Interview with Susannah Patton: How does Southeast Asia survive in the face of U.S.-China Competition
Under the second Trump administration, the United States has, through the deep restructuring of its diplomatic, economic, and security relationships with foreign nations, created massive and sweeping changes in regional dynamics around the globe. One of the foremost examples of this trend can be observed in Southeast Asia, a region already caught between the U.S. and China that is now further straining under the weight of competing superpowers in the context of shifting foreign policies. This combines with a preexisting dynamic of a growing rift between continental and maritime Southeast Asia, where mainland nations are being increasingly drawn into China’s sphere of influence, while their seaborne neighbors seek to hedge and balance between Washington and Beijing.
To help further elucidate the dynamics playing out within and surrounding Southeast Asia, The Monitor spoke with Susannah Patton. Patton is the Deputy Research Director at the Lowy Institute, where she exercises her expertise in the foreign policies of Southeast Asian countries, geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific region, Australia-Asia relations, and Australian foreign policy. She is also the author of the recent Foreign Affairs article, “The Two Southeast Asias: A Divide Is Growing Between the Region’s Continental and Maritime Countries.” Tyler Quillen sat down with Patton to discuss her article, current trends in Southeast Asia, their effects the U.S.-China relationship, and how great power relations affect the region in turn.
Tyler Quillen: To start, please give a brief overview of the regional divide in Southeast Asia and why it exists, as well as the divide’s importance in regional politics and trans-Pacific competition.
Susannah Patton: Southeast Asia is about as diverse a region as you can imagine. It has every kind of diversity contained within its eleven countries. It ranges from tiny, very wealthy countries like Singapore, to much larger sprawling democracies in Indonesia and the Philippines, to countries which really are right in China’s shadow in terms of their geography like Laos, and countries which are much further away and more confident in their ability to remain independent of the major powers. As a result, it has diversity of political systems from authoritarian communist systems in Vietnam and Laos to absolute monarchy in Brunei to democracies. So, this is a tremendously diverse region, and it always has been. But what I argued in my recent article in Foreign Affairs, which drew on a larger body of work that we’ve recently published at the Lowy Institute called the Southeast Asia Influence Index, highlighted the potential for a growing divide between mainland and maritime Southeast Asia.
One important piece of context for this region is ASEAN, which is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an important regional diplomatic grouping. Compared with other regional groups such as SAARC in South Asia, the African Union in Africa, or the Pacific Islands Forum in the Pacific, ASEAN actually has a lot of importance. It’s not as strong or as predominant as the European Union, but compared with any of those other regional groups that I’ve mentioned, ASEAN is really important to understand. ASEAN has eleven members now with the admission of Timor-Leste, but the organization started in 1967 as an original grouping of five countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Apart from Thailand, these are mostly maritime countries, and these were also countries that for the most part were leaning towards or aligned with the United States during the Cold War, and they were concerned about the risks posed by communism from China. They were anti-communist, essentially, even if they weren’t fully on board with the United States. After the end of the Cold War, ASEAN expanded to include basically the Indochina countries—Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Brunei—and now Timor-Leste has been added most recently. So now it covers all of the eleven main countries of Southeast Asia. And I think with that expansion came an optimism, and indeed it’s embedded within ASEAN’s own policy agenda to try and close the development divide within ASEAN and the region.
