China and Post-Cambodia Southeast Asia: Coping with Success

Throughout the 1980s China's Asia policy aimed to roll back Vietnamese expansionism in Cambodia. Due to the complementarity of Beijing's objective with the interests of the non-Communist Southeast Asian states, it was relatively easy for Beijing to develop cooperative relations with these states. Yet the very success of Chinese diplomacy in the 1980s has undermined Beijing's ability to maintain its regional influence in the 1990s. Now that the strategic aspects of the Cambodia issue have been resolved, the region is concentrating on economic issues, yet China has little economic influence in Southeast Asia and is thus likely to be excluded from the most significant regional negotiations. In this context, China's military capabilities could assume heightened salience, stimulating increased suspicions of Chinese intentions and thus further undermining Beijing's effort to foster a peaceful environment in which to modernize its economy in preparation for the more competitive twenty-first century.