While China has been actively enhancing its relations with Southeast Asian nations since the 1990s, international relations experts said that China's strategic goal -- to replace the US' influence in the region -- will be difficult to achieve.
The academics came to the conclusion at a forum on China's rise held by the Mainland Affairs Council and a private foundation in Taipei yesterday.
"China's influence in Southeast Asia seems to be increasing as a result of its sustained capital flows into the area, but I don't think it will get along with those countries," said Yan Jiann-fa (
There is a general and long-term anxiety in Southeast Asian nations that political development has been threatened by ethnic Chinese, Yan said, noting that the anxiety is sure to get stronger with China's rise in the region.
Lin Wen-cheng (
"While China tries to be the main actor dominating the region, the US and Japan will also enhance their cooperative relationship to counter its rise," Lin said.
The China-ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Free Trade Area signed last year is widely considered as the chief avenue by which China aims to enhance its economic clout.
The free-trade pact is scheduled to be completed in 2010, and will form the world's largest common market, with 1.7 billion consumers.
Taiwan has been excluded from the deal, with ASEAN rejecting Taiwan's entry application in 1999 in keeping with Beijing's "one China" policy. Lin Juo-yu (
She noted that the East Asia Summit, which will expand on the previous ASEAN plus three formula (which included ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea) will be held next month in Malaysia.
"China has now applied to host the second summit in 2007 and expanded EAS' agenda to political and military issues," she said.
"China also wants to exclude or reduce US influence in the region and considers EAS as a platform to compete with the US-led APEC," she said, noting that China has blocked a suggestion from Japan that the US be allowed to attend the summit as an observer.
While the future direction of EAS remains unknown so far, Lin Juo-yu also cast doubt on China's ability to make the summit and China-ASEAN successful.
It's impossible to generalize about ASEAN's attitude toward China, she said, because countries have such different attitudes -- with some resentful of China for historical reasons, some seeing it as simply a lucrative market and others regarding it as an economic rival.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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