China’s military in ‘competition for partnerships’ with US in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is playing an ever-growing part in China’s investment and diplomatic decisions, particularly as Beijing’s rivalry with Washington heats up. In the final instalment of a four-part series on China’s ties with Asean, Hayley Wong looks at Beijing’s efforts to expand defence cooperation in the region.
China is looking to forge closer defence ties with its Southeast Asian neighbours as it engages in a “competition for partnerships” with the United States in the region.
It comes as tensions have been soaring in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, where run-ins between Chinese and Philippine coastguards have intensified near disputed islands.
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In Southeast Asia, China has traditionally maintained more in-depth military relations with Cambodia and Laos. But this year it has sought to deepen ties with countries like Indonesia, Singapore and East Timor.
Song Zhongping, a military commentator and former People’s Liberation Army instructor, said Beijing saw a growing need to build political trust with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
He said the US was holding more joint exercises in the South China Sea targeting “island disputes and China”, and that it had “persuaded regional countries to get into confrontations” – a move he said was aimed at “slowing down” China’s development.
China has repeatedly accused the US of emboldening its treaty ally the Philippines to conduct resupply missions to navy outposts near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal and more recently Sabina Shoal.
The PLA has also stepped up patrols in the South China Sea, including in response to drills and other military activities by the US and its allies. Beijing claims almost all of the resource-rich waterway as its territory – claims that overlap with those of Asean members Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.
There has been concern over the activities of Chinese military, coastguard and research vessels in the South China Sea – especially those within other countries’ exclusive economic zones.
Meanwhile, Washington has sought to boost its defence cooperation with Indo-Pacific allies like Manila and Tokyo.
Six Asean members took part in the biennial US-led Rim of the Pacific maritime exercise in June and July, but China was excluded due to its “reluctance to adhere to international rules or norms and standards”.
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Chad Sbragia, a researcher at the Institute for Defence Analyses and a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence for China, said the current atmosphere in the region was largely defined by competition between the two great powers.
“It’s competition for partnerships, for alliances, and that’s just going to intensify and could get pretty ugly,” he said.
“I don’t like characterising countries by leaning one way or the other … but you are definitely seeing some leaning a little bit one way, and it’s just going to naturally fall out,” he said, giving the examples of China’s relationships with Thailand and Cambodia.
China’s joint exercises with Asean countries have tended to be about sending political signals and providing security support for less developed states. But the annual Falcon Strike exercise between China and Thailand, a US treaty ally, was in the spotlight this year because it included rare combat elements.
Meanwhile, China became the biggest exporter of arms to Thailand from 2019 to 2023, accounting for 44 per cent of its major weapons imports, according to data tracked by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). From 2014 to 2018, Thailand imported 18 per cent of its arms from China.
Alongside its economic influence in the region, China is hoping to “at least compel Southeast Asian countries to consider Beijing’s interests when it comes to the South China Sea and Taiwan”, according to Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
He said those interests, especially concerning key waterways, included whether or not to “provide access to US military forces or allied forces, or even provide overflight rights … basing or logistic support”.
While China’s security partnerships are based on a no-alliance principle, which does not grant access to military bases, it has reportedly gained “exclusive access” to Cambodia’s Ream naval base – which Beijing funded.
Other recent Chinese military engagements in the region include a joint exercise with Singapore earlier this month. It was the first time the drill has been held in a consecutive year and it is expected to become institutionalised.
China has also sought to expand its security partnership with the tiny underdeveloped island nation of East Timor, which is currently an Asean observer.
Southeast Asia is the only region where the number of China’s joint military exercises has recovered to pre-pandemic levels, with 14 such drills held last year, according to a report by the US Naval War College.
That compared to 13 joint drills between the PLA and Southeast Asian militaries in 2019.
In fact, most of China’s joint military exercises last year were conducted with neighbours from Southeast Asia, followed by five with Russia and three with Middle Eastern nations.
The report said Chinese navy port calls in Southeast Asia – the most frequently visited region – had also recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
Huang Chin-Hao, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said while engagement was growing, “in terms of increasing the level of sophistication of these kinds of military exercises, we haven’t seen it quite yet”.
“But that doesn’t mean that that won’t happen. It’s just we have to kind of wait and see how China and regional counterparts actually decide to expand on their level of military-to-military cooperation.”
He said it was “not so much about the quantity or the number of times, but more so the kind of engagement, the content, the substantive aspects of their cooperation, [and] how much intelligence and information are being shared between the different militaries in these sorts of exercises”.
