HANOI: China's military expansion and assertive trade policies have set off jitters across Asia, prompting many of its neighbours to rekindle old alliances and cultivate new ones to better defend their interests against the rising superpower.
A whirl of deal-making and diplomacy from Tokyo to Delhi is giving the US an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where its eclipse by China has been viewed as inevitable.
The trip to the region this week by Barack Obama, his most extensive as US president, will take him to the area's big democracies, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, skirting authoritarian China. Those countries and others have taken steps - with varying degrees of candour - to blunt China's assertiveness in the region.
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Obama and the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, are expected to sign a landmark deal for US military transport aircraft and are discussing the possible sale of jet fighters, which would escalate the Pentagon's defence partnership with India to new heights; Japan and India are courting south-east Asian nations with trade agreements and talk of a ''circle of democracy''; Vietnam has a rapidly warming rapport with its old foe, the US, in large part because its old friend, China, makes broad territorial claims in the South China Sea.
The deals and alliances are not intended to contain China, but they suggest a palpable shift in the diplomatic landscape, on vivid display as leaders from 18 countries gathered at the weekend in Hanoi for a meeting suffused by tensions between China and its neighbours.
China's escalating feud with Japan over islands in the East China Sea stole the meeting's headlines on Saturday, and the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, proposed three-way negotiations to resolve the issue.
Most Asian countries, even as they argue that China will inevitably replace the US as the top regional power, have grown concerned at how quickly that shift is occurring, and what China the superpower may look like.
China's big trading partners are complaining more loudly that it intervenes too aggressively to keep its currency undervalued. And its rapid naval expansion, combined with a more strident defence of its claims to disputed territories far off its shores, has persuaded Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Singapore to reaffirm their enthusiasm for the US security umbrella.
''The most common thing that Asian leaders have said to me in my travels over this last 20 months is, 'Thank you, we're so glad that you're playing an active role in Asia again','' Clinton said in Hawaii, before her seven-country tour of Asia, which includes a last-minute stop in China.
(source:smh.com.au)
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