- 著者
-
廣野 美和
- 出版者
- 一般財団法人 アジア政経学会
- 雑誌
- アジア研究 (ISSN:00449237)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.69, no.3, pp.55-70, 2023-07-31 (Released:2023-08-19)
- 参考文献数
- 40
How did China put into practice its non-interference principle before and after the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, and how did Myanmar’s key actors perceive China’s practice? Non-interference has been one of the more important foreign policy principles in the Asia-Pacific regional order. However, China’s approaches to the non-interference principle have evolved in the twenty-first century. Moving beyond the government-to-government channel that China had upheld in its diplomacy earlier, China began taking a flexible approach to the principle to work with the government of Myanmar and its opponents, i.e., ethnic armed organizations. In the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, too, China’s non-interference policy has been questioned by many, particularly those concerned about China’s “neo-colonial policy” and its alleged “debt trap” diplomacy.However, the meaning of the principle remains ambiguous within academic and policy communities, as the principle is often evaluated politically and subjectively in reality. By addressing the ambiguity, this paper examines China’s actual political and economic practices of what seems to be interventionist behaviour—China’s conflict mediation in Myanmar and the Belt and Road Initiative—and the Myanmarese actors’ perceptions of the practices.This paper employs as its conceptual framework a spectrum of interference consisting of coercion on the one hand and influence on the other. Primarily based on the author’s interviews with key actors in Myanmar in 2018, this paper uses the spectrum to examine China’s practices and the Myanmarese actors’ perceptions of those practices, to determine the extent to which they amount to coercion or influence.This paper finds that China’s political and economic practices in Myanmar and the Myanmarese actors’ perceptions address opposite ends of the spectrum. China’s practices amount to the exertion of influence on both the government of Myanmar and on the ethnic armed organizations, without resorting to coercing either actor to engage in particular behaviour. In contrast, the Myanmarese actors perceive China’s practices as nothing less than coercion and the violation of Myanmarese sovereignty. Those perceptions are linked to anti-China sentiment, wide-spread demonstrations and physical attacks against Chinese infrastructures in Myanmar, which limit the scope of China’s attempt to expand its economic influence in that country. If one takes the view that the establishment of a new regional order has to be endorsed by regional countries, the above finding implies that China’s approach to its non-interference principle suggests that China still has a long way to go to reformulate the regional order.