China picks up the torch amid fading US soft power

Since the Trump administration came into office, it has quickly torn apart the United States foreign funding apparatus. Besides freezing many types of aid, the administration has decimated the US Agency for International Development, firing over 1,600 staffers.

It has also closed the Agency’s headquarters, putting most of its staff around the world on leave. A federal judge, Carl Nichols, recently allowed these actions to continue, refusing to keep a temporary stay on its closure. 

These actions have resulted in the shutdown of thousands of USAID programs worldwide, including many regions where China is increasingly in the ascendency.  

Beijing has also been inching closer to Washington’s soft power across the world and will now seek to eclipse it by immediately stepping into the void. Southeast Asia is one example. China already dominates regional trade and has increasingly dominated regional diplomacy. 

Additionally, it has bolstered its soft power and won more significant concessions from Malaysia and Indonesia on the South China Sea dispute than in the past.

Economic influence

Under Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia has moved significantly closer to China. 

This shift is partly due to Anwar’s belief in his ability to negotiate effectively with Beijing, partly because of China’s substantial economic influence, and partly because the war in Gaza has made the US highly unpopular in Malaysia.

Even before the USAID shutdown, polls by the ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute in Singapore showed that China had edged ahead of the US in popularity in many Southeast Asian states. This may have been in part because of the Gaza war.

My anecdotal interactions with a wide range of opinion leaders from the 10 ASEAN states and Timor-Leste suggest that much of Southeast Asia was losing faith in the US even before the Middle East conflict and before President Donald Trump began to reduce aid. 

This loss of faith was in areas once core strengths of US popularity and influence.

They included trade and economic leadership, interest in political reform, the popularity of American culture and education, the appeal of high-tech consumer goods, and the value of security and strategic support.

They believe the United States will continue to fall behind the region’s trading trends. They also see the US, which is experiencing democratic backsliding, preaching democratic reform to some countries like Myanmar and Cambodia while ignoring it in others like Vietnam.

Hanoi has become strategically important to Washington. 

Additionally, they increasingly view Chinese products, from electric cars to smartphones, as equal to or better than American ones and believe the US is losing its technological advantages.

Wild swings

This belief is evident in the rapid expansion of Chinese car makers into places like Thailand and Indonesia.

Many Southeast Asian opinion leaders do not understand the wild swings in Washington policy positions from administration to administration, except a tiny handful who intensely follow domestic politics in the US.

American culture also increasingly seems to befuddle the region with so much online US discourse divorced from issues in Southeast Asia and, sometimes, divorced from reality. 

Higher education in the United States is also becoming difficult to access, and under the Trump administration, it will get more complicated for Southeast Asians and other foreigners. Many are turning instead to Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and China. 

With these losses, only US security protection has remained, and the Trump administration has so far remained unclear on how it will handle key allies and partners in the region like Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Now, another pillar of US popularity has been decimated. While USAID and other foreign funding consumed a tiny portion of the total budget, they were often the leading edge of soft power, along with American culture. 

This was not only the case in Southeast Asia but also in Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, and other developing regions where China was already competing with, or surpassing, the United States in economic and diplomatic influence.

Beijing has wasted little time touting the end of much of Washington’s foreign aid, which totaled about US$40 billion a year, and linked it to the overall US global decline. It has also begun to identify places with potential projects in countries where USAID is now gone.

China has already increased foreign funding and outright grants in Southeast Asia in recent years despite its focus on loans for projects as its primary source of aid. 

University scholarships

For example, China donated more than seven million vaccines to nine ASEAN countries during the Covid-19 pandemic, and funded infrastructure projects like the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville Expressway, as well as granting university scholarships to Malaysian students. 

And, of course, Beijing has made huge promises of investments, admittedly not grants, to other regions. The Christian Science Monitor noted: 

Last fall, Beijing hosted a China-Africa summit at which Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that China would contribute $50 billion in loans and investment to boost economic and infrastructure development in Africa over the next three years.

China appears to be seeking to move to places where USAID has moved out. Beijing seems to be considering increasing a range of humanitarian aid projects in health, education, and sanitation in mainland Southeast Asia, in some of the region’s poorest states. 

It picks out particularly newsworthy projects to take over, too, assuming the cost of a high-profile de-mining project in Cambodia that the United States used to fund, for instance. 

In strategically important Nepal, Politico reported that China would likely replace the funding that USAID had provided. In Colombia, “non-governmental organizations that received American aid said Beijing was interested in putting up money to help fill the void.”

Yet, these are early days. Without a doubt, Beijing will take advantage of the United States’ squandering of its soft power. 

If, as is possible, the Trump appointees to run Voice of America and oversees Radio Free Asia turn these independent media outlets into essentially propaganda, it will make it easier for China to continue to get Xinhua accepted as a regular news source across the world.

Strategic importance

This is a process Beijing has been working on for more than a decade. 

And suppose other donors, like the Gates Foundation or major countries like Japan, cannot fulfill projects USAID abandoned. In that case, China will likely provide more funding, not loans, to continue these initiatives, especially in states of strategic importance to Beijing. 

In Southeast Asia and many other developing regions, China’s time is now.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This edited article was published by the Council on Foreign Relations under a Creative Commons license. Read the original here.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of ChinaFactor.