00:00As competition between China and India for influence in the global South intensifies,
00:06Southeast Asia is navigating an increasingly complex strategic landscape.
00:11On the sidelines of the 39th Asia-Pacific Roundtable,
00:15Dr. Jabin Jacob, Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University,
00:19shared his perspective on what this means for ASEAN.
00:23When China talks about providing public goods,
00:27it is able to provide infrastructure development,
00:30it is able to provide green technology,
00:34and it's also able to provide these at scale as well as at lower costs.
00:40So, I mean, narrative doesn't stand on its own.
00:42It has to be backed by capacity.
00:44India is getting there, but of course, India is...
00:48I wouldn't say India is a late mover,
00:50but India has always had problems of capacity.
00:53So, therefore, I think India is still taking some time
00:56in being able to provide its version of what it can do for the global South.
01:04But, you know, India's capacities or India's strengths
01:07are not just in the realm of hard infrastructure development capacities.
01:13It's also in terms of human resources training
01:16in being able to provide capacities for governments,
01:20for institutions in countries to ensure accountability, for example.
01:25You have economic assistance coming in,
01:29you have foreign direct investments coming in to countries.
01:33He also argued that ASEAN's greatest strength
01:36lies in maintaining strategic balance.
01:38But that can only happen if the region speaks with a more unified voice
01:42rather than allowing external powers to exploit divisions on key regional issues.
01:48Southeast Asia needs to be able to play the big players against each other, right?
01:54That's in its advantage.
01:54That's logical, given its size, given its capacity.
01:57But if Southeast Asia is not able to do that,
02:00then the big players are going to play divide and rule, right?
02:03And we have a classic case with respect to the South China Sea disputes.
02:09I mean, for a couple of decades now,
02:11Southeast Asian countries have been negotiating with China.
02:14And China has really led you up the garden path, right?
02:17So if you have not learned from that experience in all these years,
02:25I mean, you know, it's going to be difficult.
02:29Jacob also said ASEAN should broaden its strategic and economic partnerships
02:33to avoid over-reliance on any single major power.
02:37China's approach, despite the rhetoric of win-win, has always been a zero-sum.
02:41If ASEAN wins, China loses.
02:44And therefore, China has to win, right?
02:47But if China wins, then ASEAN loses.
02:49That's a zero-sum story.
02:50So, essentially, can we find a system in which China is compelled
02:58to make it genuinely win-win?
03:02Again, I think the dependencies have gone so far
03:08that ASEAN will have to sort of rethink its approach.
03:13Essentially, the first and most important solution is diversifying.
03:17ASEAN needs to diversify away from China.
03:20But it can't diversify to India because India is a difficult market, right?
03:24So there has to be a bit of a give and take as well.
03:26And in India, the feeling has always been that India has actually lost out
03:32in an India-ASEAN FTA.
03:35So there needs to be some sort of an acknowledgement
03:37where we need to maybe revise our current terms of engagement.
03:43He added that lasting partnerships cannot be built
03:46through high-level multilateral platforms such as BRICS alone.
03:49Instead, deeper people-to-people exchanges will be key
03:53to strengthening ties across the global south.
Comments