But in some ways, there are a couple of trends which have meant that that divide is continuing to grow. We can talk about it on the level of economic development, but we can also talk about it in terms of the two trends which I focused on in my Foreign Affairs article. The first trend that I point to in that article was the way that growing physical connectivity between southern China and mainland Southeast Asia has driven these countries into much more enmeshed economic arrangements than was the case in the past. Historically, there’s been a big geographic barrier of mountainous jungle between southern China and mainland Southeast Asia, and indeed that terrain for millennia actually defined the outward expansion of the Chinese state. Today, that is really changing because of rapid economic development. So this includes things like high-speed rail connections, which is probably the most prominent example. A rail connection between southern China and the capital of Laos, Vientiane, opened in late 2021, but that’s been accompanied in Laos by a much broader set of engagements, including road connections and special economic zones, which I would argue really blur the line between where one sovereign state ends and the other begins, because Laos does not have full control over its jurisdiction within those special economic zones. And so, they’ve become zones where all manner of illicit activity has been able to flourish. And Laos is an extreme example, but Myanmar as well exhibits this trend in a different way. There has always been a lot of influence from China in northeastern Myanmar through China’s relationships with the ethnic armed organizations which have influence in that part of Myanmar. But one thing that’s really interesting to note is that, despite the civil war which has raged in Myanmar over the last few years, China’s key interests including the oil and gas pipeline which connects a port in the northeastern Indian Ocean with China has been able to continue to operate without being attacked by either side of the fighting. That’s really notable. And of course, some of the other planned infrastructure which is associated with that has been delayed, like rail and road connections, but ultimately, I think that will also come to be implemented, and so that will drive further connection between Myanmar and China.
And then finally and potentially most significantly looking at this development would be the greenlighting in Vietnam of a rail connection that would be partially funded by China and connecting cities in northeastern Vietnam with China. Now Vietnam has a very different relationship with China than the other two countries that I’ve been discussing. The Vietnamese characterize this as a thousand years of defiance and deference, so it’s a sort of delicate dance for them between acknowledging the much larger weight of their giant neighbor to the north, along with fiercely safeguarding their own sovereignty and independence. It’s one reason why Vietnam has historically been quite wary of investment from China, but that’s actually changing, especially following the first U.S.-China trade war with the relocation of supply chains out of China and into Southeast Asia. Vietnam was the prime beneficiary of that, but it also transformed the economic relationship between China and Vietnam, particularly in northern Vietnam. So I think that’s really one to watch as well, because if we’re thinking about a mainland-maritime divide, Vietnam is really a hinge country. But all of that is to say that the physical barriers between China and mainland Southeast Asia have increasingly been paved over the last decade.
Now the contrast there is with maritime Southeast Asia, where geography and distance continues to mean that these countries remain as they always have been, I think, which is basically open to a large range of external partners, and they’re of interest to a large range of external partners as well. So not just the United States and China, but a whole range of other countries including Japan, Australia, India, South Korea, all have really important maritime interests in this part of Southeast Asia. And for the most part, these countries are also larger and more prosperous than the mainland countries, and that means that they continue to attract a wide range of investment and interest, whether it’s on the economic side or the defense side, from a range of external partners. And so what I think these two converging trends point to is that, over time, we’re looking at a scenario where mainland Southeast Asia could become part of a weak de facto sphere of influence for China, while maritime Southeast Asia is unlikely to go down the same path.
TQ: Thank you very much, that’s a fantastic description. Continuing on, for the maritime and near-maritime Southeast Asian nations hedging between the United States and China, what form has this hedging taken? Has it been effective in managing their obligations to and benefits from both superpowers?
SP: I think hedging is a really interesting description and it’s one that many academics have devoted their whole lives to studying. The context for hedging, though, is another important concept, which is non-alignment. Except for the Philippines, which is a very staunch U.S. ally, at least under its current leadership, the other countries in Southeast Asia, even Thailand, which is a U.S. ally on paper at least, and Singapore, which has a close defense relationship with the United States, all of the rest of them are what we would call non-aligned, meaning not that they’re necessarily neutral on all issues, but that they’re not going to choose sides. And this is the mantra that we hear over and again from leaders in Southeast Asia—that they don’t want to be forced to choose sides. And it’s a sort of simplistic statement on one level, but it also does reflect the fact that Southeast Asia, by virtue of its geographic position, has been a prime beneficiary of the open liberal trade order, especially since the end of the Cold War. It has become much more prosperous through its ability to trade with China, to have investment from the United States, and also to have the security guarantee of the United States. And this is something that particularly comes through if you read speeches by the leaders of Singapore, because they acknowledge this, I think, in a much more eloquent way than I can do. But in their speeches, they point to this idea that the U.S. presence in Asia has underpinned a period of stability that has allowed countries to focus on economic development and focus on their prosperity. Now, of course, we’re entering a much more uncertain era where many Southeast Asian countries are questioning whether this era, which has been so profoundly in their interests, is coming to a close. And that’s something that we can debate as well.
