Japan is taking advantage of a backlash against China's growing assertiveness to woo Southeast Asian nations. The WSJ's Michael Arnold talks to China's World columnist Andrew Browne about changing alliances in Asia.
BEIJING—Few countries have been as loyal to China over the years as Cambodia, an impoverished nation that needs all the help it can get from its giant neighbor to the north.
Just last year, the tiny kingdom again proved its steadfastness to Beijing by torpedoing an effort to criticize China's territorial ambitions at a meeting of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian nations in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.
Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister and Cabinet Minister Sok An, right front, and Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Bu Jianguo, left front, attended a conference on the 55th anniversary of Cambodia-China diplomatic relations in Phnom Penh on Monday.Zuma Press
So what transpired a week and a half ago at a Japan-Asean summit in Tokyo is an indicator of a much broader diplomatic shift that's taking hold in the region. At the summit, Cambodia this time closed ranks with its neighbors as well as Japan—China's archrival—and joined a pledge to work together to protect freedom of aviation.
That was a clear dig at China, which has stirred new fears about its territorial aspirations by announcing an air-defense identification zone across a vast stretch of the East China Sea.
What is more, on the fringes of the meeting, Japan and Cambodia—of all countries—announced they had upgraded the status of their relationship to a "strategic partnership." Though Cambodia also spoke up for Beijing at the meeting, with Prime Minister Hun Sen saying he was pleased to hear Japan was making efforts to improve its relationship with China.
It has been obvious for some time that China's aggressive claims to disputed territory are pushing Southeast Asian countries into the arms of the U.S.
Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Hun Sen with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during a meeting in Tokyo in December. European Pressphoto Agency
Now Japan, too, is making diplomatic headway as smaller countries in the region respond to China's more assertive behavior by balancing their relations among the great Pacific powers.
To be sure, Asean countries stopped well short of openly criticizing China in Tokyo—even though Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was egging them on to do just that. Asean has no wish to pick a fight with Beijing. It is a deeply conservative and consensual body and its members, as a group, avoid getting involved in each other's territorial spats. Beijing had no immediate response to Cambodia's new approach.
Still, the summit capped a successful year of diplomacy for Mr. Abe, whose whirlwind visits around Southeast Asia to win hearts and minds—and open doors for Japanese companies with promises of billions of dollars in aid and investments—matched a similar outreach by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.
Mr. Abe's diplomatic accomplishments are all the more remarkable given his domestic political agenda.
He has emerged as one of the most nationalistic Japanese politicians of his generation, speaks openly of his lifetime goal of rewriting Japan's 66-year-old pacifist constitution, and is upgrading his country's armed forces. He has even contested the idea that Japan's brutal wartime assault on its neighbors counts as an "invasion."
Only a few years ago, such an agenda by a Japanese leader might have sent tremors around the whole region. It still enrages China, as well as South Korea. But among some countries in Southeast Asia, worries about a revival of Japanese militarism are trumped by deeper concerns about China's long-term strategy.
This is particularly true in the Philippines, which has infuriated China by launching a legal challenge at a U.N. tribunal in The Hague to China's territorial sovereignty claims. Aquilino "Nene" Pimentel, the former president of the Philippine Senate, recalls that as a boy during World War II his family escaped Japanese troops by hiding in banana groves. "I could hear the bullets whizzing by," he recounts. For years, he says, his attitude to Japan was "one of fear and hatred."
Now, he says: "We see Japan's resurgence as a balancing factor in what otherwise would be China's dominance in this region."
Japan is eager to encourage such sentiments. Earlier this year, it offered to sell 10 patrol ships to the Philippines using a yen loan to beef up its defenses against China. Then, it mounted its largest ever peacetime deployment of its Self-Defense Forces for disaster aid to the Philippines after the devastation created by Typhoon Haiyan. China's humanitarian response, by contrast, was widely criticized at home and abroad as slow and grudging.
Japan has also offered patrol boats to Vietnam and Indonesia.
Nevertheless, the risks of irritating China are greatest among the smallest countries around Asia whose economies can be carried along, or crushed, by the Chinese juggernaut.
That's why Cambodia is such an interesting case. Its faithfulness to China over the years has been amply rewarded by a benefactor that sits on foreign-exchange reserves of $3.6 trillion, and is using them as an instrument of diplomacy to try to forge what President Xi has grandly called a "Community of Common Destiny" in the region. Cambodia alone has received promises of more than $2 billion in loans and grants from China—a huge sum for a country whose gross domestic product last year was only $14 billion.
China's vision is to draw Cambodia and its neighbors, also including Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar, more deeply into its economic orbit. It wants to achieve this through a giant free-trade zone linked by highways, a high-speed rail network, energy pipelines and a power grid.
At an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting on the Indonesian resort island of Bali in October, Mr. Xi proposed an infrastructure investment bank to make all this a reality. He also set a goal for trade between China and Asean to reach $1 trillion by 2020, up from $400 billion last year.
And yet, despite China's almost bottomless largess, Cambodia's apparent change of heart demonstrates the potential for a backlash when its political agenda collides with nationalistic sensibilities around the region.
Write to Andrew Browne at andrew.browne@wsj.com