People-to-People Connectivity: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Notes written for use at the “Fireside Chat” panel at the “China-ASEAN Economic Seminar: Exploring the Feasibility of a China-ASEAN Common Market“. Organised by the Guangzhou Institute of the Greater Bay Area (GIG), the Belt And Road Initiative Caucus for Asia Pacific (BRICAP), and Sunway University, on 21 April 2024 at Sunway University

By Dato’ Dr Ooi Kee Beng (黄基明) Executive Director, Penang Institute

LET ME START by thanking the organisers, both GIG and BRICAP, for honouring me with an invitation to speak to you at this highly significant event held here at Sunway University today. I wish specially to thank my old friend Professor Zheng Yongnian, board director of GIG. We both worked in Singapore at the same time on the NUS campus, several years ago. It seems like another world now.

I am also very honoured to be on the same panel as Dr Li Mingbo, Deputy Dean and Secretary General of GIG, and Dr Veronika S. Saraswati, Convener of the China Unit, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you, Maslisa Zainuddin, for moderating.

The organisers segmented today’s discussion into four parts: One on Geopolitics in the region, another on the technical feasibility of an ASEAN-China common market, the third on the industrial and advanced technological paths towards a common market, and lastly, this one, on cultural exchanges and people-to-people connections.

It’s rather appropriate that this people-to-people session is done over dinner. Nothing binds people together more easily than the sharing of a meal, especially after a hard day’s work and in such lovely surroundings as we have here at Sunway.

So, what is people-to-people connectivity? Should we think of it (1) as ties between nationalities, between national collectives, or (2) as collaborations between organisations and NGOs, or should we be more ambitious, and think of it (3) in terms of individuals?

There are at least those three levels to differentiate between when we talk about “people-to-people connectivity”, and I believe there are different things we can learn from looking at them separately. Each level involves different levels of mutual understanding, reach different depths in personal identity, and touch different parts of our heart-and-mind.

And they involve different levels of political intervention, and different intensities in political intervention.

1. Nation-to-nation happens in the realm of “Diplomatic or Cultural Exchange”. In effect, they are events organised at a political level.
2. Organisation-to-organisation involves members of the socio-political and socio-economic elite having organisational platforms to connect with brother-platforms across borders.
3. Individual level connections involve the personal interests of individuals and the processes they go through to cross cultural lines.

Within the present turning around process in geo-economic de-coupling or de-risking or disentangling, we have to ask ourselves when and how people-to-people connectivity can best be transformative, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, lasting, and not merely transactional, hesitant and transient.

I would like to focus, if I may, on the more spontaneous and less structured aspect of people-to-people connectivity, looking from the bottom upwards – from the individual outwards, as it were. Facilitating people-to-people connectivity at this level is vital for any ties across cultural boundaries to be profound, productive and durable.

Now, connections tend to involve some amount of “Curiosity” and Humility. These sentiments kick-start a learning process that leads to Comprehension of—and a sense of empathy for— “the other”. With that comes a sense of Participation and excitement in the workings and wellbeing of the once-unknown and distant “other”. And at that point, we can say that we have proper people-to-people connectivity – We have Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

CULTURAL CROSSINGS

From being humbly Curious, you begin to Comprehend and empathise, and with that, you gain a sense of belonging, a sense that you are Participating in the contemporary history of “the other”. And you then naturally spread that sense of connection with “the other” among your own kind. In other words, we then have a “Cultural Crossing”.

For People-to-people connectivity to be enduring, there must be opportunities for individuals to be engaged in an epistemological process of getting to know each other across cultural borders. So, to nurture People-to-people connectivity of this more enduring and infectious type, we need to cultivate Curiosity in our own people.

Ladies & Gentlemen.

To my mind, strong ties across borders tend to happen at the cultural level in areas such as education, art exchanges, friendly competition in sports, and travels and explorations of all kinds.

What is also important to remember is that overtly politically-motivated ties should not take centre stage. In effect, government efforts tend to be most effective and enduring when they are geared towards facilitating cultural ties, first and foremost.

Strong ties between peoples begin essentially as cultural and philosophical ties before they move on to become economic or political ties. More pointedly, strong ties are expressions of individual curiosity, not just of opportunism. Of sincere openness and not of shrewd cunning.

My own journey across the world has been one of curiosity and wonder on one hand, and loss and confusion on the other. I lived a third of my life in Sweden, half my life in Malaysia, and the rest in various places, including Singapore and China. My journey towards understanding China and historical Chinese culture was partly in negative reaction to European ways of thinking that I found highly confusing. It began with curiosity over its culture. Curiosity led to understanding and understanding to empathy. And from all that Cultural Crossing comes a sense of common humanity. That perhaps is my main point. Cultural crossings in the end, is a journey towards understanding one self.

NATIONS, REGIONS & REGIONALISMS

Ladies & Gentlemen.

Having said all that about individual curiosity, let me now move to the geopolitical side of things, and talk a bit about my understanding of ASEAN and contrast that to China. To my mind, this is a very different subject compared to the people-to-people aspect of this conference.

