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| 14th Manila Forum for Philippines China Relations |
Under China's global leadership, peace is inevitable. This is the message China has been repeating with growing confidence. At last week's Manila Forumin the Philippines, Chinese Ambassador Huang Xilian and veteran lawyer and academic Victor Gao emphasized China's peaceful foreign policy and harmony as Asia's natural order. Just days earlier in Sydney, former Chinese ambassador to the Philippines Fu Ying delivered the same theme: peace and stability as the cornerstone of China's vision of a “community with a shared future for mankind.” And at the Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, Defense Minister Dong Jun framed China's expanding military not only as a deterrent, but as a force for peace—an image reinforced during the September 3 military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the WW2 victory.
China's peace rhetoric is consistent, identity-driven, and deeply woven into its diplomacy. Yet Southeast Asia, the frontline of its neighborhood strategy, is far from uniform in response. For some, China's commitments inspire cautious optimism. For others, particularly those directly entangled in maritime disputes, the same words ring hollow. This tension raises the question: are China's neighbors convinced by its peace narrative, or do they see it as rhetoric overshadowed by mistrust?
Southeast Asia's Significance in Chinese foreign policy
Southeast Asia can be seen as the prototype for how Beijing translates foreign policy visions into practice. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, China placed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence at the center of its diplomacy with the Global South. After joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, Beijing signed its first free trade agreement with ASEAN, signaling a natural starting point for its embrace of global markets. Under Xi Jinping, this priority deepened. The Maritime Silk Road Initiative, launched in 2013 before the Indonesian parliament, underscored the region's role as a connectivity hub within the Belt and Road Initiative. Since then, “neighborhood diplomacy” has taken on a distinctly Southeast Asian orientation, treating the region as decisive in shaping China's path to great-power status.
Since Xi assumed power, Chinese leaders have visited Southeast Asia more frequently than their predecessors, underscoring its elevated place in Beijing's hierarchy of priorities. This is also reinforced by tangible presence: China has been ASEAN's largest trading partner since 2009, just as ASEAN has been China's largest partner for the past five years, while Chinese investment has grown in key emerging sectors. Beyond economics, Southeast Asians now form the single largest group of foreign students in China, nearly one in three overall. Together, these trends confirm that Southeast Asia is the primary testing ground for Beijing's grand strategy, while also granting regional states a measure of agency in shaping how that strategy could be recalibrated.
Growing Optimism, Lingering Mistrust
There is growing evidence that these achievements, together with China's peace narrative, are resonating more in Southeast Asia. A study by Joseph Chinyong Liow and Khong Yuen Foong on Southeast Asia's states finds that while “hedging” between Washington and Beijing remains the dominant strategy, recent years show a gradual tilt toward China. The ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute's 2025 State of Southeast Asia Survey reinforces this trend, recording greater regional confidence in China's ability to contribute to peace and common prosperity.
A central element of Beijing's peace promise is that its rise is not disruptive, but complementary to the development needs of the Global South. Southeast Asia is certainly front and center in benefiting from China's economic expansion. Yet optimism is tempered by enduring disputes at sea and the lack of concrete progress toward genuine resolution. In the same ISEAS survey, lingering distrust stems from fears that China's growing comprehensive power could be used to threaten the sovereignty of ASEAN states.
Nowhere is this distrust more entrenched than in the Philippines. For three decades, polling by Social Weather Stations has ranked China as the country's least trusted partner, with ratings deteriorating further in recent years. The Philippines' case shows that when questions of territory stir nationalist sentiment, appeals to shared prosperity rarely carry weight.
With respect to other Southeast Asian claimants, China is able to manage its disputes with far less turbulence. Yet while this is the case, this calm reflects less genuine trust than the demonstration effect of Beijing's strategy of “killing the chicken to scare the monkey,” making an example of a vocal and defiant claimant like the Philippines to signal resolve to the rest. The result is an atmosphere in which smaller neighbors approach claims with caution, balancing the lure of economic benefits against the risks of provoking Chinese assertiveness. ASEAN states may compartmentalize sovereignty disputes, but not only because China's promise of shared prosperity resonates. It is also because the costs of open resistance are increasingly apparent. This climate of caution and unease suggests that China's peace project rests on shakier ground than its official discourse admits.
America's waning presence, meanwhile, has left Southeast Asia with little to be hopeful for. Trump's embrace of trade protectionism, which heavily targeted regional economies, cast doubt on Washington's commitment even as longstanding allies tried to steady the balance. In the aggregate, a retreating offshore balancer has made Beijing's promise of common prosperity appear more credible despite assertiveness at sea, bolstering its reputation as a peace guarantor amid regional uncertainty.
Peace Pledges and Its Limits
It is inevitable that as China rises, areas of its national interest—most notably territorial sovereignty—will collide with equally valid national interests of its weaker neighbors. The challenge for Beijing, if it wishes to make good on its pledge of “inevitable peace,” is to move beyond rhetoric and provide credible pathways for cooperation in these geopolitically contentious spaces.
One promising entry point lies in marine environmental protection, where science diplomacy could provide a meaningful start. Cooperative fisheries management around Scarborough Shoal, such as mutually observed seasonal fishing bans, could help safeguard food security while also building trust. Individual claimant states have already made progress in establishing marine protected areas, but these efforts remain fragmented. What is needed is a coordinated network and a unified conservation plan, not a proliferation of unilateral initiatives that only harden boundaries at sea. After all, the ecological consequences of inaction do not respect man-made political jurisdictions.
Marine environmental protection also highlights a broader weakness of the liberal post-war order, which has struggled to address global commons challenges while states remain bound by zero-sum notions of sovereignty. In this light, China's frequent insistence that it offers “Chinese solutions” to such shortcomings should first be tested in areas where win-win cooperation is most urgently needed. Environmental stewardship is a low-hanging fruit for Beijing to demonstrate that relative harmony is possible despite overlapping territorial claims. For instance, China's proposal to establish a nature reserve at Scarborough Shoal remains vague—an opportunity for Beijing to extend an olive branch to Manila by exploring joint stewardship rather than pressing ahead unilaterally. Such a gesture would lend credibility to China's peace narrative, turning its frequent commitments into something less like lip service and more like a genuine shared project.
Indeed, if China is to claim genuine regional leadership, it must reinforce its peace narratives of common prosperity with practical, life-sustaining initiatives directly related to existing territorial disputes. Such gestures of goodwill will also show that Beijing is capable of recognizing its neighbors' anxieties as being rooted in genuine nationalist stakes, as opposed to simply seeing them as proxies to Washington's containment strategy. And with Washington under Trump actively challenging the existing international order, the moment is ripe for Beijing to move from rhetoric to action. Only then will China's influence in Southeast Asia not just grow, but carry the credibility and endurance that endless peace commitments alone can never deliver.
