Southeast Asia

Last week, Malaysian prime minister Najib tun Razak dissolved parliament and called a general election, which will now occur no more than sixty days after April 7, the day of dissolution. Najib and other leaders of the governing coalition, which has ruled Malaysia since independence, likely set this timetable in part so the election would be held while the longtime opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, remains in jail. In the last national election, Anwar’s coalition, a diverse group of parties held together by his personality, actually won the popular vote, although extreme gerrymandering (and possibly fraud) ensured that Najib’s coalition retained control of parliament. It would be a major upset if the opposition coalition, led by former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad with Anwar in jail, won the election this time around. It is true that the opposition made major gains in 2013, that there is significant public discontent in Malaysia with the 1MDB scandal and the other allegations of corruption swirling around the government, and – at least among urban Malaysians – that there is anger about Malaysia’s outflow of capital and lack of jobs in higher-value industries. In addition, high living costs are a major problem for Malaysians of all income levels, and despite being cleared by the domestic justice system, Najib’s administration still faces ongoing investigations into the 1MDB scandal in the United States and multiple other countries. Still, Najib and his coalition are likely to win. Mahathir remains distrusted by some in the opposition, and he does not have the ability to galvanize the broad opposition coalition the way that Anwar had. The Najib government has dished out a massive pre-election budget, which is a norm in Malaysia, to appeal to voters. Under new election regulations, many districts are even more gerrymandered than in past year, further diluting the power of urban voters, who tend to support the opposition. And Najib’s parliament recently passed a law against “fake news” designed to further chill political discourse in Malaysia, a country where Najib has already overseen significant crackdowns on expression over the past five years.   Najib also has benefitted from a divide between the Parti Islam Se Malaysia, or PAS, a vital part of the opposition coalition last time, and the current, Mahathir-led opposition coalition. This divide could badly hurt the opposition in the election, leaving Najib and his allies the winners as PAS siphons votes from the opposition without winning many seats for PAS itself. In addition, if Najib and his coalition win the election – and especially if they win by a considerable amount – they are likely to usher in an era of a much more repressive Malaysia. Najib has wielded power repressively in his current term, but in another term he could well try to turn Malaysia in a direction closer to Turkey or other more personalized authoritarian states. However, a massive victory by Najib’s coalition would not necessarily lead to a further empowerment of conservative and Islamist groups in Malaysia, which have been wielding greater political power in recent years. If Najib scores a large victory, PAS will be less equipped to extract concessions from the new government. However, if Najib does not win big, and PAS’s split of the opposition is a major factor in Najib’s win, PAS and its Islamist allies will be poised to make sizable demands on the government. Finally, as James Chin notes in New Mandala, the states of Sabah and Sarawak will again play a critical role in the election. In the past, they have been virtual vote banks for the ruling coalition, and the opposition has failed to make much headway in either of these states. For Sabah and Sarawak’s reliability, the governing coalition has lavished money and political power on these two states located on the island of Borneo.

The U.S. government is increasingly focused on the emerging competition between the United States and China. To date, U.S. policy has focused primarily on the military, economic, and diplomatic elements of the contest. Equally important, however, will be a fourth pillar in the realm of information, ideas, and ideology. My recent Policy Innovation Memorandum, “Exposing China’s Actions in the South China Sea,” provides a specific recommendation for how the United States can do better in the area of strategic messaging and information operations.  The lack of regular and detailed public information about China’s activities in the South China Sea has abetted Chinese revisionism. Beijing’s false and propagandistic accounts of the regional security dynamic have largely gone unchallenged, and regional leaders in other claimant states have been relieved of domestic political pressure for greater pushback against Chinese violations of their sovereignty and maritime rights. The net result is that China continues marching toward rapid militarization of the area without sufficient diplomatic resistance from the region or other major powers. The United States can readily fix this information deficit, thereby raising the costs to China for ongoing efforts to militarize and expand its control of the South China Sea. Two steps are necessary for the U.S. government to release more imagery of China’s destabilizing activities. First, the secretary of defense should determine that the costs of declassification are minimal, and are outweighed by the concurrent strategic advantages to be gained by enhanced transparency. In doing so, under the authorities outlined in Executive Order 13526, the secretary can require U.S. intelligence agencies to declassify relevant imagery. Second, to motivate the administration to move hastily, Congress should require the State Department to produce a quarterly report with the declassified imagery of significant Chinese activities in the South China Sea. The strategic rationale and specific bureaucratic requirements for these actions are described herein.

