Today I’m going to talk something else in a broader context which is irrelevant to Myanmar study.

Today I’m talk about defense China Threat Thesis, but it is a big topic and I’m not going into details of this thesis. And second are Research Questions, and then Data and Methods which is followed by Main Results and Conclusions.

Actually, it is a very big issue that China Threat-is it a threat? or an opportunity for the world? I think threat rather than the opportunity of a rising China is overwhelmingly discussed by politicians , academics and mass media. So it is a very big thesis, I’m not going into details about that. Today I’m more straightforward to the raised questions and to the result.

My first question is how do the Asian countries see the big power influence to the Asia. The average Southeast Asians, not the politicians, not scholars, not the mass media, the average , the ordinary southeast Asian. And second is do Asian see China’s…the first is big powers including USA, China, Japan and India according to this available data in my survey and the second is do Asian see China’s influence a threat or not. And how does this vary across countries, that mean how do these different Asian countries have different ideas on this threat or opportunity. And then to answer these two questions I used data, Asian Barometer Survey which is implemented by the Department of Politics, Taiwan University.And this survey has conducted up to now three waves; I used the third wave, the most update wave which is in the year 2010-2012. The key variables used in these study includes as follows:

The first is“Which country has the most influence in Asia?”And the second is“In ten years, which country will have the most influence in Asia?”the first is now , at the sum of survey , which is the most influential one in Asia. The second question is in ten years later which country will have the most influence in Asia. And the response categories are in four, it is four categories and discrete USA, CHINA, JAPAN, INDIA. So according to the discrete category we used multinomial logistic regression (MLR). This is the method to check the result, and then the second aspect is focused on China, Does China do better or harm to the region? The region means in Asia. And the response categories are four ordered ones: much more good; somewhat more good; somewhat more harm; much more harm. The next question is how much influence does China have on our country? This is also four Ordered categories: a great deal; some; not much; not at all.And the last is the influence China has on our country positive or negative? Our countries mean the respondent’s own country. This is a six categories responses, also ordered: very positive; positive; somewhat positive; somewhat negative; negative; very negative.

So according to the nature of the responses we used ordinal logistic regression (OLR), here is the data description: the total Sample size is a little bit more than10,000 including Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippine, Mongolia and South Korea. And the next is by demographic factors, I’m not going to talk about it in details because it is not our focus today. Here is the Multinomial logistic regression result that is“The most influential country in Asia”. The first part is now and the second part is after 10 years later. And most of the results are very significant but it’s very complicated to see this picture so I converted it to gross. Here which country is the most influential in Asia Now? China, Japan, US and India. Next Which power has the most influential in Asia in 10 years? And China, Japan, US and India. And I’ll combine it into one slide in order to have more visible comparison. Here we can see the most influential country now, here is ten years later. Here we’ll find that this is Philippine, the Philippines respondents have a high evaluation of Japan and US influence in Asia. Other countries like Mongolia or South Korea and then Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. This means Vietnam has the highest evaluation of China’s influence in Asia Now. The overall the average Asians believe that China has much more influence than United States Now in Asia. And ten years later, the gap between these two countries become larger. China’s influence becomes more and there are some decreases of United States influence in Asia. So this is how the average Asians see the influence of China and US in the region.

And this question is focused on China: Does China do better or harm to the region? We found that here, the response categories are four: much more good; somewhat more good; somewhat more harm; much more harm. We found that the most of the countries believe that China do good not harm to the region, not to their own countries, to the whole Asia. Only the majority of Mongolia and around half of the Korean think it is , only half and a half….

The next question is how much influence does China have on our country?That means the previous slide is on the influence do more good or harm to the whole region , but this question is to the respondents’home country. And nearly all of the countries believed that China has influenced on their own country. And the next question is“is this kind of influence good, positive or negative?”The influence of China has on our country, the respondent’s own country, is good or bad? Is it positive or negative? And we will find similarly that most countries will evaluate it positively here, only Mongolia and South Korea believe that some kind of negative influence on their own countries especially Mongolia.

So my conclusion is , first The majority of Vietnamese, Singaporean, South Korean and Mongolian identify China as the most influential power in Asia. And then the majority of Philippine respondents believe that the USA is the most influential in the region. The next point is Thais and Malaysians have nearly equal evaluation of China and USA. And Indonesian is the only one which has a moderate evaluation of Japan as the most influential in Asia. So another point is the gap of Asians’perceptions of the two countries’influences will become larger in the next 10 years. That means the gap will become larger than now in ten years later. So Overall, the Vast majority of Asians see China as the most influential in the region. So this is the first question.

And then the second question as to whether China’s influence in the respondent’s own country is positive? The result is Thais, Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian evaluate China’s influence positively, but the majority of Mongolian and nearly half of Korean seems to evaluate negatively. So these results indicate a clear-cut distinction by geographical location because South Korea and Mongolia are China’s neighbors and others are a bit far from China. Maybe that is the possible explanation.

To sum up, the Asians believe China, rather than the USA, is the most influential country in the region and the majority of them tend to say China’s influence is positive, which seems to‘disagree’with the‘China Threat Thesis’. But the Limitation of the study is the Lack of Data: Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. And as a Yunnanese researcher, this is very important to me. But unfortunately, the data set does not cover these countries.

And finally, Hilary Clinton said‘A thriving America is good for China and a thriving China is good for America’. Maybe we might revive this into another sentence: A thriving America plus a thriving China is good for the world in general and for Asia in particular! That is what I think and I believe.