China and the Philippines: Asia's Most Toxic Relationship
5 hours ago | Updated 10 minutes ago
Richard Javad Heydarian Academic, policy adviser, and author of "Asia's New Battlefield: US, China, and the Struggle for Western Pacific"
In the West, it is often said that Asians are a different bunch, that they conduct diplomacy in a more subtle fashion -- disguising their differences under the veil of cultural solidarity and burgeoning economic ties. I vividly recall the 'guidelines' forwarded to me by a prominent American think tank ahead of a major conference hosted in an Asian capital.
In a politely Orientalist fashion, the participants, particularly those from the West, were encouraged to be circumspect and courteous in expressing their views, to hold the business cards of their Asia counterparts with two hands (instead of one) to exhibit respect, and maintain utmost collegiality in their interactions with their Asian hosts (i.e., don't be too frank and open), even when the topic at hand was as contentious as, say, nuclear proliferation or maritime security.
As Francis Fukuyama explains in his critically-acclaimed book The Origins of Political Order across the Sino-sphere, which covers Asia's most dynamic economies, Confucianism -- a philosophical tradition that sidelined 'legalism' as the enduring state ideology of Imperial (and post-Mao) China -- always emphasized the importance of amicable and ethically-inspired resolution of disputes instead of, say, confrontational litigation or brute force.
In the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which has a significant Muslim population, the emphasis is on consensus-building and consultation, drawing on Islam's age-old tradition of deliberative/consultative governance, embodied by the concept of Shura.
In recent years, however, the veneer of Asian exceptionalism has been decisively shattered by a particularly bitter, acrimonious, and openly hostile relationship between China and Philippines over a whole host of disputed rocks, atolls, islands and fishers and hydrocarbon resources in the South China Sea. Slowly but surely, Asian territorial disputes have become as hostile as inter-state disputes among Western countries in the past and Middle Eastern nations in more recent times.
And it's becoming clear, as realist scholars like John Mearsheimer have been warning for years, that a rising China will probably not be substantially different in terms of its ambitions and behavior from other revisionist states in the past. An explosion of nationalist fervor among Asian claimant states hasn't helped either. A prosperous region is now sleepwalking into conflict.
China and the Philippines: Asia's Most Toxic Relationship | Richard Javad Heydarian