Hunter Marston is a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution, where he works in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and for The India Project. You can follow him on Twitter @hmarston4. China’s economic growth, rising military power, and deepening cultural ties with many states have outstripped many U.S. policymakers’ predictions a decade ago, and left them wondering about the implications of China’s rise for global security and what remains of the liberal world order. President Xi Jinping has dramatically reshaped China’s presence and power on the world stage, touting a “new model” for developing countries to follow and advocating a “new type of international relations”; unlike predecessors such as Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, Xi openly promotes China as a model of development. China’s deepening trade ties with the developing world, massive financing for projects in other states through its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and expansive vision for connectivity via its Belt and Road Initiative, suggest a 21st century order that eventually may have Beijing at its center. With China in ascendance on so many fronts, the new volume China Steps Out: Beijing’s Major Power Engagement with the Developing World, edited by Joshua Eisenman of the University of Texas-Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and Eric Heginbotham of MIT’s Center for International Studies, is a timely contribution to the literature on China’s foreign policy and development strategies. Its six regional analyses offer a thorough overview of China’s expanding relations with states in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Central, South, and Southeast Asia, assessing Beijing’s approach to various parts of the developing world, and looking for broader similarities in Beijing’s strategies. While the breadth of this book would seem to threaten its cohesiveness and focus, the editors provide an approachable reading experience by employing a thoughtful thematic structure to each chapter, analyzing, in turn: China’s primary objectives; means (economic investment, military diplomacy, cultural ties, etc.); how effective Beijing has been in achieving those objectives; and how other countries perceive China’s efforts to achieve Beijing’s goals. As Eisenman and Heginbotham reveal in their introduction, Beijing’s overseas strategy encompasses several overlapping areas: economic investment; political and diplomatic outreach; security cooperation; and cultural ties. As the editors recount, Xi Jinping has actively championed his desire for a “multipolar world and democratic international relations.” He also publicly has promised that China will remain a status quo power that supports the existing world order, although whether Beijing will actually play that role is very much an open question. The chapter by Derek Mitchell, former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar and currently senior advisor to the Asia Program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, provides essential framing of China’s history of interaction with the developing world, reminding the reader that China had previously been a great power competitor of the United States and Europe centuries ago. Mitchell describes imperial China at the peak of its international influence in the 15th century: “As the Chinese imperium expanded, so did the territory required to serve as a buffer to protect it.” He concludes that, “There is little...that suggests it is China’s natural state to forge international partnerships of equality and mutual respect.” Echoing its imperial past, Beijing today has demonstrated its willingness to use heavy-handed tactics to achieve foreign policy goals. Heginbotham’s chapter on China-Southeast Asia relates delineates China’s economic outreach, diplomacy, military-to-military links, and cultural ties with the region in which it probably has the most influence, and is closest to becoming the regional hegemon. Heginbotham parses variations in Chinese strategy toward larger and smaller countries in Southeast Asia, observing how Beijing prefers to co-opt weaker powers with large sums of aid or investment, and, having brought into its fold smaller states like Cambodia, is dedicating considerable diplomatic capital to wooing sizeable powers like Indonesia, which is not a U.S. ally and is increasingly dependent on Chinese aid and investment. In many countries in Southeast Asia, however, Beijing’s focus on elite ties has made it a target of grassroots animosity, a problem the Chinese government has faced in other developing regions as well. Myanmar citizens have protested environmental destruction and unpaid land confiscation surrounding oil pipelines and hydropower dams backed by the Chinese government. As Heginbotham reveals, massive Chinese investments in Southeast Asia, particularly in infrastructure projects and in states with poor legal frameworks, can exacerbate inequality and graft in recipient countries. Heginbotham notes that Chinese investment in Laos accounts for 66 percent of all foreign direct investment, in one of the poorest states in East Asia. He contends that Chinese government aid has largely benefited Chinese firms operating in Laos and the government in Vientiane, without trickling down to the people of Laos. In Central Asia, Beijing has benefited, in recent years, from the relative absence of other major power competitors beyond Russia, which is unable to match China’s aid in the region. The United States under George W. Bush renewed attention to Central Asia given its strategic importance to the global war on terror, but declining U.S. government interest in the region in recent years left a void for Beijing. As Raffaello Pantucci of the Royal United Services Institute and Matthew Oresman of Pillsbury Winthrop note in their chapter on China-Central Asia relations, despite the region’s desire for more U.S. investment and stronger diplomatic relations with Washington to balance growing Central