Will the nations of Southeast Asia maintain their strategic autonomy, or are they destined to become a subservient periphery of China?

This book's expert authors address this pressing question in multiple contexts. What clues to the future lie in the modern history of Sino-Southeast Asian relations? How economically dependent on China has the region already become? What do Southeast Asians think of China? Does Beijing view the region in proprietary terms as its own backyard? How has the relative absence, distance, and indifference of the United States affected the balance of influence between the US and China in Southeast Asia?

The book also explores China's moves and Southeast Asia's responses to them. Does China's Maritime Silk Road through Southeast Asia herald a Pax Sinica across the region? How should China's expansionary acts in the South China Sea be understood? How have Southeast Asian states such as Vietnam and the Philippines responded? How does Singapore's China strategy compare with Indonesia's? How relevant is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? To what extent has China tried to persuade the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia to identify with 'the motherland and support its aims? How are China's deep involvements in Cambodia and Laos affecting the economies and policies of those countries? This rich collection, writes renowned author-journalist Nayan Chanda, answers these and other questions while offering fresh insights and new information and analyses to explain Southeast Asia's relations with China.

Southeast Asia faces hard choices. The region's most powerful organization, ASEAN, is being challenged to ensure security and encourage democracy while simultaneously reinventing itself as a model of Asian regionalism.

Should ASEAN's leaders defend a member country's citizens against state predation for the sake of justice-and risk splitting ASEAN itself? Or should regional leaders privilege state security over human security for the sake of order-and risk being known as a dictators' club? Should ASEAN isolate or tolerate the junta in Myanmar? Is democracy a requisite to security, or is it the other way around? How can democratization become a regional project without first transforming the Association into a people centered organization? But how can ASEAN reinvent itself along such lines if its member states are not already democratic?

How will its new Charter affect ASEAN's ability to make these hard choices? How is regionalism being challenged by transnational crime, infectious disease, and other border-jumping threats to human security in Southeast Asia? Why have regional leaders failed to stop the perennial regional haze from brush fires in democratic Indonesia? Does democracy help or hinder nuclear energy security in the region?

In this timely book-the second of a three-book series focused on Asian regionalism-ten analysts from six countries address these and other pressing questions that Southeast Asia faces in the twenty-first century.