Chapter 8: An Evaluation of the Strategic Situation in Southeast Asia
This essay was translated by JANG Jun and proofread by HOU Songshan and TANG Xiaohong.
The year 2016 marked the beginning of the ASEAN Community established by the Southeast Asian countries. However, Southeast Asian countries had serious contradictions and divergences over issues like the South China Sea, which posed unprecedented challenges to the development of ASEAN integration. In the context of the Sino-U.S. competition over the South China Sea, ASEAN could hardly win by diplomacy as before. In the aspect of economy, most of the Southeast Asian countries maintained stable GDP growth, and only a few countries’ GDP slightly decreased. However, Southeast Asian countries were generally affected by the weak global economic recovery, and their exports were facing enormous pressure. In the aspect of security, the situation in Southeast Asia was not optimistic, as radical Islamic thinking, racial contradictions, and illegal immigration problems posed increasingly serious challenges to each country’s own stability and even regional security.
