Understanding China's Proposal for an ASEAN-China Community of Common Destiny and ASEAN's Ambivalent Response.

• Author: Ha, Hoang Thi
• Position: Association of Southeast Asian Nations

China's engagement with and influence in Southeast Asia, including through the framework of ASEAN-China dialogue relations, have grown considerably since the early 1990s. This growth is both a natural function of China's phenomenal economic growth, historical ties to the region and geographic proximity to Southeast Asia, and the fruition of Beijing's decades-long investment in building regional relationships, both bilaterally with the ASEAN member states and multilaterally through ASEAN and the ASEAN-led regional architecture. Over the past few years, China's regional engagement has been branded under the slogan "ASEAN-China Community of Common Destiny" (ASEAN-China CCD) which was first articulated by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, and since then actively promoted across the whole spectrum of ASEAN-China cooperation.

The ASEAN-China CCD is a regional variation of China's concept of a "community of common destiny for mankind" (1) which has become a refrain in China's foreign policy discourse and embedded in the Chinese Constitution. President Xi has referred to this phrase nearly a hundred times since 2012, (2) including in major policy statements at the 70th UN General Assembly (September 2015), the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) (January 2017), the inaugural Belt and Road Summit (May 2017) and the 19th Party Congress (October 2017). A top-down and ill-defined pronouncement, the CCD contains lofty principles such as equality among nations, fairness and justice, joint contributions and shared benefits, harmony, inclusiveness, respect for differences and green development. (3) However, it lacks specificity and follow-up action plans. Deciphering this concept requires reference to other Chinese foreign policy initiatives, especially those that signify China's greater activism in regional and global governance such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the "Asian security concept", and its "new-type" proposals for major-country relations and international relations.

Because of its vagueness, the CCD could be dismissed as another empty slogan that lacks substance. Where the CCD is seriously examined, however, it is subject to various interpretations. According to Denghua Zhang, the CCD continues the discourse of China's peaceful rise, i.e. "to dismiss external strategic suspicion of China's peaceful development path and sustain a favourable external environment for China's economic development". Zhang, however, points out the key difference between the "peaceful development" concept and the CCD in that the latter "signals a departure from the 'low profile' diplomacy and reflects China's desire to play a more active role in global governance". (4) The CCD's emphasis is therefore on projecting China's leadership in global governance, compatible with its new comprehensive national power. It is articulated in President Xi's 19th Party Congress speech: "China champions the development of a community with a shared future for mankind, and has encouraged the evolution of the global governance system. With this we have seen a further rise in China's international influence, ability to inspire, and power to shape." (5)

Scholars have also tried to explain the CCD based on Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions. Zhaohe Chen, for example, highlights the CCD's ideological origins from Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism which see "the whole world as one community", place importance on "great harmony of the world" and praise the exercise of leadership by virtue rather than by force. (6) As China's global interests have expanded, Chinese scholars have paid greater attention to the notions of "mankind", "cosmopolitanism", "worldness" or "world spirit", and enriched the discourse by weaving Chinese ancient thoughts into re-thinking and reconstructing the contemporary world order. Consequently, as noted by Sabine Morky, the "communitarian spin" is the "Chinese characteristic" that distinguishes Chinese universalism from Western cosmopolitanism which emphasizes individual rights. (7)

One prominent example of integrating the Confucian communitarian tradition into contemporary Chinese universalism is reflected in the works of leading Chinese scholars, such as Zhao Tingyang, that revived the Tianxia order (translated as All Under Heaven or Great Unity under Heaven). An ancient concept dating back to the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BC), Tianxia describes a romanticized harmonious world order in which China was at the centre (the Middle Kingdom) under the reign of the Chinese Emperor (Son of Heaven) by virtue of heavenly mandate, moral authority and cultural superiority. According to Thuy T. Do, "the core of Zhao's holistic view of the world is Confucian 'family ties'. In his view, if nation-states and Tianxia are built upon the spirit of family-ship, the world can evolve into one of great harmony (that minimises economic and cultural conflicts) and inclusivity (in which nobody is excluded or pushed aside)." (8) What is not squarely addressed is the nature of interstate relations under the realm of family-ship and how harmony can be achieved. Are these relations based on the principle of sovereign equality or on pre-determined placements subject to one's own size and strength? Is harmony to be achieved through respect of hierarchy or respect of international law as the "great equalizer"?

