China’s East Asia Challenge: Managing a Complex Regional Order

there are rights and responsibilities that china would have to shoulder if it wants a great-power role.

If we assume that the role of the US as a global hegemon is nearing its end, rising China may wish to assume the mantle of leadership. But in order to take on such a role, it will first have to establish itself as a trusted and reliable leading power among the diverse countries of East Asia.

Evelyn Goh outlines the rights and responsibilities that China would have to shoulder if it wants to share or to take over the great-power management role of the United States in

East Asia. The challenges are enormous and complex.

CHINA Is first and foremost an Asian great power. for strategic and economic reasons, East Asia is one of the world’s most important regions; for china, it is the most important world region for geographical reasons as well. If chinese leaders decide that they wish to pick up the pieces of the changing world order, one of their first tasks would be to take on the substantial leadership role as East Asia’s “indigenous” great power.

the contemporary East Asian order is peculiar in two key ways. first, small states play a larger political role in the regional architecture than many would expect. In the 1990s, the Association of southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) stepped into the breach as the least offensive and best organized regional actor to help create the first regional security institution in the immediate aftermath of the cold War. since then, this grouping has facilitated great power interaction and regional co-operation over functional issues. second, the East Asian order is fundamentally undergirded by an offshore power, the united states. the us imparts central direction to East Asia through its alliances and security relationships, the management of its great power relationship with china, its critical role in managing regional crises, and providing public goods. As the “indigenous” great power in East Asia, china (and to a lesser extent, Japan) has not explicitly shouldered the special role of a great power as provider and manager of regional order for nearly 150 years. Both china and Japan suffer serious legitimacy deficits within the region for historical, political and strategic reasons. In china’s case, despite Beijing’s adept diplomacy, its

neighbors still harbor doubts about its intentions and suspicions about its authoritarian communist leadership, and they are not reassured by how china has managed its territorial conflicts with neighboring states. china’s difficulties with gaining acceptance as regional leader has facilitated the general preference for retaining the us as East Asia’s preponderant power even after the cold War, especially its forward military positioning and the security umbrella of its alliances, under which regional countries may shelter in times of crisis. Many countries also appreciate ASEAN institutions as an additional means of retaining maneuvering room between the great powers for smaller states.1

for the past three decades, as long as the us commitment to East Asia held firm, everyone could put off the unpalatable challenge of trying to negotiate some form of great power leadership by china. However much china might have resented us dominance, and other regional states feared entrapment, “they continue to subcontract order provision to the us because it is there, because it is willing, and because they can.” today, however, East Asia

2 faces a crisis of us reliability that has grown in urgency since former us President Barack Obama’s under-performing “rebalance” to Asia, and that has reached a critical juncture with donald trump’s election as president and the covid19 pandemic. Because the us role in East Asia now poses the greatest uncertainty for regional (indeed, international) order, the region is forced to grapple with the question of which other great power will step in to perform the vital role of managing regional order.

what would China have to do?

“Great powers contribute to international order by maintaining local systems of hegemony within which order is imposed from above, and by collaborating to manage the global balance of power and, from time to time, to impose their joint will on others.”

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What would china have to do in East Asia today to become the region’s leading great power? success in carrying out such a role — much like that of the us since the end of the cold War — will hinge on five elements:4

• Proven demand for Chinese leadership from

most, if not all, regional states;

• Articulation of, and agreement on, common purposes;

• China’s superior ability to marshal and commit

resources to fulfilling these purposes;

• China’s capacity to provide public goods; and • China’s reliability in wielding force to discipline detractors and act as arbiter of the peace.

to pick up this demanding mantle of regional great power leadership, china will need to tackle three important tasks.

1) Present a convincing great power identity:

to establish itself as East Asia’s great power leader, china would have to demonstrate three aspects of its identity.

first, it would have to be non-threatening to other regional states and their sovereign interests. Over the past 30 years, successive chinese leaders have stated that china eschews “hegemony,” in the sense of coercive imperialism. President Xi Jinping at the November 2017 19th Party congress reaffirmed that “china’s development does not pose a threat to any other country. No matter what stage of development it reaches, china will never seek hegemony or engage in expansion.” to substantiate this assurance, Beijing should resolve its outstanding territorial disputes with neighbors in a more compromising way, as it did earlier with some land boundary disputes. In a situation without us competition, this approach may be more fruitful, as it would