Assessing Effects of China's Party Diplomacy vis-à-vis Southeast Asia: Ideas, Interests, and Controversies

Abstract:China's party diplomacy—the Communist Party of China's own international outreach—has become an important component of China's foreign relations. Given Southeast Asia's strategic importance, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been proactively engaging political elites in the region. What are the immediate changes party diplomacy brings about for Southeast Asian actors, and how do they translate into long-term consequences? I propose a three-pronged framework to explore the local effects of China's party diplomacy, respectively, concerning exposure to ideas, the pursuit of interests, and the emergence of controversies. Drawing on a novel dataset and using illustrative cases of Vietnam, Singapore, Myanmar, and Malaysia, I show how the effects are contingent on the agency of Southeast Asian actors and domestic dynamics in each country. From the standpoint of Southeast Asian elites, engagement with the CPC could bring about ideational and material benefits, while domestic pushback, if any, is easy to deflect and tends to fade away over time. China's party diplomacy is best described as a moderate status quo multiplier that leads to noticeable changes without triggering structural shifts.