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Forging a Marriage of Convenience between ASEAN and China
| Article
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11295 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
3,453 Words |
| Author
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John Wong
John Wong is an associate professor of economics at the
National University of Singapore. |
China's relations with those countries which now constitute the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are deeply rooted in the shared historical processes that are common to the region. Drastic change has marked those relationships in recent years, and there are numerous questions concerning what direction economic and political development will take in the years to come.
In any discussion on recent developments in the region it might prove useful to place the issues at hand in a historical perspective. In 1967, the Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand formed ASEAN in Bangkok. In 1984, a small oil rich sultanate, Brunei, joined the ASEAN organization as its sixth member. China's relations with the countries in Southeast Asia, traditionally called Nanyang (or South Sea) by the Chinese, are extensive and deep-rooted on account of the history, geography, and migration in the area. After the Communist revolution in China in 1949, the traditional pattern of China's relations with Southeast Asia was radically transformed, with complex ideological and political forces coming into play, and this gave rise to two decades of cold war relations. It was not until the early 1970s with the advent of détente in the region, touched off by President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972, that individual ASEAN countries started their long and often tortuous course of normalization with China.
Among the ASEAN countries, Indonesia has had unique experiences with China because of Indonesia's commitment to a nonalignment policy in the early years of its independence. Indonesia was in fact the first country in the region to extend diplomatic relations to the People's Republic of China
... (1995 of 21452 Characters)
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