China’s dominance in Southeast Asia has been hit by its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to author Sebastian Strangio.

Sebastian Strangio talks to Shibani Mahtani on October 12.

The Southeast Asia editor of The Diplomat told an October 12 FCC webinar that the onslaught of the coronavirus had furthered a trend that was already underway in the region which was that the “image of both the United States and China are suffering in Southeast Asia”.

This trend was borne out before the pandemic in the surveys conducted by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore that showed amongst elites and opinion leaders in the 10 nations of ASEAN “a pretty significant souring on both of these powers for different reasons”, Strangio said.

“What we see is a lot of Southeast Asia nations concerned about China’s initial response to the pandemic.. allowing it to get out in the first place. Concerns about the region’s over-reliance on China in terms of when the pandemic arose there – the first cases outside China arose in Thailand I think … Also the fact that China took the opportunity to assert its maritime sovereign claims in the South China Sea. I think in the affected nations that was seen with a great deal of negativity,” he added.

However, Strangio said he believed the pandemic would not ameliorate China’s main advantage in the region – its geographic proximity which, he said, is a “structural underpinning of Southeast Asian relations with China”. As COVID-19 and its  economic after-effects continue to ravage the region, he added, “China is looking more and more like an unavoidable economic partner”.

Strangio, author of In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century, said China is currently reaffirming its commitment to Southeast Asia, assuring ASEAN partners that it will help the region recover from the virus physically (via its signing of vaccine access agreements), economically, and politically.

China, he said, has a basic security dilemma in that it has “formidable rivals” on every side: nuclear powers India and Russia, and “a string of U.S. treaty allies – Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan”. Southeast Asia is the one region in China’s neighbourhood that does not have an incumbent great power constricting the power of Chinese influence, Strangio said. This made it a region “relatively amenable to the extension of Chinese influence”. The Chinese economy relies heavily on the vital sea lanes of the South China Sea and wants to protect them, he said.

“China views itself as a dominant power in the region once again, it is reclaiming a mantle that it lost 150 years ago with the rise of western empires and I think what we can glean from its behaviour occasionally from the comments of its officials is that China wants the region to be deferential, it wants the region to acknowledge China’s size and prominence through deference to Chinese aims.”

On China’s relationship with the United States, Strangio said a Biden presidency would not bring any significant shift in America’s policy towards China, adding: “I think a corner has been turned that will not be reversed.”

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China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy has contributed towards its damaged global reputation, according to author and China scholar, Professor Rana Mitter.

Professor Rana Mitter talks to FCC president, Jodi Schneider.

Speaking in the week that new research showed unfavourable views of China has reached record highs, Mitter told an October 7 FCC webinar that the country’s often aggressive style of diplomacy could have influenced the United Kingdom ’s decision to drop Huawei as a provider of 5G.

The report from Pew Research Center found that sentiment towards China had grown more negative in recent years across many advanced economies, and in particular unfavourable option had soared in the past year.

Mitter, Director of the China Centre at the University of Oxford, noted that an escalation of “wolf warrior” diplomacy had appeared to occur at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. He added that there was a sense within the Chinese Communist Party that such an approach had “been really damaging to China’s reputation”.

“Anyone who thinks it’s been part of some great wider thought-through propaganda effort I think needs to look at the results of it,” he said, citing Huawei’s failed 5G bids. He added: “It seems to me if you were actually sitting in Beijing plotting and planning you would not do the things that have happened which, as we say in Britain, tends to suggest cock-up rather than conspiracy.”

While the research found China had firm support at home over its handling of the pandemic, “it’s got a very bad reputation in the global north and it will need to start from there in terms of thinking where are they going now”.

Addressing relations between the United States and China, Mitter said he believed a Joe Biden administration would lead to better diplomatic relations between the two countries.

President Donald Trump’s “aggressive rhetoric” and China’s “wolf warrior” mode response has led to a deterioration in relations between the world’s two largest economies. Mitter said he believed a change of government in the United States would reset the relationship.

“My sense is if we have a Trump administration I think we’re going to go further down the route we are now which is with a huge amount of very confrontational rhetoric on both sides. People talk about Trump’s aggressive rhetoric – I think that’s true – China has been responding a lot in the ‘wolf warrior’ mode. Both of these things have to be acknowledged,” he said.

Mitter added that Democratic hopeful Biden would find a new way of addressing “the problems that involve dealing with a large, growing authoritarian powerful economy in the shape of China”. He acknowledged that “many people in western Europe” were concerned about China’s growth, its expanding military and its stance on Hong Kong.

The United States, he said, had abandoned alliances and “respect” for the post-1945 world order which was also problematic for Europe.

