Special Session Introduction China's Rise in Asia: China-Host Country Interactions and Transformations

Abstract

Special Session Introduction China's Rise in Asia:China-Host Country Interactions and Transformations Alvin Camba (bio), Guanie Lim (bio), and Victoria Chonn Ching (bio) Chinese capital exports are at the front and center of China's globalization (Hung 2015), actualizing US$3.8 trillion of foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in 2018 (UNCTAD 2019) and around US$843 billion in Chinese concessionary and non-concessionary financing between 2000 and 2019 (Bluhm et al. 2018). Against this backdrop, China has emerged as an alternative capital exporter as Western firms and international institutions have increasingly shifted their development finance from hard to soft infrastructure, in addition to concentrating their FDI in key sectors not easily participated by countries in the Global South (Camba 2022). For those in the Global South, China has also become a provider of military aid, an ally in the international arena, and a model to emulate. These changes are expected to exert enormous consequences on executive power competition among political elites, socio-ethnic fissures within countries, and geopolitical strategies of individual countries and/or regions. These domestic transformations better inform the ongoing debates on China's rise both within and across the Global South. The current literature on China's globalization can be divided into three different dimensions. First, there is a question of how China's interests, state-business relations, and state-society structures figure into China's mode of exporting capital. This literature has debated the question of China's global economic position, the issue of centralization or decentralization, and the recent emergence of party-state capitalism (Pearson et al. 2021, 2022). A parallel group of scholarship analyzes how China's Communist Party (CCP) and its institutions prefigure into the country's capital export strategy and China's geopolitical ambitions and gains (Benabdallah 2020; Doshi 2021; Repnikova 2022). Second, another group of works has examined China's impact on host regions and countries. From an economic lens, this scholarship examines how Chinese development finance or direct investments have catalyzed gross [End Page 543] domestic production, industrial policy, supply chain linkages, or capital restructuring (Camba et al. 2022; Lin 2012; Wise and Chonn Ching 2018). Politically, some debate how much China has inspired or exported models of autocracy (see, for example, Bader 2015; Camba 2022). These works also discuss China's role as a global environmental actor (Gallagher and Qi 2021; Kong and Gallagher 2019; Saha 2020). Finally, more recent literature has examined how the host country has responded to China's overtures. This body of work varies from analyzing national government institutions, elite politics, bureaucracies, and civil society. Some have examined host country positioning amidst geopolitical tensions, while others analyze hedging strategies (Liao and Katada 2021; Stallings 2020). Others have looked at how elites have taken advantage of China to increase their political power (Liu and Lim 2019). Despite all these advancements, what is relatively less scrutinized is the kind of host country politics that has emerged in response to—or alongside—Chinese capital exports and the degree to which these changing dynamics address underlying socio-economic or historical cleavages (Camba 2021a; Liu and Lim 2023). Our special session further interrogates how China's rise has spurred innovative bureaucratic strategies, social cleavages, and ethnic tensions in South, Southeast, and Central Asia. These sub-regions are rich for empirical investigation and theory building because democratization and development processes have differed not only from the Global North or Western countries but also among themselves. Adopting a macroscale perspective, Southeast Asian countries have generally pursued labor-intensive industrialization and illustrated distinct development patterns (Higgott and Robinson 2013), South Asian countries are fraught with nationalist movements and inter-state rivalries (Bhattacharyya 2020), and Central Asian countries are transitioning from their communist past into newly emerging democracies (Cummings 2012). However, these regions have—in varying ways—managed disillusionment with the West, increasing income inequalities, and intensified geopolitical tensions. Special Session Overview The first article focuses on Singapore. Xianbai Ji (2023) discusses how this quintessential city-state sought to engage the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China's signature global infrastructure strategy, since 2013. Compared to other economies, the Singaporean approach to the BRI shifted away from engaging with China...