SE Asian democratic reversals favor China

The democratic backsliding now prevalent in several countries in Southeast Asia underscores the gradual decline in the quality of these countries’ democracies and the emergence of autocratic tendencies. This political trend has geostrategic implications, as it may see countries in Southeast Asia gravitating toward China’s authoritarian arm while moving away from US democratic influence.

Except for Laos and Vietnam (both communist one-party regimes), most governments in Southeast Asia have experienced democratic backsliding. In Thailand, the military junta that toppled a democratically-elected government through a coup in 2014 was able to engineer a parliamentary election in 2019 to prolong its rule. In Indonesia, the government legitimized a conservative and anti-pluralistic brand of Islam and suppressed political opposition. In Myanmar, the military coup last February overthrew a civilian-led government, making the country the front-runner in the region’s “authoritarian race to the bottom.”

As governments in the region reverse their domestic political course, their external balancing efforts will likely tilt toward China at a time of heightened great power rivalry with the United States. The lack of transparency, desire to extend power, and propensity to use force among leaders belonging to the “Asean dictators’ club” dovetail with China’s principle of noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs.

Unlike the United States’ willingness to condemn authoritarian rule, China’s “noninterference” is paradoxically notorious for its implicit support of autocratic leaders. It’s an important financier, for instance, of the regime survival of Cambodia’s Hun Sen, the world’s longest-serving prime minister with 36 years in power. Hun Sen has chosen to exclusively embrace and bandwagon with China, even describing Beijing as Cambodia’s “ironclad friend.”

For the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, China provides financial assistance without any preconditions anchored on the advancement of human rights. While the United States has limited aid provision to the Philippines’ brutal war on drugs, China granted support for drug rehabilitation and law enforcement. Amid international condemnation, President Duterte regards China as “the only country to come out freely supporting the fight against drugs in my country.”

Several Southeast Asian countries are also attracted to China’s alternative, non-Western model of prosperity without democracy. They are increasingly disillusioned with the chaotic democratization process and its effects on their economies and societies. While they have sustained economic growth in the past decades, most of them continue to suffer from high levels of inequality, widespread corruption, fragile institutions, and weak rule of law. For them, China represents an exemplar model for political and economic development where state legitimacy need not be based on a democratic relationship between the government and the governed, but rests instead on the country’s rising standards of living.

China’s authoritarian allure in the region became more evident after the United States underwent retrenchment in the region and retreated from its role as a global advocate of liberal democracy under the Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy. Washington’s tarnished democratic credentials have become even less relevant for Southeast Asian countries experiencing democratic backsliding. And as these countries descend toward autocratic rule, they are implicitly handing over a wide-open field for Beijing to take further political steps toward regional dominance.

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Andrea Chloe Wong holds a PhD in political science from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.