China said boo and ASEAN flinched, jumped and momentarily fell silent.
By failing to release any communiqué to mark its annual meeting, ASEAN's
foreign ministers ensured everyone would note their failure.
This is a signal with multiple
meanings. Or, to turn that thought around, no single or simple explanation
should be given to the ASEAN fiasco in Phnom Penh. As failures go, this was
fascinating, illuminating a game with many players that has been played many
times before and will have many more iterations.
Understanding ASEAN is always
about picking the moments of substance from those of shadow play. Introduce
China into this equation and you get a glimpse into the deeper parts of the
ASEAN psyche, where the dreams and the nightmares reside. Come down the time
tunnel and reflect on what history tells us about ASEAN and China.
In 1989, I'd flown from my post
in Singapore to Beijing as part of the cohort of correspondents the ABC used to
report the massacre in Tiananmen square. Returning to Singapore, my next
assignment was to report the annual ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Brunei.
The joint communiqué of the 22nd
ministerial meeting was a weighty document running to 87 numbered clauses,
ranging over headings including Southern Africa, Afghanistan, Asia Pacific
Cooperation, West Asia, Disarmament, the search for a settlement in
Kampuchea...and on it ran. When I'd got through the sizeable collection of
ASEAN pronouncements I can remember a moment of puzzlement that quickly turned
to astonishment. There was not a word in that 4 July statement about what had
happened in Tiananmen on 4 June.
The name China didn't get a
mention. Paragraph 12 was an expression of welcome for the Sino-Soviet summit
that had happened in Beijing in May when Gorbachev visited; but there was not a
word about the bloody crushing of the democracy movement in June, one of the
seminal moments of 1989 that will always serve as the grim counterpoint to the
fall of the Berlin Wall in November.
With document in hand, I wandered
over to one of the senior hacks gathered in Bandar Seri Begawan to cover the
meeting. His ranking as an old Asia hand had been established at breakfast when
he'd piled on the sliced chilli and the advice he offered was similarly
astringent: 'You're not in Canberra any more, mate. This is ASEAN. The silences
say as much as the statements.'
In those days, ASEAN had only six
member countries. So the next Foreign Ministers' gathering in Bandar happened
in 1995. By then, the ASEAN Regional Forum was going, so this was a much larger
jamboree.
China was a presence as well as a
factor. My defining memory of that gathering was the ceremony to enrol Vietnam
as the seventh member of ASEAN. Vietnam's Foreign Minister, Nguyen Manh Cam,
walked on stage to be greeted by the other ASEAN foreign ministers; sitting
impassively in the front row of the audience was China's Foreign Minister, Qian
Qichen. As the Vietnamese Minister turned to face the audience, his eyes went
directly to the face of the Chinese minister. This was a moment of
Sino-Vietnamese history with a prelude of thousands of years, a stage of
Southeast Asian regionalism that spoke also to a complex ancient relationship
with China.
From these perspectives, the
Phnom Penh debacle can be read lots of ways. As usual, Ernest Bower offers some
useful analysis. He sees Phnom Penh less as a spectacular failure for ASEAN but
as a clear example of China overplaying its cards:
China has revealed its hand as an outlier on the question of ASEAN
unity. It seemingly used its growing economic power to press Cambodia into the
awkward position of standing up to its ASEAN neighbours on one of the most
important security concerns for the grouping and its members. China's overt
role, underlined by leaks about Cambodia's complicity in sharing drafts, seems
to suggest Beijing's hand in promoting ASEAN disunity. Thus the most important
message coming from Phnom Penh is not the intramural ASEAN spat over the joint statement
but, rather, that China has decided that a weak and splintered ASEAN is in its
best interests.
On that reading, ASEAN has a
chance to regroup and play a rematch, again and again. The ASEAN chairs over
the next four years will be Brunei, Burma, Malaysia and Laos. Cambodia's
performance revealed again that the role of the chairman matters in ASEAN in
ways that often outweigh the power of the ASEAN secretariat.
ASEAN has every incentive to draw
closer together, to bolster unity so as to be able to coordinate a diplomatic
push-back against Beijing. That is not a recipe for calm in the South China
Sea. Don Emmerson judges that the deadlock in Phnom Penh will delay a code of
conduct for the South China Sea, but equally will cause some ASEAN states to be
less willing in future to kowtow to their giant neighbour, for the sake of both
national and regional independence:
If China wields its geo-economic and geopolitical power as a blunt
instrument – 'I’m big and you're not' – it will trigger joint push back among
Southeast Asians while earning their disrespect. Smart power in a networked
world of high-speed linkages, flows, and innovations means knowing when
recourse to physical preponderance is counter-productive. Size does matter, but
how it is used matters more. By the evidence of Chinese diplomacy, that lesson
has not been fully learned.
In Phnom Penh, some ASEAN foreign
ministers were ready to make a public display of failure rather than give China
veto rights over the communiqué. Silence is no longer an option as it was back
in 1989. This is an ASEAN more willing to stare back at China, following
Vietnam's example in 1995.
China overplayed its power to get
a short-term diplomatic win in Phnom Penh; very short term. The cost of
Beijing's 'win' was to galvanise ASEAN to a point of such anger that it tore up
the final communiqué altogether. A bland document with the usual ASEAN-speak
about ongoing dialogue would have been the usual ASEAN response. Instead, ASEAN
is confronting its own purposes in a way that must have astounded Beijing even
as much as it is surprising ASEAN itself.
What happened in Phnom Penh was a
sign of how high the stakes have become. The diplomatic struggle reflects the
power interests in play. A China that pushes so hard to win the communiqué
argument is just as likely to overplay its naval strategy. No wonder the talk
of 'accidental war' in the South China
Sea is on the rise.
Graeme Dobell
Business & Investment Opportunities
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