Analysis: The UK's South East Asian opportunity
In our new Analysis series, we invite experts to comment on key developments relevant to the UK’s relations with China.
Charles Dunst is an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Southeast Asia programme. He argues that South East Asian countries welcome more engagement from countries like the UK — but won’t stop engaging China. The UK should pursue deeper ties with them nonetheless.
In recent years, South East Asia has become “ground zero” in the US-China competition that is rapidly veering towards becoming Cold War 2.0. Unsurprisingly, though, it is the countries of South East Asia that are most fearful of reprising the first one — which, as they remember (and we should, too) very much ran hot in countries like Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
Accordingly, most South East Asian countries, with the possible exception of China-aligned Cambodia (and post-coup Myanmar) are determined to maintain positive ties with both the United States and China, extracting benefits from both, like development funds, rather than choosing between them. Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put it best, writing last year in Foreign Affairs: “[...] Asia-Pacific countries do not wish to be forced to choose between the United States and China. They want to cultivate good relations with both. They cannot afford to alienate China [...] [and] regard the United States as a resident power with vital interests in the region.”
Where does the UK fit in? Certainly, the UK has often taken Washington’s side in the US-China competition, having barred Huawei from its 5G networks and castigated Beijing for committing “genocide” in Xinjiang, and wants to help rebuild Western credibility in South East Asia.
But Downing Street’s motivations for deeper engagement in South East Asia go beyond just pure geopolitics: the region will soon become one of the world’s economic centres. The UK therefore should seize the current moment, in which South East Asian countries need help reversing the Covid-19 pandemic’s damage, to deepen ties with the region by providing South East Asians with what they truly want and need — vaccines and development support, for starters — all without forcing them to choose between China and the West.
Doing so will not prompt these countries to fully break ties with China, of course; most countries in the region want and will maintain strong ties with both Beijing and Washington (and London, Brussels, and Tokyo). But by deepening engagement with the region (and boosting business opportunities for Brits) the UK can augment liberalism’s cachet, thereby helping prevent South East Asia from becoming a zone of Chinese dominance — a region in which China sets the terms of engagement, in Beijing’s favour, and towards authoritarianism. Put simply, the more opportunities South East Asians have from countries like the United Kingdom, the less likely they are to rely on China alone.
The sitting UK government has taken some encouraging steps already.
In August, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) named the UK a new Dialogue Partner; this was the first such partnership to which ASEAN had agreed in 20 years. And in early November, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss traveled to Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia — the world’s fourth-largest country by population — to “deepen economic and security links with fast-growing and increasingly influential countries.” Southeast Asia, Truss added, “will be the engine of the global economy, and I want Britain to be part of that, upgrading our economic and security relations with the region to reflect its growing importance.”
These efforts indicate that the UK no longer considers South East Asia a lagging region where Western countries should focus on pressing liberal values rather than serious cooperation, as in the past, but a hugely important economic centre with whose countries Western governments have to work productively, and to which Western governments want to expand their countries’ business opportunities.
Certainly, the UK should advance democracy and human rights when possible, but these two issues cannot dominate Westminster’s relationship with the region. Instead, the UK should follow the practice modelled by the US’s hugely successful relationship with Vietnam: Washington has made clear to Hanoi that the US had no interest in regime change, and accordingly received Vietnamese cooperation not only on the economic and security fronts, but also in regards to human rights (if modestly, at times).
Cambodia, on the other hand, is the negative example: Prime Minister Hun Sen has long accused the US of wanting to overthrow him and has, as expected, deepened ties with China, distanced the Americans, and cracked down even more brutally on the opposition that he alleges is backed by Washington. There’s evidently nothing to be gained from pushing even the spectre of regime change in the stable, if poorly-run autocracies of South East Asia.
So, while Truss has framed British foreign policy as creating a “global network of liberty” that advances freedom, democracy and enterprise — similarly to how Biden has framed US foreign policy — the UK will have to push those goals carefully in South East Asia, a region with only four democracies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste). Making clear to the region’s autocracies that the UK does not seek regime change, but improvements within the existing regimes, is the only realistic option.
Indeed, leaning too heavily on liberal, Western values will alienate ASEAN’s ten members (and Timor-Leste), which already have a combined GDP of $2.8 trillion. The region’s population is almost nine percent of the total world population and that number will continue to grow. The bloc, meanwhile, is now the world’s fifth-largest economy and the third-largest in Asia.
