China and southeast Asia in the 2000s: Tension management in the maritime space

Abstract

Viewed through the standard prisms of international politics, escalation of security tensions is the definitive feature in the evolution of relations between China and Southeast Asia over the last decade. Disagreements over territorial ownership of and rights to the South China Sea sharpened and arguably became the defining feature of regional geopolitics. Yet, China and Southeast Asia have also managed to prove predictions of fateful conflict to be premature. In this article, we study Chinese and Southeast Asian strands of security discourse, which provide political and diplomatic cover for cooperative interaction in parallel with little or no compromise on security principles. Then we select interactions between China and the Philippines and China and Vietnam as cases to illustrate our observations. We conclude by postulating that, at least in the maritime space, tension management rather than conflict resolution is more likely to be the continuing feature into the future.