Power Projection And Threat Perception: Analysis Of Southeast Asia's Hedging Strategy Against China

The main strategy of Southeast Asia towards China is believed to be the hedging.This judgment is based on the fact that Southeast Asian countries choose to corporate tightly with China in economy and avoid severe security conflict with China while maintaining good interactions with other great powers in politics and security.If we put bandwagon and balance as the two extreme points of the choices of countries‘ strategy,then hedging is at its middle,being in a mixed stage.Thus we can view hedging as a combination of strategies,containing both bandwagon and balance.We define that the more factor of balance plays in a hedging behavior,the tougher the hedging is.So the extent of the factor of balance plays in a hedging behavior will be a standard to distinguish different kinds of hedging behavior,which could be defined as tough,moderate and soft.Threat perception is the essence of different kinds of hedging.That means countries with strong threat perception toward China will tend choose tough hedging strategy with more balance actions,and weak perception means soft hedging.Most relative researches are to answer the question “why hedging?”,rarely noticing “why hedging different? ”.This article is going to analyze the Southeast Asian countries‘ threat perception and hedging behavior toward China in the eyes of geopolitical theory.In his classical book The Origins of Alliances,Stephen Walt gives an impressive argument of geopolitical—threat perception theory which argues that,in a certain situation,it‘s distance between countries that determine their threat perception.But such a theory cannot explain the case of Southeast Asia.Myanmar is adjacent to China while Singapore is further.But the former country acts very kind to China and the later one is more vigilant.Thus,this article proposes an argument that it‘s the distance between countries and area of power projection of great power that matters.China‘s power projection is on the direction of its south and west sea,which causes near countries,like Vietnam and Malaysia,stronger threat perception toward China and countries on other direction,like Myanmar and Cambodia,less nervous.Such amend will allow this geopolitical theory to better explain the hedging case of Southeast Asia.To analyze this hedging case from the perspective of power projection and threat perception,we are able to better understand hedging and make a contribution to the development of Stephen Walt‘s geopolitical theory.