ABSTRACT
China’s growing influence is being felt worldwide and across different issues. Perhaps nowhere, however, is China’s growth more acutely felt than in Southeast Asia and by the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While China as a security concern has mostly been (for the original ASEAN states, at least) an internal and relatively recent concern with its roots in China’s revolutionary radicalism of the 1960s, it is nevertheless the case that history, geographic proximity, and also relative disparities in size and potential, all give ASEAN states particular reason to pay attention to China. This paper offers an analysis of corporate ASEAN’s political and diplomatic efforts to manage and adapt to China as a rising power and in relation to the growth and expansion of relations experienced over the last decade and a half.
