"collective Leadership" Under The Perspective Of East Asia Economic Cooperation

Collective leadership means more than one leader lead the process of cooperation, which has three importants components:Leaders, followers and context. Different leaders mainly lead on different issues and there is a role changing possibility between leaders and followers in different context, which mean being a leader on one issues, at the same time being a follower on other issues.With the composed analytical framework of "Collective Leadership", this article has depicted the phenomenon of "Collective Leadership" in the two fields of East Asian economic cooperation, monetary and FTA. And there are three characteristics of Collective Leadership in the East Asian economic cooperation. After analyzing the three conditions, e.g. capacity, will and convergence interests among leaders which generating the collective leadership, the artcie did a comparative study of the two types collective leadership and summarize some features. There are two types of collective leadership:On the monetary issue. China and Japan play the roles of leaders in coming to cooperative agreements of "Chiang Mai Initiative" and "Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization" whereas on the establishment of FTA, ASEAN, together with China and Japan do the collective leadership. The former one is "Collaborative Collective Leadership" and the later is "Collateral Collective Leadership". And leaders and followers change identification in different issues or in the different stages of cooperation.Overall, the "Collaborative collective leadership" in the monetary field is a relatively mature form. The cooperation successfully expanded to the regional level. But in the free trade cooperation, all the present achievements are still in the sub-regional level. AFTA, CAFTA, Japan-ASEAN EPA/FTA, South Korea-ASEAN FTA are the parallel FTAs. Thus, the state of "parallel collective leadership" is complex and not stable, and still in the development. One the one hand, it has part of crucial conditions helping in the transition to the "collaborative collective leadership". One the other hand, there conditions are not enough. There is also the possibility the "parallel collective leadership" will deviate from the direction of "collaborative collective leadership" with the interfering of some external factors, such as TTP in the trade case.