Although the extent to which these new Chinese universalistic thoughts have influenced or informed the conceptualization of the CCD is not clearly established, the CCD unmistakably takes a cosmopolitan worldview that projects China's new activism in global governance. Regardless of the platform--foreign-policy posturing via the CCD or scholarly discourse on new Tianxia--the intention is to present the "Chinese path" that builds upon "Chinese wisdom" to reconstruct the world order. Combining both interest and morality, it projects China's rise as being benign and beneficial to humankind, and offers an alternative form of global governance that purports to be win-win rather than zero-sum, cooperative rather than aggressive, and thus qualitatively different from and morally superior to other rising great powers in the past.

Seen from a liberal vantage point, Melanie Hart and Blaine Johnson opine that the CCD is Beijing's vision for a new global governance system different from the prevailing liberal democratic order, one that mirrors China's political system and domestic governance model in which the party/state is the ultimate authority: "In China's preferred authoritarian order, collective rights and interests--so-called mankind--are more important than individual rights and interests, and the state speaks on the collective's behalf to determine its interests. Beijing is trying to convince the global community that authoritarian systems are better than democracies in this regard." (9)

In terms of geographical scope, the CCD is an "elastic concept". (10) In its broadest sense, the term "community of common destiny for mankind" is meant for universal application and it has been actively promoted at global fora like the WEF, G-20 and the UN. However, it has been loosely used in different contexts of China's foreign relations with variations. For example, China tends to associate the CCD with the developing world rather than with developed countries. (11) The CCD also ventures into the cyber realm with President Xi's proposal to build "a cyberspace community of shared destiny" at the Second World Internet Conference in December 2015. (12) According to Hart and Johnson, this cyber CCD proposition represents China's normative push in the internet domain to assert state control or cyber sovereignty, as can be seen in the inclusion of digital surveillance in Chinese digital infrastructure projects in some recipient countries. (13)

References to the CCD, however, are most pronounced in China's peripheral diplomacy, i.e. vis-a-vis China's near neighbourhoods, including Southeast Asia. At the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs in 2014, Xi stated that China's goal is to "turn China's neighborhood areas into a community of common destiny". (14) The CCD priority given to near neighbourhoods is not only a natural function of geography but also in line with China's strategic culture which projects its influence to the outer world through concentric circles. As Tan See Seng remarks, "the importance which the Chinese attach to outreach to their near abroad is clear in their multilateral commitments and conduct: strong, active and even creative in its near abroad, but decreasing steadily with distance away from China". (15) Southeast Asia and ASEAN thus occupy an important place in the rolling out of the CCD.

This article argues that the ASEAN-China CCD proposal signals an invested Chinese strategy to bind ASEAN member states into a Sino-centric regional system and condition their behaviours accordingly. It goes on to argue that ASEAN has responded to China's CCD proposal with ambivalence characterized by both accommodation and resistance. The article consists of three sections. This first section presents the background of the CCD in general, situating it in the context of China's push for a greater role in global governance and the emergence of Chinese contemporary universalism influenced by its Confucian communitarian traditions. The second section deconstructs the ASEAN-China CCD by examining the economic initiatives that underwrite this proposal and the underlying narrative about China's positive and committed engagement with Southeast Asia vis-a-vis an aloof United States under the Trump administration. Drawing heavily on historical perspectives, this section also discusses certain historical analogies between the pre-modern Sino-centric hierarchical regional system with the new regional order that China is seeking to shape in

Southeast Asia. The final section analyses...