Asian dependency on Beijing, “Central Asian governments have learned that they cannot count on the United States to be a consistent partner.” Instead, they write, the region has become a “foreign policy testing ground” for China. Central Asia offers Beijing the opportunity to measure the success of the first multilateral institution, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which it cofounded in 2001. Central Asia also showcases Beijing’s intersecting energy and military diplomacy; in Central Asia, Beijing’s Belt and Road projects demand greater security cooperation with neighboring partners to mitigate investment risks. Chinese influence in Central Asia, however, suffers from some of the same challenges it does in Southeast Asia. In Kazakhstan, Pantucci and Oresman describe how massive Chinese investment in Kazakh energy companies have enriched Kazakh elites and in 2016 triggered protests over proposed legislation that would expand Chinese land ownership in Kazakhstan. In his chapter on China-South Asia relations, Jeff Smith of The Heritage Foundation echoes some of Beijing’s challenges in Central Asia. This analysis is especially timely given China’s controversial leveraging of debt to gain control over ports in Sri Lanka and political influence in the Maldives. Traditionally New Delhi enjoyed considerable influence in Sri Lanka, but the balance of power has shifted dramatically in recent years as China has poured investment into the country. As Smith observes, today more than a third of Sri Lankan government revenue goes to repaying Chinese debt. Beyond overt Sino-Indian competition for influence, Smith provides a nuanced understanding of how some of the smallest South Asian countries have balanced China and India off one another to protect their interests. His account of last year’s Sino-Indian border dispute in Bhutan shows how the Bhutanese government skillfully played the two powers. The book’s China-Africa chapter, co-written by Eisenman and David Shinn, former U.S. ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, shows how China’s foreign policy in sub-Saharan Africa has evolved significantly from the revolutionary ideology of the 1960s and 1970s to one of pragmatism. In Africa China is making a high-stakes bet on the future of global growth, financing infrastructure projects, contributing to peacekeeping forces, and supporting antipiracy missions, to create a stable investment landscape. Beijing has also provided military arms and diplomatic backing to regimes such as South Sudan and Zimbabwe to maintain influence in those states. As the authors note, Beijing also has in recent years successfully convinced countries like Gambia and Sao Tome and Principe to abandon diplomatic relations with Taiwan, further adding to Taipei’s global isolation. The Chinese government has signaled its willingness to play the long game to earn popular support in Africa, investing in telecommunication companies and media corporations, and spending money on cultural exchange programs. However, as in Central Asia, China has succeeded at cementing its influence in part because of the absence of competitors such as the United States, which invests comparatively little (financially or diplomatically) in the region. Nevertheless, there is growing public concern about China’s influence in Africa. The authors discuss, for instance, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where locals increasingly resent competition brought by Chinese firms that utilize imported labor, and demonstrators have targeted Chinese businesses. In the Middle East, as Sarah Kaiser-Cross, a Dubai-based financial analyst, and Yufeng Mao, an assistant professor at Widner University, show in their chapter, Beijing has primarily sought to secure its own energy needs by linking Belt and Road projects to its energy supply lines. Largely this is due to Chinese dependency on Middle Eastern oil, which accounted for 48 percent of China’s total oil imports in 2016. Needing energy, Beijing has facilitated expansion of state-owned oil companies such as SinoPec into countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. While China’s repression of its Uighur Muslims at home hurts its public image in the region, six of seven Middle Eastern countries surveyed in a 2014 Pew Research Center poll believe China is having a positive impact on their economy. Beijing has also made inroads in Latin America, as R. Evan Ellis, research professor at the U.S. Army War College, illustrates in his chapter. Following a surge of Chinese trade and investment over the past fifteen years, Beijing has sought to embed itself in Latin American regional institutions. Ellis’ chapter also demonstrates that populist governments like that of Venezuela, historically suspicious of free trade and democracy, have been quick to embrace Chinese support, although Beijing has also built close ties with longstanding Latin American democracies. More recently, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s insistence on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes Mexico, Chile, and Peru, has increased the appeal of China as an economic actor in the region. As China’s economic and strategic relations with developing nations have expanded dramatically, it has often contradicted its reassurances of acting as a peaceful power and respecting current global institutions, nearly all of the authors in the book show. The volume offers a measured but perhaps overly neutral analysis of Chinese behavior. However, this reticence to impart value judgments is rare among academic perspectives, and it allows the reader to decide for oneself whether the sum of China’s influence is more benign or not. Only in their conclusion do the editors acknowledge: “some Chinese activities in the developing world…threaten peace and stability” and aim “to alter the status quo” of the liberal world order. How the Xi Jinping government resolves this contradiction will be a critical question in the next stage of its relations with developing states.

