Three Questions for China’s Neighbors

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Richard J. Heydarian, Nirupama Rao & more on December 28, 2021

“China was, is, and will always be a good neighbor,” China’s leader Xi Jinping told ASEAN representatives in a November 2021 virtual meeting, after a series of conflicts over Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea had raised tensions. But China’s neighbors aren’t always so sure, in an era of growing Chinese assertiveness under Xi’s leadership. China remains the top trading partner throughout much of Asia, but many individual Asian states seek to counterbalance China’s influence with stronger relations with the United States and, in some cases, with other regional powers. Some strive for a balance, and don’t want to be forced to choose one side or another.

Dang Cam Tu

on December 20, 2021

Dang Cam Tu is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam (DAV). She joined the DAV in 2000 and is currently serving as Acting Director General of the Center for Information and Documentation at the Academy. Tu earned her Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from the University of New South Wales, Australia in 2011. She is a member of many major research and education projects at both institutional and national levels. She also participates and serves as Vietnam’s national coordinator in several think-tank networks in the Asia Pacific. Her main areas of research and publications include international relations in Southeast Asa and the Asia Pacific, ASEAN, and Vietnam’s foreign policy and relations with key partners in the region.

Jae Ho Chung

on December 16, 2021

Jae Ho Chung is a professor of Political Science and International Relations and Director of the Program on US-China Relations at Seoul National University. A graduate of Seoul National University, Brown University, and the University of Michigan where he received his Ph.D. in 1993, Chung taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1993-1996) and was the Brookings Institution’s CNAPS Fellow (2002-2003). He was the Director of the Institute for International Studies (2004-2006) and of the Institute for China Studies (2008-2011). He was also the recipient of the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation’s Asian Security Initiative Grant during 2009 to 2012.

Chung is the author or editor of 18 books, including Central Control and Local Discretion in China (Oxford University Press, 2000), Between Ally and Partner (Columbia University Press, 2007), Assessing China’s Power (Palgrave, 2015), and Centrifugal Empire: Central-Local Relations in China (Columbia University Press, 2016). He is a recipient of Seoul National University’s Best Researcher Award in 2009, of the Korean Association for International Studies’ Best Book Award in 2012, and the American Library Association’s Choice Award in 2017 for Centrifugal Empire.

Kavi Chongkittavorn

on December 16, 2021

Kavi Chongkittavorn is a Senior Fellow at Chulalongkorn University’s Institute of Security and International Studies. He has been a journalist for over three decades with the Bangkok-based English-language newspaper The Nation, first as correspondent in Phnom Penh and Hanoi, and later as leading writer and editor. He served as Special Assistant to the Secretary General of ASEAN from 1995 to 1996 before returning to journalism. Chongkittavorn was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002, and President of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Guillermo Carno World Press Freedom Prize jury from 2004 to 2007. He is the current affairs commentator of Nation News Channel’s One World Program. Chongkittavorn’s column, Regional Perspective, is in its 30th year.

Nirupama Rao

on December 16, 2021

Ambassador Nirupama Rao was Foreign Secretary in the Government of India from 2009-2011, and earlier served as Spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, High Commissioner of India in Sri Lanka, and Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013. On retirement, Rao was a Fellow at Brown University and also taught there from 2015 to 2016. She was George Ball Adjunct Professor at Columbia University in fall 2018. In 2019, she was a Pacific Leadership Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. She is a Global Fellow of The Woodrow Wilson Center, in Washington, D.C.; a Member of the Board of Governors of IIM, Bangalore; Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi; and on the Board of the U.S.-India Business Council. She holds a degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) from Pondicherry University and is a recipient of the Vanitha Ratna Award of the Government of Kerala.

From 1992 to 1993, Rao was a Fellow at the Center for International Affairs (now the Weatherhead Center) at Harvard University.

Rao is the founder trustee of The South Asian Symphony Foundation and has established the South Asian Symphony Orchestra. This is a project aimed at greater people-to-people connectivity in South Asia and among the South Asian diaspora.

Rao is the author of The Fractured Himalaya: India, Tibet, China 1949 to 1962 (Penguin Random House India, 2021).

Vanishing Point

By Patrick Wack on December 16, 2021

The French photographer Patrick Wack first traveled to Xinjiang in 2016. The pictures he made during those visits to Xinjiang between 2016 and 2019 document both the changes wrought by the government campaign of cultural and political repression of the region’s primarily Muslim ethnic minorities, and Wack’s own “brutal” realization that working in Xinjiang wouldn’t be the escape from China’s politics he had craved.

Patrick Wack

on December 8, 2021

Patrick Wack is a self-taught photographer currently based in Moscow. He is the co-founder of the Inland documentary cooperative.

Wack worked for international editorial and commercial clients in China from 2006 to 2017. He has also worked on documentary projects addressing topics such as repression of minorities, urban mutations, post-conflict reconstruction, and environmental issues. His projects have been published in Time Magazine, The New York Times, Geo, The Sunday Times, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.

Previously, Wack had a career in sports and studied Economics and foreign languages in France, the U.S., and Sweden. He grew up in the suburbs of Paris.

Hong Kong’s National Security Law Made Amnesty International’s Departure All But Inevitable

By William Nee on December 6, 2021

The human rights violations being committed now under the National Security Law only demonstrate China’s decision to drift further away from compliance with international human rights law. Rather, the NSL’s claim to global jurisdiction signals an increased willingness to engage in counterattacks against critics and to undermine the international human rights system. Amnesty’s departure from Hong Kong will have fall-out far beyond the mere absence of the group on the ground. In the fragile, increasingly imperiled ecosystem of the territory’s civil society, each time a group collapses it adds strain on the groups that remain. Of course, people within Amnesty were aware of this stark reality, and I’m sure made their decision with a heavy heart.