Economic Cooperation and Regional Stability in East Asia: Perspective from China

With the drastic change and contrast of international strength after the 2008 financial crisis, there emerges new features of economic cooperation in east Asia, two of which have far-reaching impacts on the region’s stability and development: First, America is expanding its engagement in Asian affairs and attempting to lead East Asian affairs with its advocation of TPP and the multilateral system under the Asia-Pacific Cooperation mechanism advocated and led by the United States poses tremendous challenges to the growing cooperation mechanisms in East Asia. Second, East Asian countries and China are economically more and more interdependent on each other, meanwhile, these countries have growing concerns over China’s political and military strength. So they have close economic ties with China but cooperate with America on security issues, which will be an outstanding trend in the next decade. For China, the two above mentioned trends involve some of China’s diplomatic priorities: China–US relation and its relations with neighboring countries, thus making China’s surrounding environment more sensitive and complicated and strategically posing a severe threat to its general goal of peaceful rise. The competition over the leadership of economic cooperation in East Asia and the possible spillover effect of divergent interests and lack of strategic trust in this area may add to the uncertainties in regional stability. All these have forced China to reconsider its strategic choice in East Asia. This thesis suggests that in terms of strategic choices of the form of East Asian cooperation, China should transform China–US relation from “strategic competition” into “strategic coordination”. While deepening functional cooperation in economic areas, China needs to focus on conducting strategic dialogues with major East Asian countries to enhance their strategic trust.