I suppose in the context of that non-aligned foreign policy, hedging is one strategy that Southeast Asian countries tend to use, which is to say they don’t put all their eggs in one basket. They don’t definitively align with either the United States or China, but they selectively work with both countries where they see it as being in their interests. And I would say that the way that hedging plays out for Southeast Asian countries can be quite different across the region, and Malaysia is probably the archetype of a hedging country in that it very much seeks to partner both with the United States and China. But there are clear examples of where it doesn’t go all the way in providing what either of those superpowers would really like it to do. And you can see that this year in the way that Prime Minister Anwar has chaired ASEAN. Even though he personally hasn’t managed to establish, I think, a relationship with President Trump, and even though the United States is very unpopular in Malaysia at the moment, especially owing to its support for Israel in its war on Hamas following the October 7 attacks, even despite all of that, Anwar has really wanted to encourage the United States to be there. Because although he’s been establishing new forms of cooperation with China, like an ASEAN-GCC-China Summit, which was held earlier in the year, he really wants the U.S. to be there as well. So that is one example of where I would say this hedging behavior plays out. They don’t want to have all their eggs in a China basket, and that instinct remains very strong.
TQ: As each of these groups of nations are caught in the crossfire of growing tensions and competition between the U.S. and China, how are they likely to be affected? What effects have we already seen from things like the Trump administration’s tariffs?
SP: I think for me, the big question that is raised by the Trump administration’s approach to Southeast Asia is really whether or not we can still accurately talk about the region being defined by great power competition or by U.S.-China rivalry. Because many of the actions that the United States has taken, and these are global policies, they’re not specific to Southeast Asia, but they play out in Southeast Asia, are really not the actions of a country that is focused on competing for influence in third countries. The U.S. might still see China as a systemic rival, and we can debate the extent to which that is the case within Trump’s own mind or the various figures within the Trump administration. But if we look at the way U.S. policy has played out, it doesn’t appear to be competing for influence in a serious way in those third countries. And I think Southeast Asia is probably reflective of the way that this is likely to be playing out in other parts of the Global South.
So just a quick overview of those policies and the way that they play out. I mean the tariffs are a key one because Southeast Asia is so trade-exposed that they had a lot to lose. Countries like Cambodia, around 40% of their exports go to the United States and they were initially threatened with nearly 50% tariffs. That’s devastating. Likewise for Vietnam. Now ultimately the region landed on around 19 to 20% tariffs, but there is a bitter taste in people’s mouths about the way those negotiations happened, the perception that they were one-sided and unfair, and there’s still a lingering fear about the way that sectoral tariffs will play out, in particular for semiconductors. This has really, I think, been of great concern to countries in Southeast Asia, probably to a degree that’s hard to overstate. And if we think back to the Biden administration, there were a lot of complaints that the U.S. lacked a positive economic offering for the region, but of course now that looks like a high-class problem compared with a U.S. economic agenda for the region which is actively harmful.
The cuts to USAID of course have also played out in different ways. I would say that’s more of a mixed story in Southeast Asia because a lot of what USAID was funding in the region was focused on areas that were not of high priority to many of the national governments. So, thinking about support for civil society, for free media, for governance, democracy, disability rights, LGBTQ rights—these are not priorities for the most part for a lot of Southeast Asian countries. Not to say that USAID wasn’t also doing work that was really valuable. And there’s been some examples, particularly in the work that the Millennium Challenge Corporation was doing in some parts of the region, where clearly U.S. withdrawal is of concern to governments. But in some respects, I think the U.S. withdrawal from USAID funding for the region is more an impact on long-term U.S. soft power and engagement with civil society than an immediate problem for its bilateral relationships. I would say the same is true of cuts to the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Voice of America had a pretty strong reach in Southeast Asia. It did quite important work, particularly working with civil society, human rights defenders and so on, shining light on issues of corruption, of environmental destruction, types of reporting that no one else is really going to replace. Again, not necessarily a big concern for many governments to have that gone.
