THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 153

course, this is now changing: as the Obama administration vows a pivot toward Asia and
away from the Middle East, in order to confront a militarily more powerful China.) 37
Further afield in Southeast Asia, both Malaysia and Singapore are heading into chal-
lenging democratic transitions of their own, as both of their adept, nation-building strong-
men, Mahathir bin Mohammed and Lee Kuan Yew, pass from the scene. Because all ethnic
Malays are Muslim, Islam is racialized in Malaysia, and the result is intercommunal di-
vides between the Malay, Chinese, and Indian communities. Creeping Islamization has led
to seventy thousand Chinese leaving Malaysia over the past two decades, even as the coun-
try falls further under the shadow of China economically, with most of Malaysia's imports
coming from there. Chinese themselves may be unpopular in Malaysia, but China “the
state” is too big to resist. The quiet fear of China is most clearly revealed by the actions
of Singapore, a city-state strategically located near the narrowest point of the Strait of
Malacca. In Singapore, ethnic Chinese dominate ethnic Malays by a margin of 77 percent
to 14 percent. Nevertheless, Singapore fears becoming a vassal state of China, and has con-
sequently developed a long-standing military training relationship with Taiwan. Recently
retired Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has publicly urged the United States to stay milit-
arily and diplomatically engaged in the region. The degree to which Singapore can main-
tain its feisty independence will, like developments in Mongolia, be a gauge of Beijing's
regional clout. Indonesia, for its part, is caught between the need of a U.S. naval presence
to hedge against China and the fear that if it looks too much like a U.S. ally, it will anger
the rest of the Islamic world. The Free Trade Area inaugurated recently between China and
ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) demonstrates the tributary relationship
that is developing between China and its southern neighbors. China's divide-and-conquer
strategy has each ASEAN country negotiating separately with China, rather than as a unit.
China uses ASEAN as a market for its high-value manufactured goods, while it imports
low-value agricultural produce from Southeast Asia: a classic colonial-style relationship. 38
This has led to Chinese trade surpluses, even as ASEAN countries are becoming a dump-
ing ground for industrial goods produced by China's relatively cheap urban labor. In fact,
the trade gap between China and ASEAN has widened five-fold in the first decade of the
twenty-first century. Look at recent history: from 1998 to 2001, Malaysian and Indonesian
exports to China “nearly doubled,” as did Philippine exports to China from 2003 to 2004.
From 2002 to 2003, combined exports from all of the ASEAN states to China grew by
51.7 percent, and by 2004 “China had become the region's leading trade partner, surpassing
the United States.” 39 Yet China's economic dominance is also benevolent, in that China is
serving as an engine of modernization for all of Southeast Asia. The complicating factor in
this scenario is Vietnam, a historic foe of China with a large army and strategically located
naval bases that might serve as a potential hedge against China, along with India and Japan.
But even Vietnam, with all of its fears regarding its much larger northern neighbor, has no