Perception and Strategy of ASEAN’s States on China’s Footprints under Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Perspectives of State-Society-Business with Balancing-Bandwagoning-Hedging Consideration

Abstract

This special issue will propose that the changing relations among statemarket-society in ASEAN's states will play the crucial impact toward China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Under such circumstances, the changing state-market-society relations from internal and external impacts will reshape or modify their development strategy on China's footprint in ASEAN by way of adopting balancing, bandwagoning, cooperating, or hedging consideration. The hedging strategical framework can be constructed and analyzed on each ASEAN's country how to effectively deal with China's economic and political involvement. It will be concerned that the hedging strategic framework is a combination of consideration on resisting, balancing, bandwagoning, and cooperating measures in order to efficiently and rationally deal with great powers like China, in different aspects and degrees. The application of general hedging framework is a kind of risk and benefit management strategy for ASEAN states toward China's dominance on BRI that is smartly used by ASEAN states to pursue economic gains and to enjoy relative political autonomy at the same time.

The Strategic Adjustments of the United States and China in Southeast Asia: A Case Study of the Mekong Subregion

“…In this situation, without a large or equal mechanism to restrain them, countries will be drawn into an order centered on China's dominance. China has been and is "ready to deepen political trust between countries" (Soong 2021), which could cause ASEAN to…”

Infrastructure and politics: Why the Belt and Road Initiative proceeded differently in Malaysia and Indonesia

“…As increasing numbers of BRI projects were rolled out and faced various issues in practice after 2016, BRI studies accordingly tended to analyse from the perspectives of domestic politics. They examined how the policymaking, interpretation and implementation of the BRI were influenced by such socio-political factors as China's political mobilisation (He, 2019;Ye, 2019), centre-local relations (Jones and Zeng, 2019) capital export regime (Camba, 2020a;Liu and Lim, 2022;Rithmire, 2022), Chinese firm's types and business practices (He and Tritto, 2022;Tritto and Camba, 2022) as well as recipient countries' perceptions, strategies and policies towards China (Liu and Lim, 2018;Wang and Zhao, 2021;Soong, 2021a;Camba et al, 2022). Particularly, two special issues have recently been published by Asian Perspective and The Chinese Economy to address these questions (Kuik, 2021b;Soong, 2021b).…”

“…They examined how the policymaking, interpretation and implementation of the BRI were influenced by such socio-political factors as China's political mobilisation (He, 2019;Ye, 2019), centre-local relations (Jones and Zeng, 2019) capital export regime (Camba, 2020a;Liu and Lim, 2022;Rithmire, 2022), Chinese firm's types and business practices (He and Tritto, 2022;Tritto and Camba, 2022) as well as recipient countries' perceptions, strategies and policies towards China (Liu and Lim, 2018;Wang and Zhao, 2021;Soong, 2021a;Camba et al, 2022). Particularly, two special issues have recently been published by Asian Perspective and The Chinese Economy to address these questions (Kuik, 2021b;Soong, 2021b). Based on more rigorous empirical research, meso-level studies casted doubts over not only the nature of BRI as China's coherent strategy but also China's claim of success.…”

The Impact of Collective Memory on Thailand’s Involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative

“…Meanwhile, the literature attributing Thailand"s delays to efforts to balance power to preserve its national interests in the international system (Buckley and Raymond 2020) believes that Thailand and other ASEAN countries cooperate with China to obtain the consequent economic grains (Soong 2021). However, they also understand that external factors, such as competition between the world"s great powers, have influenced how cooperation has been implemented (Uddin and Kwun-Sun Lau 2023).…”