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Posted on 04/03/2008 6:45:06 PM PDT by steelboy
As China expands its reach around the world, its power also is growing in its own backyard. The United States exerts considerably less influence than it used to in Southeast Asia, and China is increasingly filling that role, even in countries that were once firmly anti-communist. They obviously have been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. They've had a very successful development experience, and so they have a lot to offer in terms of both knowledge as well as financing," says Larry Greenwood, vice president of the Asian Development Bank in Manila. "Certainly our experience with China has been very positive in the sense that they are very good at helping design and execute projects which have had very good impacts and outcomes in terms of development effectiveness."
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Ping.
Do you ever think the US has been leaderless and adrift for the past eight years?
No, I think US is doing the right thing and making the best decision. Right over half of the countries are US allies, the rest at worst stay neutral.
You don’t say......
A fair number of them are mirroring China’s military buildup - and I don’t think they’re doing this because they’re afraid of Uncle Sam. A lot of the pleasant rhetoric has to do with the fact that if you diss Uncle Sam, he smiles and continues dealing with you. If you diss the Chinese, they will shut off the flow of bribes that are part of the Chinese way of business and diplomacy.
The moment one of these countries allows a Chinese military base on its soil, I’ll agree that they actually like the Chinese. Orientals are extremely thin-skinned. So they’ll say very pleasant things about someone, while hoping he runs face-first into a buzz-saw. Don’t look at what they say - look at who they have real military exercises with. The common dominator in that region is that their major partner is not China - no point in letting your most likely adversary get a close look at what your people do during training.
I agree, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia will be more than happy to do business with China, but the idea that they’d welcome Chinese hegemony is nonsense.
There is deep seated anti-Chinese sentiment in these countries, it’s actually an unpleasant form of Asian anti-semitism in my view but that’s beside the point, given the choice between the US or China being top dog in the SE Asia region they would take the Americans in a heartbeat.
You make an interesting point.
The historical background is that ethnicities of the rest of East Asia are where they are because the Han Chinese drove them out of their ancestral lands in what is now China. Then there is the other fact of China being the original Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. What the Japanese tried to build in WWII was a Japanese edition of the Chinese empire (China is the third largest country in the world). Anyone who glances at a map of East Asia understands that China, not Japan, has traditionally been the expansive power in East Asia. And Chinese encroachments on neighboring lands have traditionally been facilitated by waves of Chinese settlers who provided intelligence and the eventual justification for Sudetenland-types of invasions and annexations. Jews have never posed this kind of existential threat to the nation states of Europe.
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