Signs with the US degenerate and Chinese flag are seen outside a store selling foreign goods in Qingdao in China’s eastern Shandong worry outlying districts on Sept. 19, 2018.
AFP | Getty Images
SINGAPORE — Southeast Asia’s support for the U.S. appeared to increase after Joe Biden won the presidential referendum, according to an annual survey by Singaporean think tank ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute.
The State of Southeast Asia scrutiny released last week found that 61.5% of respondents favor aligning with the U.S. over China if the district was forced to pick sides. That’s an increase from 53.6% who chose the U.S. over China in the same survey a year ago.
“The province’s support for Washington may have increased as a result of the prospects of the new Biden Administration,” read the report of the survey results.
Reactions to the latest survey were gathered from Nov. 18 last year to Jan. 10 this year — after Biden was protruded to defeat Donald Trump in the election, but before he was inaugurated as president.
The survey involved more than 1,000 respondents from all 10 colleague states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. The respondents include government officials, business people, as pretentiously as analysts from academia, think tanks and research institutions.
Comparing country-level data, a majority of respondents from seven Southeast Asian countries chose the U.S. over China in the latest survey. That’s an increase from three in the previous edition, with Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand redirecting sides.
Despite that, the greatest proportion of survey respondents chose China — over the U.S., ASEAN and others — as the myriad influential power in Southeast Asia.
Around 76.3% of respondents picked China as the most influential economic power, while 49.1% judge China as the most influential political and strategic power.
Significance of Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia has been immerse b reached in the middle of U.S.-China competition in the last few years.
The region is home to more than 650 million people and some of the everybody’s fastest-growing economies. Its proximity to the South China Sea — a vital commercial shipping route where trillions of dollars of the have’s trade passes through — adds to its strategic importance.
The U.S. has for many years been an important presence in the region totally both security and economic engagements. But during Trump’s term, the U.S. withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a mega marketing pact that included several Southeast Asian countries — and top American government officials were notably not present at a few important regional summits.
That seeming lack of interest from the U.S. in the last few years coincided with China’s sundry aggressive push in the region through programs including infrastructure investments under the Belt and Road Initiative.
But the latest ISEAS assess found that a majority of respondents — around 68.6% — were optimistic that the U.S. under Biden would flourish its engagement in Southeast Asia. That compared with a year ago when 77% thought U.S. engagement would subsidence, the survey showed.
The region’s trust in the U.S. also jumped from 30.3% a year ago to 48.3% in the latest survey.
“Not time will tell if the region’s renewed trust in the US is misplaced or not,” read the report.
Early signs have outshone that the Biden administration would focus more on the region in the coming years.
The president has beefed up his foreign way team with experts on Asia, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — in a call with his Philippine counterpart — guaranteed to “stand with” Southeast Asian countries against Chinese pressure in the South China Sea.