• 2022
• Article

The Third Indochina War called forth dramatic changes in the international relations of Southeast Asia. Foremost among these changes was a shift in the geopolitical orientation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The organization’s founders established ASEAN in 1967 to contain Chinese influence in Southeast Asia. But in the wake of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in late 1978, ASEAN forged a tacit alliance with the People’s Republic of China to pursue a campaign of rollback against Vietnam. This article argues that ASEAN's volte-face and China’s reentry into networks of regional diplomacy depended upon a shift in Indonesian threat perceptions. As political Islam displaced Chinese communism as the key threat fixating Indonesian policy, the Suharto regime abandoned its longstanding attempts to integrate Vietnam into the architecture of regional order and instead accommodated itself to a Thai-led effort to enlist China as a counterweight against Vietnam. The reorientation of Indonesian diplomacy reveals the dynamics of a phenomenon that anthropologist Heonik Kwon has called the “decomposition” of the Cold War – the geographically and temporally uneven erosion of the Cold War as a social reality and the gradual elaboration of a post-Cold War era.

• September 2022
• Case

On June 21, 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) went into effect, requiring companies to prove that goods imported from the People’s Republic of China were not made with forced labor. The bill was a reaction to reports of products being made with forced labor from Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities being held in camps in the PRC, chiefly in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. However, implementation of the bill would be difficult. The PRC government denied the existence of forced labor, and this would make it nearly impossible for importers to trace their supply chains all the way to the origins of primary goods and prove that no forced labor was involved. Three industries were chiefly at stake – tomatoes, cotton, and polysilicon – at a time of high inflation and increasing urgency to do something about climate change, but the bill also threatened to fundamentally re-shape U.S.-PRC relations, potentially along the lines of a full-scale economic “decoupling.”

• Fall 2022
• Article

Contrary to expectations that economic interdependence might lessen security conflict between China and the U.S. and its allies, much of the contestation between China and several OECD countries has focused on firms and economic links. This paper explains the intensification of economic contestation between China and several OECD countries by showing how changes in China’s domestic political economy have generated security dilemma dynamics. Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to the economy has become increasingly securitized, such that the developmental goal of economic growth, which required accommodation of the private sector, has been overshadowed by a strategy of political control and risk management for regime survival. We term these changes “party-state capitalism,” and identify two signature manifestations: 1) expansion of party-state authority in firms through changes in corporate governance and state-led financial instruments; and 2) enforcement of political fealty among various economic actors. Together, these trends have blurred the distinction between the state and private capital and resulted in several forms of backlash, including intensified investment reviews, campaigns to exclude Chinese firms from prominent sectors, and novel domestic and international institutions to address perceived threats from Chinese actors. We conclude that the uniqueness of China’s model has prompted significant reorganization of the rules governing capitalism at the national and transnational levels.