As envisioned by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the summit deliberately frames participation on a country-by-country basis, dispersing ASEAN's combined weight and enhancing China's role as first among equals. "It's very subtle, but it could be very important," the senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official said.
The ASEAN countries -- Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam -- increasingly have begun to deal with China individually rather than as a bloc. As a result, an association that began with U.S. encouragement in 1967 in large measure to fend off Communist Chinese influence has evolved into a forum through which China exercises its regional leadership.
Other examples of Chinese leadership include the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security forum comprising China, Russia and four former Soviet republics along China's northwest borders. As a part of this grouping, China's formerly standoffish military recently held anti-terrorism exercises with Kazakhstan and plans exercises next fall with the Russian military.
But China's new face has been most apparent in its dealings with the ASEAN countries, mainly because of the economic equation. At China's initiative, for instance, ASEAN countries and China in December agreed to create a free-trade zone by 2010, which would further integrate neighboring countries into China's orbit.
Trade between China and the 10 ASEAN countries has increased about 20 percent a year since 1990, and the pace has picked up in the last several years. Bilateral trade hit $78.2 billion in 2003, up 42.8 percent from the previous year. Chinese and ASEAN officials said the figure was about $100 billion and rising by the end of 2004.
"This is the locomotive that will bring growth for the Asian economies," said Leong, the professor who, in addition to his day job at a local branch of Nottingham University, advises the Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Malaysia on how to make the most of the new situation.
Partly because 25 percent of its population is ethnic Chinese, Malaysia has been one of the major beneficiaries of China's growth. It exported only $1.2 billion annually in goods to China a decade ago. That figure hit $6 billion in 2003 and reached $6.4 billion in the first 10 months of 2004, according to the Chinese and Malaysian governments.
"It all depends on your mindset," said Callum Chen, a Malaysian businessman whose company markets its underwear in 30 stores around Beijing and Shanghai. "The rise of China can be threatening. Or it can be an opportunity."
'Commercial Diplomacy'
China's foreign relations establishment has long adhered to an adage offered by the late Deng Xiaoping: "Never be a leader." In deference to that concern, Foreign Ministry officials recoil when the word leadership is used to describe what they are doing. Nonetheless, as the country's economic strength has grown, so has the confidence of its foreign policy and a recognition that the United States is no longer the only country on which others in Asia rely for leadership.
"China has sensed that there is an emerging transition of power in East Asia between China and the United States," said Shi Yinghong, who heads the People's University Center for American Studies in Beijing. Outside Asia, China's most immediate foreign relations concern has become an appetite for oil and other raw materials needed to sustain the economic boom. Tao Wenzhao, a senior researcher at the American Studies Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said China had been carrying out "commercial diplomacy" far and wide.
In recent years, China has contracted in a range of distant countries for oil supplies, from Sudan and Angola in Africa to Indonesia and even Canada. President Hu Jintao's recent trip to Latin America dramatized the country's new interest in that part of the world, traditionally a U.S. domain, including plans for $20 billion worth of business in Argentina.
In the first 11 months of 2004, China invested $889 million in Latin America, according to the Commerce Ministry, as part of the government's "go out" strategy to guarantee raw material imports. On return from a recent trip to Beijing, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela said that in coming years, Chinese firms would invest nearly $350 million to extract oil from eastern Venezuelan fields and another $60 million in natural gas wells.
Although strictly business now, a senior European diplomat noted, these commitments herald future Chinese diplomatic and security interests beyond Asia. Buying oil in Africa or Latin America, he explained, implies a concern for stability and friendship in the source countries and for security in sea lanes leading back to China. In one small sign of this evolution, the Foreign Ministry recently set up a department to monitor the safety of Chinese working abroad.
Cultural Domination
By expanding its activity abroad, China inevitably has bumped against existing international relationships. Japan, with its extensive economic relationships around the region, so far has most keenly felt this aspect of China's rising influence. But Japan has never been in a position to exercise the regional leadership that China has assumed.
Although teenagers across Asia follow Japanese fads and read Japanese comics, its cultural power has been no match for China's, which is exported through language ties, entrenched overseas communities and traditional philosophies. In addition, Japan's role as a ruthless military occupier during World War II created a legacy that still haunts the region.
During the days of war and Japanese dominance, for instance, allied forces fought to prevent Tokyo from constructing a railroad from southern China through Vietnam, Laos and down to Singapore as a conduit for oil supplies. Now, Tao remarked, China has announced plans to build just such a railway.
