dangers of underestimating the United States or thinking it is in absolute decline. There is no sign that Xi has taken any notice. If anything, China\u2019s actions have become more aggressive on his watch.<\/p>\n Why is it so difficult for Beijing to stop or even substantively modify counterproductive behavior? First of all, it may regard the reputational damage as a sunk cost because it is convinced\u2014not entirely without cause\u2014that the West, and particularly the United States, is set on containing China and stymieing its growth no matter what it does. Moreover, once you have revealed your intentions by your actions, they are not going to be easily forgotten by others. I doubt Beijing really believes that piously claiming that its foreign policy is motivated by the desire for a \u201ccommunity of common destiny for mankind\u201d is going to cut any ice except with the terminally gullible. Whatever you may think of them, China\u2019s leaders cannot be accused of naivete.<\/p>\n But there is a more fundamental reason why Beijing cannot modify its behavior. In 2021, the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party adopted a resolution on the \u201cMajor Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Last Century.\u201d The resolution melded China\u2019s imperial tradition with Marxist dialectical materialism. In this retelling of Chinese history, the revolutions of 1911 and 1949 are only superficial ruptures with the past. More essentially, they are presented as stages in an unbroken historical process whose inevitable culmination will be the realization of the China Dream under CCP leadership. This conception of Chinese history is the foundation for the CCP\u2019s ethno-nationalist legitimating narrative of China\u2019s humiliation, rejuvenation, and eventual realization of the China Dream. The importance of this narrative to the CCP cannot be overstated.<\/p>\n A crucial aspect of the China Dream is the recovery of territory that China lost when it was weak, and the restoration of the real or imagined status China enjoyed before the West intruded into Asia. The inconvenient fact, however, is that China\u2019s most extensive territorial losses were to Imperial Russia and its successor states, which Xi now claims as his partner without limits. Siberia and what is now the Russian Far East are beyond even the pretense of recovery ever since border disputes were conclusively settled in 2003. What is left to impress the Chinese people with the CCP\u2019s resolve and success in defending China\u2019s sovereignty and territorial integrity are its claims to tiny islands, atolls, reefs, and shoals in the East and South China Seas\u2014and Taiwan. The connection with the CCP\u2019s legitimacy gives its maritime claims far greater weight than the minuscule size of the land features or even the potential undersea resources around them may suggest. Taiwan is of even greater political importance, and Xi has said several times that the China Dream cannot be achieved until Taiwan is reunified with China.<\/p>\n The deep sense of victimhood that permeates the CCP\u2019s legitimating narrative\u2014and the presentation of the China Dream as the inevitable result of a historical process vouchsafed to the party\u2014injects a strong element of entitlement into Chinese behavior on these issues. It makes diplomatic compromise difficult for Beijing, except as a purely tactical and therefore temporary expedient.<\/p>\n The CCP is caught in a trap of its own making. After all, if I have drummed into my people that I am only recovering what was stolen from me when I was weak, why should I compromise? And how can I defy what I see as the inevitable unfolding of history? What will my own people think about my mandate to rule if I bargain away what I claim was always mine?<\/p>\n A Chinese People\u2019s Liberation Army honor guard is seen at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Nov. 12. Maxim Shemetov\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n These questions were less sensitive when China was growing rapidly. But China now faces a future of uninspiring growth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The three interrelated economic challenges confronting China are familiar and much discussed: a precarious property sector that accounts for a quarter or more of GDP; burgeoning local government debt with consequent stresses on banking; and a lack of confidence that has limited the effectiveness of the measures Beijing has taken to boost domestic consumption. But what is perhaps insufficiently stressed is that these issues are symptoms of a much more fundamental political challenge.<\/p>\n In 2013, the CCP rolled out a plan<\/a><\/u><\/span> that envisaged a restructuring to allow the market to play a \u201cdecisive role\u201d in the allocation of recourses. Very little of this plan has been implemented. Why? China has been talking about raising domestic consumption for more than a decade, but the rate has stubbornly plateaued at under 40 percent of GDP. Again, one must ask: Why?<\/p>\n The answer to both questions is not economic (China has scores of brilliant economists who have not only identified the problem but proposed solutions); it is political. There are no economic solutions to political problems.<\/p>\n China\u2019s political structure clearly remains that of a Leninist state led by the CCP. The primary value of a Leninist-style vanguard party is political control over all aspects of state, economy, and society. Xi is a true Leninist in that his almost Pavlovian response to any problem seems to be \u201cmore Party\u201d and more control. (We saw this clearly in his stubborn insistence on continuing a zero-COVID policy long after it had become dysfunctional.) By definition, free markets mean less political control.<\/p>\n China may soon face a vicious circle if it is not already trapped in one. China must grow to acquire the resources to deal with the population\u2019s rising expectations, but sustaining growth requires a new balance between political control and economic efficiency. Establishing that new balance requires the CCP to accept more political risk, mitigating those risks requires growth, and so on. Unless the party finds the political courage to break the circle, the Chinese economy is going to operate sub-optimally. China will be pulled in contrary directions.<\/p>\n Little wonder, then, that China is facing a domestic and foreign crisis of confidence. Xi himself is the basic cause. Chinese intellectual, party, and business elites are uncertain about the direction he is taking China, while rivalry with the United States adds geopolitical uncertainties into the equation for Chinese and foreign investors alike.<\/p>\n
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