Huang said a hurdle for deeper security cooperation was that as China’s military capabilities expand, “the intentions of what the PLA intends to do with those increasing capabilities is sort of in the unknown”.
He said it would take time to build trust and for Asean members to push for a better idea of China’s military intentions, but noted that Beijing had “a pretty good track record” in the Asean defence ministers’ framework.
But Abdul Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow in the Southeast Asia programme at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney, pointed out that “most Southeast Asian countries conducted military exercises with China due to diplomatic reasons, not military ones … so, these exercises are mostly a function of defence diplomacy”.
Abdul Rahman said most of the recent drills were “superficial in nature and lack interoperability”, but China’s aerial exercises with Thailand were the exception.
“It seems the Chinese are drawing lessons from those air exercises to improve their tactics and air fighting capabilities,” he added.
Chinese soldiers take part in a joint exercise in Laos in May last year. Photo: Xinhua alt=Chinese soldiers take part in a joint exercise in Laos in May last year. Photo: Xinhua>
Dong Jun, China’s new defence minister, has also had to re-engage with the region after he replaced Li Shangfu in December.
Li – who was removed from his post last October after disappearing from public view for months – was expelled from the ruling Communist Party in June for corruption.
Just 16 senior-level military meetings were held between China and Southeast Asian members in 2023, compared to 25 in 2019 and 27 in 2018, according to the US Naval War College tally.
In talks with Vietnamese defence chief Phan Van Giang this month, Dong urged his counterpart to “seize the opportunity” by boosting military cooperation.
Beijing also held the first “2+2” ministerial dialogue with Jakarta last month, led by foreign vice-minister Sun Weidong and Zhang Baoqun, deputy director of the Central Military Commission’s Office for International Military Cooperation.
Zhao Weihua, director of Fudan University’s Centre for China’s Relations with Neighbouring Countries, said the 2+2 dialogue would be conducive to “managing disagreement and preventing crises”.
“As an overall trend, security cooperation between China and its neighbouring countries is strengthening,” he said, adding that cooperation platforms and joint drills like the one between China and Singapore were likely to become “regularised”.
He noted that communication between China and Southeast Asian nations was “very diverse” and not limited to the 2+2 framework, citing the party-to-party channel between Beijing and Hanoi as an example.
According to defence analyst Koh, while Beijing’s security engagements were increasing in the region, some countries – especially those with territorial disputes with China – were maintaining cooperation in areas deemed to be “low hanging fruit”.
“They are also concerned about the potential security ramifications of being close to China,” he said.
Koh added that countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia were balancing new security initiatives with China with those with other partners, to “maintain some sort of equilibrium and not let this slide too much towards one particular camp”.
When Vietnamese defence chief Phan met his Filipino counterpart Gilberto Teodoro last month – about a week after Phan’s talks with Dong – the two sides pledged to strengthen defence and military cooperation. Both countries have claims in the South China Sea that overlap with Beijing’s.
Koh also noted there were limitations on what kind of joint exercises countries in the region can conduct with China based on where their military hardware is from.
He gave the example of Thailand, which deployed its Swedish-made Gripen fighter jets instead of its American F-16s for the Falcon Strike drills with China. Koh said that would not have been possible for Singapore since its air force uses only US-made fighter jets.
China is a far smaller supplier of arms than the US, which exported 42 per cent of major arms globally from 2019 to 2023. Chinese arms exports accounted for just 5.8 per cent of the global trade in the past five years, after 5.9 per cent from 2014 to 2018, according to a report published this year by SIPRI.
Beijing has attempted to expand its cooperation with Asean members to the arms trade, but those efforts have had a lukewarm response.
Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher with the SIPRI Arms Transfers Programme, said the lack of major arms sales to the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia in particular was because the three nations “see China more and more as a military threat and that deters them from buying most Chinese weapons”.
China did receive more orders in the late 2010s – including the HQ-22 defence system and missiles, tanks and armoured personnel carriers – but Wezeman did not expect that trend to continue.
“US pressure on its allies and arms clients not to buy from China and Russia has also increased in recent years,” he added.
The reputation of Chinese systems in terms of quality is another issue, according to Abdul Rahman from the Lowy Institute.
“I understand from a few sources the Chinese weapons or systems they received are not in a good working order,” he said. “For example, a Chinese air defence system used by a Southeast Asian state could not operate properly, leading to the death of a few military personnel.”
“The quality of rifles is another example. Another Southeast Asian official spoke about how he prefers to use the old American M-16 rifle as it is lighter and more accurate than the more modern Chinese ones.”
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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