ABSTRACT
Several of China's modern neighbors were once part of the Qing empire or had a unique relationship to that empire. The legacy of the Qing empire left tensions for the post-imperial and post-colonial governments of the region, north and south. French colonial claims and Chinese claims to the area date from the 1887 Sino-French Boundary Convention to Qing naval expeditions in 1902 and 1908. China backed the Khmer Rouge regime as a counterweight to the increasingly pro-Soviet Vietnamese, and possibly also for ideological reasons during the last years of Maoism in China. China experienced a dramatic loss of position in the 1960s and 1970s within Northeast Asia. In Southeast Asia, the traditional tributary relationship between imperial China and Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Siam, and Burma has been noted by a variety of authors as contributing to a sense of China as the center within Asia. The Chinese-Indonesian connection prior to 1965 was close – too close in fact for many Indonesians.
