How has the Mekong region responded to Chinese diplomacy?
Yao Song, Guangyu Qiao-Franco and Tianyang Liu
Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has attached greater importance to peripheral diplomacy which goes beyond alleviating perceived threats close to China. Such approaches involve bolder moves to shape the identities and preferences of countries in China’s immediate regional neighbourhood to build a Sinocentric community of shared destiny (CSD) underpinned by the concepts of the ‘China dream’ (economic rejuvenation) and ‘new Asian security’.
By examining China’s engagement with the Mekong countries, we identify two distinct ways China uses infrastructural diplomacy to socialize these countries into Beijing’s diplomatic norms: interstate diplomatic norm enforcement and bottom-up public norm diffusion. Analysing both channels provides a way to genuinely gauge how China’s diplomatic efforts impact its neighbouring countries.
Top-down enforcement
China’s normative power relies primarily on the provision of material incentives. The country expected its ‘magnanimity’ in investing in regional infrastructure to induce recipients to endorse Chinese norms and values. For example, cognizant of Laos’s landlocked position and need for infrastructure, China helped upgrade the former’s transport infrastructure. Xi himself wrote in the local newspapers of Vientiane before his 2017 state visit, urging the Lao people to treat the China-funded Sino-Lao Railway as part of the Sino-Lao CSD, which will connect Laos to neighbouring countries and the wider world.
China has also invested $5.3 billion in Cambodia’s infrastructure in a way that both framed Chinese projects in Cambodia as crucial to the CSD and highlighted the alignment of the two countries’ development strategies. The same practice of doling out infrastructure incentives in exchange for endorsement has similarly been applied in Vietnam, partly through support for the Hanoi Metro alongside other projects.
China’s infrastructural diplomacy has been more successful among Lao and Cambodian policy-makers than with their other Mekong counterparts. This is attributable to the increased degree of diplomatic leverage China has in relation to these countries. In Cambodia, for example, China is viewed as pivotal to national survival, owing partly to western sanctions related to the undemocratic Cambodian election in 2019. Conversely, Vietnam relies less on Chinese investment given its strained relationship with China amid incessant maritime disputes, which have led to rounds of demonstrations in Vietnam and soaring anti-Chinese sentiment.
Popular diplomacy?
Chinese policy-makers understand that infrastructure investment has a longer lasting diplomatic impact where it tangibly improve the lives of populations in host countries. In this sense, Chinese overseas infrastructure acts as a way of changing the political as well as the physical landscape. By altering the built environment, infrastructure embeds Chinese diplomacy in people’s everyday lives in a way that is both normal and hyper-visible.
As one Lao interviewee stated:
‘People here drive through Chinese-invested highway every day. New shopping malls were built. We know they were built by China… [When] western leaders came to Laos, they told us about values and other things, and they left… [But] China has just been building, but eventually these buildings become a part of the background of our lives.’
In general, communities in Laos and Cambodia are prone to perceive Chinese activities in the Mekong region as aligned with the two countries’ material interests and socio-cultural values, whereas the Thai and Vietnamese populations hold a more divided view. Myanmar’s attitude to Chinese norms sits in the middle of this spectrum. As an example, Burmese interviewees thought highly of China’s efforts to promote and sponsor academic exchange between the two countries, but held a hostile attitude towards the influx of Chinese workers and were suspicious of Beijing’s potential involvement in the 2021 military coup.
A new grand chessboard?
Furthermore, China’s inability to address territorial disputes in the South China Sea has weakened its claims to the moral high ground. Similarly, missteps in infrastructure building and indifference to local needs have limited the effectiveness of China’s attempts to engage publics in the region. Consequently, China’s infrastructure investment has been unevenly received by policy-makers in the Mekong countries and largely shunned by their civil societies.
More profoundly, China’s moves to increase its presence in the region will continue to be counterbalanced by other great powers. Sino-US competition in the Indo-Pacific region has intensified as China’s growing footprint challenges US interests. Sharing the same anxieties about Beijing’s growing might, Japan, India and Australia joined the US in reviving the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) to work towards a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ and contain China’s influence. In response to these shifting power dynamics, most Mekong countries have astutely maintained their distance from major powers while gaining benefits from all sides. This situation will make it harder for the Beijing-centred norms to take hold.
Conclusion
While China’s infrastructure diplomacy in the Mekong region has had some successes as a method of interstate diplomacy, its results in winning over publics in the region are far from conclusively positive. As long as such efforts are stymied by China’s ongoing territorial disputes, the efforts of its geopolitical rivals and the limited attention given by policy-makers to local needs, China’s diplomatic efforts are unlikely to progress much further.
Yao Song is a Research Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen).
Guangyu Qiao-Franco is Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Southern Denmark.
Tianyang Liu is an Associate Professor in School of Politics and Public Administration at Wuhan University.
Their article ‘Becoming a normative power? China’s Mekong agenda in the era of Xi Jinping’ was published in the November 2021 Issue of International Affairs.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
