China and Southeast Asia

The most remarkable aspect of China’s international development over the past thirty years has been its re-engagement with Southeast Asia. Until three decades ago China laboured under a self-imposed exile from the continent of which it is a part. In the early 1980s China had just fought a war with Vietnam, in which it lost at least 20,000 soldiers, and the other Southeast Asian states understandably viewed China with suspicion. India, along China’s south-western frontier, was politically close to the Soviet Union and had regarded China as a diehard enemy since the 1962 war. It was an Asian world that seemed to have expurgated China from its midst. The central kingdom was no longer central, but distinctly peripheral to the rest of the continent.