And then the other area where I think U.S. soft power is really under challenge is in terms of reports about it becoming much more difficult to access the United States visa system, a less welcoming environment for international students. We’re already hearing a lot of anecdotal reports that students from Southeast Asia are looking for other options, whether it be the U.K. or Australia or other intra-regional destinations, because the United States may no longer be their number one choice in the way that it was in the past because of the amazing capacity of U.S. higher education institutions. These are really big changes. But for the most part, apart from the tariffs, I would say they’re long-term soft power challenges for the United States.
Where the U.S. of course still remains highly engaged and we’ve seen a lot more continuity is in terms of defense and security cooperation, particularly with the Philippines. That all seems to be going ahead, and the alliance still seems to be on firm footing. The strategic rationale is accepted by both sides, and we haven’t seen the kind of leader-level dynamics play out in a negative way, like for example we have with the U.S.-India partnership. So, it’s not all bad news in Southeast Asia, but it does really raise for me the question of to what extent does the U.S. really care about competing for influence in the region? Because at the same time, as this is all playing out, of course China is just continuing business as usual, and it has the perception that China’s economic offering for the region is very strong. We can debate the extent to which that is in fact true, but that perception is there, and China’s diplomacy with the region is also just very consistent and assiduous across the board.
TQ: What role can Southeast Asian nations play in mediating the U.S.-China relationship?
SP: I think Southeast Asian countries for the most part wouldn’t see themselves as playing a role in mediating great power relations. I think for a time, say in the 1990s to the 2010s, there was a hope that some of the forums which ASEAN convenes like the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting Plus, and the East Asia Summit could be places where the major powers would meet and engage with each other and have leader-level conversation about the strategic issues that are of pressing importance to the whole region. I think that hope has really been shattered by the polarization between the United States on the one hand and the axis of authoritarian powers, but particularly in this context, China and Russia seeing themselves as systemic rivals and adversaries of the United States. That really makes it much harder for ASEAN to play even that modest convening role of providing a forum where the great powers meet. So, I think it still will, in a loose way, provide a forum where all the major powers turn up to some extent, but it won’t be in the driver’s seat.
And so, I think this is an important question for Southeast Asia. Many countries in the region tend to be quite passive about their own agency and their own ability to influence dynamics. There’s a perception that, well, this is for the big boys and all we can do is sort of go about our business and try and avoid the worst impacts of this competition and hope that it doesn’t veer into conflict. One emphasis in Australian foreign policy at the moment, which of course I follow closely being based here, is an agenda by the Australian Foreign Minister to actually try and encourage countries in Southeast Asia to see that they do have agency and they do have an ability to define the character of the region. So, they can’t affect the distribution of hard power, which really underpins a lot of these dynamics. But they can affect the degree of consensus in the region, and they can establish expectations and norms around superpower behavior. So of course, in an ideal world, it would be great to see ASEAN countries speaking out more forcefully about actions that China’s taking which do destabilize or undermine current norms, whether it’s in relation to the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. But unfortunately, they haven’t really seen that as their role. And there is a degree of fatalism about, you know, come what may, we are price takers, not price setters. And there are some proverbs that you hear from time to time along the lines of when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled, and that I think in some ways sort of sums up their mentality.
TQ: Your article draws attention to the likelihood of a growing rift between continental and maritime SE Asia in years to come. All else held equal, where do you see the region in five to ten years? Particularly, what would you expect to see from the nations that most straddle that line, Vietnam and Thailand?