“The Biden administration, if there is one, would be able I think to pick up the phone to the EU, it would be able to talk to London … talk to Japan, talk to South Korea – all the people who for 75 years have been part of that wider ecosystem of shared norms and liberal norms… and actually say ‘let’s talk about how we do this together’,” Mitter said.

On the topic of Hong Kong, Mitter said it was important that authorities outline their vision for the city in the context of the new national security law, which was imposed on July 1. He said it was not clear from the outside what the various interest groups involved want to happen.

“And this is as true, I think, for those protesting as it is for those upholding what they would portray as being the current status quo,” he added.

Mitter discussed his latest book, China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism, which explores how influential World War Two is on today’s China. From this summer’s wartime blockbuster, The Eight Hundred, to the successful TV series, Autumn Cicada, the Second World War is “an historical obsession” in China.

He explained that U.S. participation in World War Two was ‘good’ in that it created a “narrative of moral purpose, of how America had stood up and fought against dark forces”. China, he said, has turned back to its World War Two experience, when over 10 million died, and 100 million people became refugees.

“All of this has gone to construct a narrative today and over the last 20-30 years in which China seeks to portray itself to the world as also having taken part in a ‘good’ war in the sense of a World War Two that helped make the world safe for decent forces rather than the forces of the axis power,” Mitter added.

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China’s Communist Party has ‘weaponised’ the greed of America’s film industry, resulting in increasing self-censorship by Hollywood in its bid to reach Chinese audiences.

James Tager, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and Rebecca Davis are interviewed by the FCC’s Shibani Mahtani.

That was the consensus of a panel of experts discussing China’s influence over Hollywood during a webinar on October 5.

James Tager, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian and Rebecca Davis were appearing just weeks after the release of Disney’s Mulan, a big-budget Hollywood retelling of the Chinese folklore, The Ballad of Mulan, which flopped at the Chinese Box Office. The movie, the most expensive ever directed by a female, was beset by controversy surrounding director, Niki Caro’s choice to film in Xinjiang. The region is home to Uighur Muslims who are oppressed the Chinese government, which has been accused of detaining hundreds of thousands in mass internment camps in what Allen-Ebrahimian described as “cultural and demographic genocide”. In the film’s credits, Disney thanks several government departments of Xinjiang, prompting an international backlash against the movie.      

“It was just shocking”, said Allen-Ebrahimian, China reporter at Axios. “It would have been bad no matter what but it landed in the midst of this controversy which is basically more or less about how powerful rich Americans and a powerful American corporation have sold out any semblance of values to the Chinese Communist Party.”

She speculated that either Disney had been “asked to put it in there to make Xinjiang look better and whitewash Xinjiang”, or that “whoever was in charge of this was so removed from all these debates and issues about human rights in China that they didn’t even realise what it would do”.

Either way, she said, Disney had failed to show “democratic morality”.

“Let’s be clear: this isn’t Chinese cultural pressure, this is Chinese government pressure. They’ve weaponised the greed of Americans,” Allen-Ebrahimian added.

Tager, deputy director of free expression research and policy at PEN America, discussed the organisation’s recent report on the topic. Titled Made in Hollywood, Censored in Beijing, it revealed how Hollywood’s most influential professionals are increasingly making decisions about their films in an effort to avoid antagonising Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the world’s second largest movie market.

He gave 2013’s Brad Pitt movie, World War Z, as an example of how Hollywood was pandering to Beijing’s desire to promote narratives of which it approves. In the original novel by Max Brooks, the virus that led to the zombie outbreak originated in China. Yet in the film, that storyline was dropped.

“Chinese regulators offer a carrot and stick to Hollywood studios determining their stance on cooperation with Chinese governmental censorship. The carrot is ‘well if we really like your movie we can offer better release dates, we can offer more preferential marketing buys… essentially we can create a more  favourable regulatory climate for your movie to succeed. We can remove barriers out of your way’. And the stick of course is ‘ultimately if we don’t like your movie we won’t show it within China’. They (CCP) are the sole gatekeeper to what is becoming the most important Box Office in the world.“

Only 34 foreign films per year are permitted for release in China, and the four big studios – Disney (which now owns 20th Century Fox), Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – dominate those slots. Scripts are checked by the Chinese government before permission is granted to shoot in the country. The origins of China’s censorship, said Allen-Ebrahimian, stem from the first Cold War and Hollywood’s subsequent depictions of Russians as ‘evil’ and ‘incompetent’, Allen-Ebrahimian said.

Tager and Davis agreed that Hollywood had come a long way in recent years in terms of diverse representation, with an increasing number of Asian and Asian American actors winning top roles.

Davis, China bureau chief for Variety, said that while Hollywood would continue in its bid to appeal to Asian audiences, there would be no Chinese/American co-productions in the near future.

She said a “total disengagement” and cinematic “decoupling” from China on Hollywood’s part would be “a tragedy” and that “we should still keep trying”.

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