Restless Continent by Michael Wesley

Author:Michael Wesley [WESLEY, MICHAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL011000; POL054000
ISBN: e9781468313451
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2016-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

China’s rapid rise, from a marginalised small economy to the largest and most central economy in the region, has led to heightened attentiveness among a range of countries to any assertions of superiority from Beijing. When Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi exploded in frustration at ASEAN states’ criticism of Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea, telling Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yeo, ‘China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact’,26 the remark echoed around the region. Concerns voiced in Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia sound remarkably similar: the rise of ‘great Han nationalism’ in China aims to use wealth and power to place other countries in a deferential relationship.27

The highly politicised and sensitive place of culture and history in Asia means that ‘soft power’, the use of moral and cultural attraction to advance foreign policy outcomes, is stillborn among Asian states. Societies fear that cultural admiration will be taken as an acknowledgement of cultural inferiority. For many years, Seoul blocked the broadcasting of Japanese pop culture in South Korea out of fear that it would undermine Korean cultural traditions and subordinate the country to Japan. A growing number of Vietnamese worry about China’s expanding economic, political and cultural influence over their country. The media and popular culture are increasingly playing roles in the assertion of their societies’ intrinsic value and authenticity, and in their defence against other societies’ pretensions of superiority.

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