SP: Well, I think ASEAN will continue to exist. I don’t think it’s going to fall apart because I think, unlike the European Union, it never tightly bound its members into a common consensus view, whether it be on foreign policy issues or even on economic and trade issues. There is a notional ASEAN economic community, but countries can still set their own tariffs, enter into their own free trade agreements, et cetera. So, they have a lot of freedom within that framework, which means that I don’t think anyone is likely to leave. I don’t know what you would call it if the Philippines were to leave ASEAN in a Brexit-type equivalent, but I just don’t see that on the horizon because, ultimately, they do all share some common interests and a common worldview around norms of non-interference, of sovereignty, of establishing cooperation between themselves as neighbors. And even on the South China Sea, I mean, I think it’s worth noting that around 2012 there was a lot of commentary that ASEAN was really splitting. So, 2012 was a critical year for the group. It was the year that China took control of the Scarborough Shoal, a feature within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone. It caused a huge amount of upset in the Aquino administration and in the Philippines more broadly at the time, and the Philippines felt very betrayed that none of its neighbors really stuck up for it. And Cambodia was in the ASEAN chair at that time, and there was a very—what came to be a very infamous incident of ASEAN foreign ministers being unable to issue a joint communiqué after their meeting in Cambodia, which might not sound like a big deal in the broader world. Foreign ministers can’t agree on a statement, but for the group at the time, it was a crisis. It was saved in the end by some shuttle diplomacy from Indonesia, and the group was able to sort of patch things up and move forward.
I think since then there hasn’t been a repeat of that crisis. The reason for that is that I think since then the Philippines has had an understanding of what it can and cannot expect from its ASEAN neighbors, and so although there are strong differences of opinion on the South China Sea and probably on other issues as well, there’s a tacit acceptance, I think, from ASEAN’s members not to push too hard to the point that the group might break. So that’s their mentality and it’s what has kept them together. So I think that’s a good thing, but in terms of what we might see going forward in five to ten years, I worry that we will see a region which looks increasingly post-American, in which the U.S. plays a much more narrowly defined security role, but which is a much less relevant economic, cultural, and political partner for the region. And I think in that sense there will be increasing fatalism about China’s ultimate influence and increasing acceptance that, as China’s foreign minister himself put it in 2011, in another notorious incident, he told Singapore’s foreign minister at the ASEAN Regional Forum, “There are big countries and there are small countries, and that’s just a fact.” I think that acceptance of hierarchy and of China’s position within it will become stronger because there will be less competition from the United States.
I think the other thing that we will see, though, is that as China’s influence grows stronger, the Southeast Asian countries will be looking for other options. I think this is where the roles of third countries like Japan, India, and Australia become important because the Southeast Asian countries do want to continue to have a balance and a diversity in their relationships. But certainly, when it comes to mainland Southeast Asia, I think that the growing connectivity, which also has a competitive dynamic, which I think accelerates it. What I mean by a competitive dynamic is that Cambodia sees that there’s going to be this rail connection between southern China through Laos and Thailand and thinks, well, we want that too. Likewise in Vietnam, they don’t want that north-south corridor to be only through Thailand. They want to attract it to Vietnam as well. So, I think that competitive dynamic will really continue to accelerate the economic integration between southern China and mainland Southeast Asia. And that will ultimately come to play out at the political level, but maybe not in an immediate or a direct sense, given what I mentioned about the way that the South China Sea issue has played out within ASEAN more recently.
TQ: Thank you. ASEAN stands as a largely unique example of a collection of middle-power nations capable of punching far above their weight in diplomatic circles. What can other nations learn from this entity’s successes and shortcomings?
SP: Yeah, it’s a great question because ASEAN is often criticized. I think there’s a famous line by a former Singaporean diplomat: “Don’t criticize ASEAN for being a camel when it’s actually a horse,” or vice versa. In other words, don’t fault ASEAN for not being what it was never intended to be. What it is intended to be is a group primarily focused on achieving harmonious relations among its own members. Given the diversity of the region, it’s actually easy to imagine an alternative scenario in which Southeast Asia is far more unstable. These countries have historical tensions or unresolved disputes—think of Singapore and Malaysia, Malaysia and Indonesia, or Malaysia and the Philippines. Many of them have difficult historical legacies or ongoing border disagreements. Yet, for the most part, the region has been very stable at the interstate level, and that stability has enabled the countries to attract investment and prosper. On that front, ASEAN is a huge success story. It’s also a success because it consists mostly of small and medium-sized countries. We can debate whether Indonesia is medium-sized or large, but the key point is that ASEAN is not dominated by any one great power. That’s a critical part of its character. If ASEAN didn’t exist and the region tried to create a new grouping today, it would almost certainly be dominated by China, or at least by the region’s larger countries, and that would be to everyone’s disadvantage. ASEAN’s convening power—its ability to bring countries together on relatively equal footing—is one of its real strengths.