As Thai political parties register to compete in early 2019, the ruling junta may yet again delay promised elections.

Much remains unknown about the young leader of one of Thailand’s newest political parties ahead of the promised 2019 elections.

More than one year into the Donald J. Trump administration, it has become obvious that the White House has little interest in using the bully pulpit, or U.S. funds, for promoting democracy and human rights globally. The White House has submitted a FY19 budget that aims to drastically slash funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and other democracy promotion programs, cutting funding overall for democracy and rights promotion by 40 percent and seemingly trying to reduce the power of the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. Certainly, having a U.S. administration uninterested in, if not disdainful of, rights and democracy promotion is a significant blow for rights and democracy campaigners in many states. But the void of rights and democracy advocacy left by Trump—and likely to be maintained, in many ways, by future U.S. presidents, due to the growing isolationism of the U.S. public—could be filled by other world leaders, as they realize that the United States is unlikely to return to the same role in democracy promotion that it had in the past. No one state, of course, can make up for a dramatic shift in U.S. policy on democracy promotion. But, other rich democracies, and powerful developing democracies, can step into the breach. They may never match the single bully pulpit of a U.S. president, but together, they could prove a powerful voice against the global democratic regression. For more on how other states could fill the democracy promotion void, see my new World Politics Review column.

With elections in Thailand seemingly slated for early 2019, could an Emmanuel Macron–like figure emerge in the kingdom?

Amid uncertainty over U.S. foreign policy, countries across Southeast Asia are looking to build up strategic partnerships with regional powers to counter an increasingly assertive China.

In addition to bolstering strategic ties with the United States, Vietnam is also building a strong strategic relationship with other partners, particularly India, that are skeptical of China’s growing power in the Asia-Pacific.

After months of speculation, many signs indicate that Malaysia will hold its national elections in late April or early May. According to reports in the Malaysian press, the country’s election commission has booked most of the private helicopters in Malaysia for that time period, suggesting that it will be using them to monitor the election. Although Prime Minister Najib tun Razak does not legally have to call an election until late August, he may want to hold an election in April or May, since the vote would come before opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is released from jail. In the last national elections, held in 2013, the Anwar-led opposition coalition actually won the popular vote, but extreme gerrymandering gave Najib’s ruling coalition control of parliament, which it has enjoyed since Malaysia gained its independence. The election likely will be close, but, without Anwar, the opposition has turned to an unlikely figure of unity—former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who has now turned against the ruling coalition, but during his own terms in office harshly repressed dissent and oversaw Anwar’s first jail term.  And, even with the 1MDB scandal still swirling around him and the ruling coalition, Najib has a strong chance to win the election. If he does so, it will be in part because he, and the ruling coalition, have aggressively courted conservative, even Islamist voters, in part by splitting the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), part of the opposition alliance in the last national elections in 2013, away from the opposition. But to woo these voters, which the ruling coalition needs as urban Malay, Chinese, and Indian voters favor the opposition, Najib and the party have increasingly framed Malaysia as a state that should be dominated by Muslim, ethnic Malays. In addition, the ruling coalition has, among other steps, allowed PAS and its supporters to push forward legislation that could undermine Malaysia’s civil laws. The shift in Malaysia, in which conservative, even Islamist groups are wielding greater power in politics, is mirrored in Indonesia as well. There, the Jokowi government has not wooed Islamist organizations, but it was slow to recognize their growing power, which grew over the past decade but now has fully bloomed. Indeed, Jokowi’s administration only began to push back after Islamist organizations helped swing the vital Jakarta governor’s election last year. In a new CFR expert brief, I examine why Islamist groups are growing more powerful in Malaysia and Indonesia, the potential impact of their rise on the countries’ political systems, and the implications for U.S.-Malaysia and U.S.-Indonesia relations.  The full expert brief can be read here.

The rise of Islamism in Malaysia and Indonesia could have severe consequences for the two states’ societies, political systems, and overall stability.