It would therefore be malpractice for the UK, while championing “Global Britain,” to neglect South East Asia. In fact, there are a huge number of discrete opportunities for British business — from cars in Cambodia to digital infrastructure in Malaysia — that the UK can advance by deepening ties with the region through both multilateral and bilateral engagement.
As follows, the UK should build on existing UK-ASEAN trade and investment, which has already grown in recent years: By the four quarters to the end of Q1 2021, total trade between the UK and ASEAN was £32.3 billion. The UK has also signed free trade agreements with Singapore and Vietnam, and should work to sign more, even if doing so with countries like Indonesia proves difficult. It’s nonetheless worth a good-faith effort, if only to demonstrate the seriousness of Westminster’s commitment to the region.
Moreover, joining the CPTPP — the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s successor — as the UK is trying to, is a strong step, particularly given that the United States will likely not soon reenter (owing to our own domestic political limitations).
Beyond business, the UK should work to improve its development offers. While the UK has provided over £300 million in development aid annually to Southeast Asia in recent years, Westminster (like Washington) needs to remove bureaucratic red tape that often slows down Western infrastructure. Roads built by the United States or the UK might often be better than those built by China, but the former far too often takes longer than the latter — longer than South East Asian leaders are willing to wait.
To this end, Truss also recently announced British International Investment (BII), rebranding the UK’s development financing arm that will mobilise private capital, reportedly some nine billion pounds from the UK’s aid budget, by 2025 (although that number is quite aspirational) to counter China by funding transparent, sustainable development projects in Asia — Southeast Asia included — Africa, and beyond.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad once said that Southeast Asians “have to go to the Chinese” for infrastructure, not out of any ideological preference, but because Beijing builds infrastructure faster and often at a lesser cost. Where poverty and underdevelopment are the most pressing issues, as in much of South East Asia, leaders will not just say “no” to China’s offers. The UK, then, should try to speed up the process not only with BII, but by working with local governments and other countries with demonstrated success in the region, like Japan and South Korea.
On security, meanwhile, the UK is already strongly positioned. It is, unlike the United States or any other European country, a core member of the Five Power Defense Agreement (FPDA), a 1979-founded collective security arrangement involving Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Membership in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada is also a boost for the UK, especially as China-US tensions heat up.
From this solid starting point, the UK has in recent months smartly demonstrated the military capability it can offer friends and partners. While former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was in the region in June 2021, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the flagship of the Royal Navy, sailed through the disputed South China Sea waters. And in October, the Queen Elizabeth docked in Singapore.
The UK would be wise to carefully continue expanding its military engagement with the region, namely by offering further port visits to countries like Vietnam, which hosted the HMS Richmond in October (and US aircraft carriers in both 2018 and 2020).
But the UK should not push if countries in the region say “no,” owing to fears of Chinese retribution. Being too aggressive will only alienate countries hoping desperately to avoid being caught between China and the West; respectfully accepting their rejection, on the other hand, will demonstrate to South East Asian governments that London understands them and is taking their concerns seriously.
Finally, while the UK has promised to boost its soft power in the region through development assistance and scientific collaboration, there is room for more action here, too.
The UK is already the most attractive European education destination for ASEAN citizens (and the second in the world, behind only the United States). The reputational benefits stemming from these educational ties have already borne fruit, having bolstered ASEAN’s support for the UK’s partnership application. The UK should therefore work to further deepen this educational relationship by, for instance, facilitating scholarship opportunities for promising South East Asian students not only from rich countries with Commonwealth ties, like Singapore and Malaysia, but also from poorer, never-British countries like Cambodia and Laos.
Ultimately, while the UK is generally well-liked throughout South East Asia, following Brexit, there nonetheless remains a sense that London has somewhat exited the global stage. Today, South East Asian elites have much more confidence in the EU, Japan, and even the US to promote global free trade and maintain the rules-based order.
This is a cause for concern, but not for despair.
Certainly, there is room for improvement in UK-South East Asian relations. But if the UK actually listens to South East Asians and offers them what they want and need, all while carefully working to avoid ensnaring them in the US/West-China competition they desperately want to avoid, there’s no reason why the relationship cannot improve, benefiting all involved.
Westminster should get to work.
Charles Dunst is an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s (CSIS) Southeast Asia programme. He was previously a journalist in Southeast Asia reporting for outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Times.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this Analysis are the author’s, and do not represent those of the China Research Group.