Of course, there are examples where ASEAN’s mission of maintaining stability among its members has fallen short. The most recent and prominent example is the conflict between Thailand and Cambodia. Cambodia is a particularly interesting case because it’s a smaller country situated between two much larger neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. Cambodia has historically felt vulnerable. Some people compare it to Poland in Europe, caught between Germany and Russia. And just as Poland has looked to the United States for external security support, Cambodia has looked to China to bolster its security, modernize its military, and improve its capabilities vis-à-vis its more powerful neighbors. ASEAN’s failure here is that it hasn’t been able to build a regional community strong enough to genuinely address Cambodia’s security anxieties. If Cambodia felt reassured about its historical concerns regarding Thailand or Vietnam, it wouldn’t need to tack so closely to China. Instead, we saw a conflict earlier this year that, while small by global standards, had huge economic repercussions for people living on both sides of the border. The border is still closed, there was loss of life, and heavy weapons were used. It was a shocking incident and a sobering lesson for ASEAN that it needs to have its own house in order before it can claim a broader global role.
That connects to a concept often discussed in relation to ASEAN: “ASEAN centrality.” This refers to the role ASEAN wants to play in shaping the region’s agenda. “Centrality” essentially means relevance. ASEAN wants to remain central in regional diplomacy, retain convening power, and not be sidelined by emerging minilateral groups. That is increasingly difficult because, in recent years, China and Russia—and the United States as well—have promoted smaller, more exclusive groupings of like-minded countries. These minilaterals can cooperate more efficiently on specific issues, whereas ASEAN countries strongly favor what they call “inclusive multilateralism.” So, one of ASEAN’s big tests going forward is maintaining its relevance vis-à-vis those smaller minilateral groups. It wants to remain the central platform for regional diplomacy, not be bypassed by them.
TQ: Thank you, those are all great points. The lack of regional understanding has already caused major blunders in U.S. foreign policy history with follies like the Vietnam War. How could Washington avoid similar mistakes today?
SP: Well, I suppose the Vietnam War was an example of U.S. overreach, and its conclusion ultimately led to the Nixon administration’s Guam Doctrine and the withdrawal of a U.S. security presence from mainland Southeast Asia. So, I think the risk for the United States in Southeast Asia today is not so much a repeat of that kind of overreach—it’s more the reverse, a kind of underreach. When I think about the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, I often recall a wonderful book by Professor Michael Green called By More Than Providence, which examines U.S. strategy toward Asia across different administrations. One of the points he makes about Southeast Asia in particular is that the region has generally been treated as derivative of broader U.S. global priorities. During the War on Terror, for example, Southeast Asia was relevant mainly as a site for counterterrorism cooperation, and that opened some new lines of security collaboration. Later, under the Obama administration and then under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the region became relevant again largely through the lens of competition with China. But Southeast Asia has never really been a strategic priority in its own right.
I think the United States also struggles in its approach to non-aligned countries. It’s generally very good at managing alliances, and most U.S. policymakers are comfortable operating in “alliance mode,” but Washington often finds it difficult to engage countries that sit outside formal alliances. Indonesia is a classic example. Everyone recognizes that Indonesia—a country approaching 300 million people and the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation—is hugely important. But the question is how it is important to the United States, and how the United States can build a meaningful partnership with it. There isn’t really a clear answer to that, and I think that’s emblematic of a broader challenge in U.S. engagement with the region.
