After US President Donald Trump’s administration froze donations last month to Cambodia’s largest demining organization, which works to clear the countryside of deadly remnants of Washington’s past wars in Southeast Asia, the group announced new funding — from China.
Beijing has doubled its contributions over the past three years to the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), which helps clear millions of unexploded munitions, said Heng Ratana, who leads the group.
On Wednesday last week, CMAC said it had received a pledge from Beijing to contribute US$4.4 million — surpassing the US$2 million donated by the US last year.
Ratana said China understands that such support helps “build up people-to-people networks” and generates economic returns. Beijing invests heavily in its neighboring countries and has recently focused on building soft power through goodwill exchanges and diplomatic engagement, said the Lowy Institute in Sydney, which studies Asia-Pacific geopolitics.
However, it does not provide traditional aid on the same scale as Western democratic nations. China also has little experience providing the specialist assistance — from combating disease outbreaks to distributing humanitarian aid in conflicts zones — that the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Washington’s main vehicle for delivering such support, is known for.
Trump has halted most US government-funded aid globally for 90 days, while moving to dismantle USAID, which he accused of being run “by a bunch of radical lunatics.” The move is part of an effort by his administration to slash the federal government workforce and curb spending it considers wasteful.
While the administration has said some funds might be released when the pause expires, a lack of clarity around what could be restored has prompted scores of groups across Asia to abruptly stop work or lay off staff.
The US provided more than US$894 million in assistance to Southeast Asia in 2023, the latest year for which official data are available.
SOFT POWER
The freeze would hobble humanitarian work and human rights at a time of a tussle with China for influence over the region, said Joshua Kurlantzick, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in New York.
“The overall shift will be toward China and away from the US, as the US squanders its soft power,” he said, adding that the combination of Beijing providing more assistance and Washington retreating from funding civil society programs “crushes democratic potential in virtually every country in the region.”
China has not publicly commented about the US suspending development assistance and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to Reuters’ questions. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is now USAID’s acting administrator, also did not respond to a request for comment.
China, which has its economic troubles at home, is unlikely to match the generosity of the US, the world’s largest aid donor.
Instead, Beijing prizes “large-scale infrastructure and investment programs” that are a hallmark of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), said Derek Grossman, an analyst at the RAND Corp think tank.
The BRI is China’s US$1 trillion infrastructure assistance program, which envisions ports and railroads connecting Asia, Europe and Africa. The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak think tank’s annual poll of Southeast Asian decisionmakers last year found that China for the first time had “edged past the US” as their preferred partner, a finding attributed in part to pro-China sentiments among Beijing’s BRI partners in Southeast Asia.
China says the BRI boosts the economies of developing nations and brings needed modern infrastructure, but it has been accused by critics of lacking transparency, burdening countries with heavy debts and serving primarily as a tool to expand Chinese economic influence. Among those that have most enthusiastically embraced the BRI is impoverished Laos, which borrowed heavily to finance railways, highways and hydroelectric dams, but has a public debt burden the World Bank considers “unsustainable.”
Former US president John F. Kennedy, who spearheaded the creation of USAID during the Cold War, saw it as a “powerful source” through which the US could “exert influence for the maintenance of freedom.” Similar sentiments were previously echoed by Republican internationalists such as Rubio.
DISSIDENT SUPPORT
Now, among the groups that stand to lose vital funding because of the US suspension are those focused on causes that Beijing considers hostile, such as supporting Uighur Muslims in China, as well as dissidents from Myanmar and North Korea.
In Myanmar, the Chin Human Rights Organization, which employs health professionals who went on strike following the military’s seizure of power in 2021, has laid off 30 percent of its workforce since the freeze.
USAID’s stop-work order has also halted programs including HIV prevention for women, skills training and scholarships for future leaders in “what we hope will one day be a democratically elected government,” said former British ambassador to Myanmar Vicky Bowman, who now campaigns for transparency and human rights in business.
The freeze has “undermined faith that the USA is a reliable friend of those in Asia who are fighting for equitable development, democracy and human rights,” she said.
With South Korean governments alternating between engaging and isolating Pyongyang, US funding had also been a lone source of stability for North Korea-focused issues, said Hanna Song, executive director of the Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights.
Most North Korea-related funding is disseminated through a US state department office that had a budget of about US$5 million per year for such projects, Song said. That, too, has been paused.
China-focused nonprofits that track alleged rights abuses also face an “extinction event,” said Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, a China expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank in a post on X.
She declined to name specific groups in a subsequent article by the institute, saying some feared retribution by Beijing. The Tibet Fund nonprofit that supports Tibetan communities in exile on Saturday last week said that several of its programs were at “immediate risk.”
“Now we worry not just about the short-term operations, but the long-term effects on autocratic states,” Song said.
RELIABLE PARTNER?
Beijing has a mixed record of selling itself as a reliable partner: Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) offered a vigorous defense of globalization ahead of Trump’s first term, only to turn to confrontational “wolf warrior” diplomacy, or aggressively defending China against foreign parties that Beijing believed were hostile.
However, the US aid freeze, coupled with the targeting of Canada and Mexico for tariffs, was a warning to US partners “of the capriciousness they’ll face over the next four years,” said Greg Poling, an expert on Southeast Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
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