Over the past three years, as Thailand-United States relations soured following the May 2014 coup in Bangkok, many commentators argued that the Thai government was suddenly alienated from the United States and moving closer to China. Although the Obama administration had vowed to bolster diplomatic, strategic, and economic relations with Southeast Asian nations, as part of the pivot, or rebalance, after the coup it supposedly froze Thailand out, pushing Bangkok into the arms of Beijing. And, while the Donald J. Trump administration has made human rights a low priority in U.S. foreign policy, and hosted Prayuth for a visit in July 2017, the Trump administration’s distrust of diplomacy, gutting of the State Department, and “America First” themes have not generally played well in Southeast Asia. The reality was always more nuanced. Thailand did not suddenly break from the United States after the 2014 coup or upon Trump’s inauguration, and China did not suddenly gain massive new influence in the kingdom in the 2010s. More important, as Benjamin Zawacki reports in this timely new volume, the kingdom’s balancing act between giants actually goes back decades. Instead, Zawacki reports, Thailand, which has integrated ethnic Chinese better than most other Southeast Asian nations, and did not cut all links with Beijing even during the Cold War, has been moving toward China for over fifteen years; the U.S.-Thai relationship that existed in the 1960s and 1970s will never return. For more of my assessment of Zawacki’s important new book, see the full review in the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.

After declaring the “rebalance” to Asia dead, the Trump administration’s “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” strategy appears to be pursing similar goals: containing China’s ability to dominate Asia and bolstering partnerships with major partners in Asia like Australia, India, and Japan.

The U.S.-Indonesia relationship has often disappointed. It’s time to rethink U.S.-Indonesia ties and try to achieve real security goals, rather than make bold plans for cooperation that never come to fruition.

The ruling junta in Thailand, which seized power in May 2014, has repeatedly delayed holding elections. Most recently, after promising to hold an election in November of this year, junta leaders now have pushed back the election date to early 2019, after the military-installed interim parliamentary body extended the time of enforcement of an election bill. This change was supposedly intended to give political parties, who have been harshly repressed since May 2014, time to re-emerge and prepare for national elections. Still, with the junta having delayed elections multiple times before, this delay only further raises questions of whether the military might try to push off a vote later into 2019, or even further down the road. These delays not only give the army more time to rule directly, but potentially provide military leaders time to organize their own pro-military party, or coalition of parties, one of which may allow junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha, who now calls himself a politician, to run in civilian politics. The delay also could allow the junta to create new ways to suppress Puea Thai, the dominant political party before the coup. (Prayuth recently told the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the election will be held in a “Thailand First” style.) Prayuth has even dangled the idea that the junta will simply remain in charge well into 2019 or beyond. Even as the Thai military delays elections, pressure is mounting on the junta in a variety of ways. Of course, since the May 2014 coup, the military has drastically altered the contours of Thai politics, in order to ensure that it remains extremely powerful even if an election is held and its favored party or coalition loses. It has increased the power of unelected and bureaucratic institutions, and created a long-term strategic plan for Thailand that will allow the military to influence politics for decades. But after several years of relative calm, due in large part to the fact that this is the most repressive junta in Thailand in decades, the military now faces a range of opposition movements that are speaking out more openly. Prominent civil society leaders and journalists have stepped up calls for General Prawit Wongsuwan, the number two in the junta, to step down from his position as deputy prime minister, after he was spotted in public wearing fancy wristwatches allegedly worth more than $1 million—assets he had never declared. Thai media outlets, like ThaiPBS, which have largely been deferential to the junta, have run polls publicly asking whether Thais think Prawit should resign—and getting a massive response indicating that he should. Meanwhile, other anti-government activists, and even some centrist politicians, have become bolder in recent months, perhaps showing the growing frustration with military rule. Leaders of the Democrat Party, the other major political party besides Puea Thai, have expressed growing frustration with the slow pace of movement toward an election. Prominent activists have launched a cross-country march to highlight public dislike of the government’s handling of many social issues, although the government has suppressed marchers and arrested some march leaders. Yet other activists have held small rallies in Bangkok and other cities to protest the junta and its election delays, despite the possibility that these rally leaders would all be arrested as well. Last weekend, several hundred protestors gathered in Bangkok to demand that the armed forces not delay the election. This opposition comes in the run-up to the (eventual) election, but it also comes in an environment in which the junta has, largely, not made good on its claims that, after seizing power, it would clean up politics. The Prawit watch saga, as well as multiple other stories about alleged graft by junta associates, has tarnished whatever plans the army had for combating graft. The junta’s anti-corruption campaign has, by and large, been limited to arrests and prosecutions of former members of Puea Thai, and their associates, on corruption charges. Meanwhile, Thailand’s economy is performing relatively strongly at the moment, but the junta’s policies have done little to expand growth prospects beyond Bangkok and the eastern corridor, where the military plans a massive investment program. The lack of stronger growth in the north and northeast could help Puea Thai at election time, a point Puea Thai leaders are apparently counting on, although the junta seems to recognize that it must spread growth more widely, and plans to raise the minimum wage and fund new anti-poverty programs. Still, if an election ever happens, the junta’s favored parties may be in a weaker position than the military expected only last year.