U.S. defense cooperation with Indonesia has grown tremendously in recent years. The Garuda Shield exercise, which is the largest annual training exercise between the two countries, has expanded significantly. It’s become multilateral and much more ambitious in scope, signaling that the Indonesian armed forces are more willing to work with the United States than they were in the past. That’s very positive. But on the economic side, there are still a lot of question marks. One initiative that the Biden administration launched to engage Indonesia and Vietnam was the Just Energy Transition Partnership, which aimed to bring together international finance to support energy transition in major emerging economies. This is a major challenge for Indonesia, which remains heavily reliant on coal and other primary commodities that are deeply embedded in its political economy. But with the Trump administration’s withdrawal from these arrangements, that effort has been stalled. So again, it’s hard to see what a truly comprehensive and fully engaged U.S. partnership with a country like Indonesia would actually look like.
TQ: China’s Belt and Road initiative has certainly been successful in growing connections to and even a reliance on China in many continental Southeast Asian nations. To what degree has the same been true for maritime nations?
SP: I think the Belt and Road Initiative, at least as it was originally conceived, is in many ways a phenomenon of the past, because China has since reconceptualized its engagement with the region in a number of ways. Research from the Lowy Institute, such as our Southeast Asia Aid Map, shows that Chinese lending to the region peaked around 2017–2018 and has not been maintained at those levels. That said, the impact has already been significant. Because so many projects were committed but not yet fully disbursed, China will remain a key infrastructure partner across the region for some time to come. We’re already seeing the effects of that in major projects that have recently opened—most notably the Laos–China Railway, which I mentioned earlier, and the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed railway in Indonesia. In the coming years, we’ll also see projects like the East Coast Rail Link in peninsular Malaysia, connecting the country’s eastern and western coasts. These are very important undertakings.
Often, the economic cost-benefit analyses for such projects don’t quite add up, as is true for many large infrastructure projects around the world. The debt that Indonesia owes China for the Jakarta–Bandung railway is extremely high, and Laos’s debt to China for its railway is even higher. However, once these projects open, the public tends to forget about the financial concerns and simply uses them. In both Laos and Indonesia, ridership and public use have been quite strong. But as you point out, there is a qualitative difference between Belt and Road projects in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. China’s physical proximity to the mainland and its political priorities mean that Beijing has focused more on projects that deepen its connectivity with those countries. The long-term vision, of course, is to eventually have a rail line running from Kunming all the way down to Singapore.
By contrast, most of the maritime Southeast Asian countries have different priorities. Their focus is less on connectivity to China and more on internal connectivity. In a country like Indonesia, for example, geography poses enormous infrastructure challenges. Because it’s an archipelago, connecting the outer islands—particularly in eastern Indonesia—is a massive undertaking, and that’s often the government’s central focus. Many of China’s investments in Indonesia during President Jokowi’s tenure were therefore directed toward domestic infrastructure, such as ports and airports. These projects don’t necessarily strengthen connectivity with China, but they are high priorities for national development and, in many cases, are also popular domestically.
TQ: What is public sentiment towards China and the U.S. like in Southeast Asia? How does it differ between the sub-regions and individual nations?
SP: Our understanding of public opinion in Southeast Asia is limited by the fact that we don’t have good polling for many of the region’s countries, so we need to be cautious about drawing broad conclusions. That said, the data that does exist—particularly from global surveys like Pew—suggests that public opinion toward China is generally quite positive. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey from last year, for example, included data from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. It found that in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, a very high percentage of respondents viewed China as contributing a great deal to global peace and stability. Even in the Philippines, where tensions with China are acute due to daily confrontations in the South China Sea, around two-thirds of respondents—about sixty-seven percent—expressed a positive view of China’s global role.
