Chinese Power Has Peaked in Asia as Countries Nix Beijing’s Advances

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.

A vast arc of countries from Northeast Asia to the subcontinent are unwilling to subordinate their interests to China’s.

But for those same reasons, China will also always arouse anxieties in Asia and indeed the world, former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan wrote in an analysis for Foreign Policy.

Deng Xiaoping’s approach of hiding China’s 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. But by the end of the Hu Jintao era, Deng’s wisdom was either forgotten or ignored — perhaps because Beijing over-read the implications of the 2008 global financial crisis and, just as the US had over-read the end of the Cold War, invested it with a universal significance as heralding Karl Marx’s long-predicted decline and eventual collapse of the West, specifically the US.

In his book The Myth of the Asian Century, Bilahari argued that Beijing is in an unfavorable geopolitical position, with a vast arc of countries from Northeast Asia to the subcontinent unwilling to subordinate their interests to China’s.

His book is also a plea for Western analysts not to fall into the trap of seeing Asian countries as Beijing’s or Washington’s to win or lose. Instead, Kausikan writes, Asia has a long diplomatic tradition of hedging, balancing, and bandwagoning — sometimes all at the same time.