Conflicts in the South China Sea and China ASEAN Economic Interdependence: A Challenge to Cooperation

This paper analyzes the absence of correlation between China-ASEAN economic interdependence and dispute settlement in the South China Sea, against liberals’ prediction. It argues that there are a few trends in the dispute settlement process that reflects liberalist theory irrelevance, i.e. (1) the main feature of the dispute settlement is power politics; (2) the progress of multilateral arrangement for dispute settlement is constrained by unilateral policies; (3) the deepening economic integration and growing interdependence are intentionally maintained exclusive from and thus have little impact on the on-going disputes; and (4) the constrained multilateral arrangement through ASEAN invites further power politics between the claimants and actors from outside the region. It also argues that three factors have contributed to the trends: i.e. (1) power structure in the region; (2) divergence of each actor’s geopolitical interests and strategies in the South China Sea; (3) weak regional coherence and institutional design.