I think this reflects a broader trend that we see across much of the Global South: admiration for China’s economic development story and, increasingly, an appreciation of China as a high-tech power. That perception of China as “the high-tech country of the future” is particularly interesting for the United States to consider because it shapes how publics think about modernity, innovation, and economic partnership. Meanwhile, attitudes toward the United States are more mixed. They remain very positive in the Philippines and quite positive in Singapore, but in Muslim-majority countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, there’s less of a belief that the United States is a morally superior power. The idea of moral equivalence between the U.S. and China is quite strong, and this stems in part from historical legacies—especially the fact that the Cold War was, in many ways, a hot war in Southeast Asia. So, while public opinion isn’t necessarily hostile to the United States, it’s certainly not uniformly positive either.
What’s particularly interesting is how public opinion diverges from elite opinion. The ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute’s State of Southeast Asia survey, which is one of the most closely watched annual surveys among regional observers, looks specifically at elite attitudes across government, business, and academia. It consistently finds that elites in most Southeast Asian countries prefer the United States over China when asked to choose between the two. That question is, of course, a false dichotomy—given that most regional foreign policies are explicitly designed to avoid such choices—but it still reveals an important distinction. With the exception of one year, most elites across the region have said that if they had to choose, they would choose the United States. You can see that particularly clearly in Singapore, where the political and security establishments have a deep, institutionalized comfort with the U.S. relationship. For the broader public, though, that view may not be as firm, and the gap between public sentiment and elite preference is likely to remain an important dynamic to watch in the years ahead.
TQ: That’s fascinating, thank you. That brings us to my final question. Many nations throughout the region and abroad are highly invested in preventing Chinese consolidation of control over the South China Sea, and yet none so far have been able to halt its steady expansion. What can and should nations be doing to address this concern?
SP: I think the South China Sea is a really tough issue because, as you say, the overall trend over the last decade or more has been quite favorable for China. But it’s important to note that the picture isn’t entirely one-sided. I pay close attention to what Greg Poling at CSIS says about developments in the South China Sea, and he’s made a few points that challenge the more pessimistic narrative. One is that China hasn’t made any new territorial gains in the past few years. Another is that Beijing may have underestimated how much the Philippines’ recent transparency campaign would catalyze international support—not only from the United States, which announced an additional $500 million in foreign military financing, but also from partners like Japan and Australia. Those developments matter, because they signal that the Philippines is no longer standing alone.
If you look at Vietnam, it’s also not backing down, even if it’s acting more quietly than the Philippines. Vietnam has been conducting extensive land reclamation of its own, which could, over time, shift the balance of power in the South China Sea. That might not make the situation more peaceful, but it does show that China’s expansionism is not going unchallenged. Likewise, the Southeast Asian countries are holding firm in their negotiations with China over the long-discussed code of conduct. They’re not giving away core principles like the importance of international law and the commitment to keeping the South China Sea open as a vital trading route for the region and the world. Those are the more positive elements, the “glass half full” aspects of the story.
Another encouraging sign is that China, despite its best efforts, has so far been unsuccessful in driving a wedge between the United States and its treaty ally, the Philippines. Weakening the U.S. alliance system and pushing Washington out of Asia remains one of Beijing’s key regional objectives, but under the Biden and Marcos administrations, that hasn’t happened. Still, the challenge remains immense. It’s hard to see how China can be fully prevented from making further gains, whether by taking control of Second Thomas Shoal, militarizing Scarborough Shoal, or consolidating its hold on smaller remaining features. Each of those potential developments would reinforce the perception of China’s inevitable dominance in the South China Sea and deepen regional fatalism about its growing control.
So, I think the best that the United States and others can do is to support Southeast Asian claimant states—encouraging them to work more closely together, resolve their own disputes where possible, and present a more unified front. They can also help these countries strengthen their capacity to uphold international law: rejecting China’s “nine-dash line,” refusing to accept its claimed baselines around the Spratly and Paracel Islands, and continuing to exercise the rights of freedom of navigation and overflight that all nations enjoy under international law. Those actions send a crucial signal that China’s expansive maritime claims are not accepted. Whether those efforts will ultimately prevent China from making further territorial or strategic gains is much harder to say, but they remain essential steps toward preserving regional stability and upholding the rules-based order in the South China Sea.
