But, by the late 2000s, Beijing had dropped those slogans and begun to build artificial islands and military installations on Chinese-controlled features in the Paracel and Spratly Islands. China’s signature on ASEAN’s “Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea” (code of conduct) and diplomatic slogans of heping jueqi(peaceful rise) and hexie shijie (harmonious world) buoyed Southeast Asian hopes. In the early 2000s, their strategy seemed to work. Instead, they hoped to persuade Beijing to adopt ASEAN’s principle of consensus and shelve its contentious South China Sea sovereignty claims. Hence, even as China became more assertive in the South China Sea during the 2000s, most Southeast Asian leaders resisted calls to modernize their navies. Modern warships are costly to acquire and maintain at a state of high readiness. Given the lingering impact of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the lack of a clear maritime danger, that was none too surprising.

4 But perhaps most interesting has been how well each country’s hedging behavior has been reflected in the pace of its naval modernization.Ĭertainly, at the turn of the new millennium, naval modernization was a low priority for most Southeast Asian governments (with the possible exception of Singapore’s). 3 And by the end of that decade, Malaysia started to adopt a similar approach during Mahathir Mohammad’s brief second stint as prime minister. 2 In the mid-2010s, Indonesia began to hedge too, while striving to maintain its nominal neutrality at the same time.

And while the Philippines did slide backwards towards accommodation with China when Rodrigo Duterte became president, it would eventually tack back to hedging during the second half of his tenure. Vietnam was the first to move towards a hedging strategy in the late 2000s. Ultimately, those changes are also what have led the four countries to hedge, to one degree or another, the risks associated with China’s rise. Though they have done so with varying levels of intensity, they all have been driven to modernize their navies by changes in their strategic environment, the biggest of which have been the growth of China’s economic and military power and its aggressive assertion of its South China Sea sovereignty claims. For over a decade, Southeast Asia’s largest maritime countries-Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam-have engaged in extensive naval modernization programs.

Indonesian navy submarine tender