If we consider China as a region, and ASEAN as another, then we are basically drawn into a discussion about Regionalism itself. This is about Close Encounters of the First Kind.

Not too long ago, before 1990, Regionalism was considered a mechanism for smaller nations to get together in a conflicted bipolar world in order to retain some sovereignty and independence in a world torn between Capitalism’s Market Economies and Communism’s Planned Economies.

The world has changed a lot since then.

Today, if we wish to discuss China-ASEAN ties, be it inter-state, inter-organisation or inter-people relations, we have to consider what the geo-strategic situation and trends are, and how we got here.

Let’s talk about ASEAN first. This is a region that began to see itself as a geostrategic region during the Cold War. The original five founding members staked out what was in effect an anti-communist region. Brunei joined soon after its independence, and the remaining four—Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar—were included only after the bipolar world had ended, i.e. after 1990, and been replaced, in narrative at least, by a unipolar world under the USA.

But in what sense can we say that Southeast Asia, the region fronted by ASEAN, is a region? It has diverse religions, diverse histories, diverse ethnicities—and it is largely maritime in nature.

Also, and this is important, Southeast Asia entertains no civilisational imperative to unite into a region, something which Europe, in contrast, experiences very strongly. Southeast Asian regionalism is not about a re-union, or a desperate search for a re-expression of a bygone age or a lost civilisation. And also, it does not need to unite in order to avoid regular warfare between its parts.

Being partially maritime, Southeast Asia’s cultural diversities remain easily separate, historically allowing for cultural crossings to be more low-level, commercial and spontaneous—and in practice, less threatening.

Ladies & Gentlemen.

To understand ASEAN therefore, one cannot merely think of the organisation as a regionalist entity the way the EU is a regionalist entity.

In fact, ASEAN is a territory boundaried from the outside, not inflated from the inside. We look like a region by virtue of being outside of China, outside of India, outside of Australia, outside of the USA. Regional unity is therefore not as much a pillar in the foreign policy of each member state government as might have been the case if ASEAN were a form of European-style regionalism.

REGIONALISM IN A MULTIPOLAR WORLD

ASEAN as an organisation was able to expand to include all countries in the geographical region only after the world became somewhat unipolar. But we are now in an emergent—if not already existing—multipolar world. How is ASEAN to behave in such a world?

ASEAN started out largely as an extension of national security for the founding member states, and after the Cold War, its goals quickly shifted towards economic integration.

The world may be moving away from unipolarity towards multipolarity, but with the USA resisting this dynamic, ASEAN is left in limbo and fears that its relevance as regional peacekeeper and its status as a master of its own fate are diminishing.

It must now seek a new balance between being on the one hand, a guarantor of regional peace—its original function—and being on the other, a facilitator for regional economic growth.

Now, what is China in this context? Well, it is a giant country—or a region if you like—held together politically from within, and culturally by a long common history.

But what I experienced of China when I lived there was how diverse it actually is. Having been a united empire for so long, one could say that its cultural diversities—even within the Han majority itself—have gotten very familiar to each other. But it is culturally surprisingly diverse.

In Southeast Asia, our diversities were kept apart by geography, by colonialism and by the seas. If you ask me, I think Southeast Asians actually don’t know each other all that well. Politically, we are newly reconfigured, and our wish to connect with each other are usually more for strategic reasons than cultural ones.

We have not been as curious about each other as we like to think.

But with better transport links today, things are changing. Cheap flights have allowed for Indonesians to visit Vietnam easily; for Thais to go sightseeing in the Philippines, for Malaysians to travel to Bangkok for weekend trips, and so on and so forth.

The pandemic of 2020-2022 made us more deeply domestic tourists, but I think very soon, regional ties are going to become stronger than ever. Regional travel will grow greatly in the coming months and years. And such travel will not only be for sightseeing alone—further education, SME initiatives, art shows, academic conferences… such events will soon flourish more than ever.

And because of global tensions—which I see as part and parcel of the transition from global unipolarity to global multipolarity, interest and curiosity within the East Asian region among East Asians will continue to rise in the coming decade.

Southeast Asians will—individually or collectively—seek to explore the East Asian region, from China all the way down to Indonesia, and for diverse reasons. The Chinese will be wanting to do the same.

So, when we talk about China-ASEAN relations, we should consider them, both within the narrower context of growth in intra-ASEAN ties as well as the larger context of improvements in intra-East Asia interactions.

Barring some bad upheaval in geopolitics, I believe the trend is towards stronger connections within East Asia as such—not merely across regional boundaries between ASEAN and China, for example; but across cultural lines within countries and within the regions as well. Encounters of all kinds should flourish.

CULTURAL CRISSCROSSINGS

In short, in a multipolar world, there is a good chance that people will become more curious about neighbouring cultures and societies, and become humbler as they learn about each other’s achievements and cultural legacies.

I talked about Cultural Crossings in the life of an individual. Piggybacking on that, let me describe what may happen as intra- and inter-regional trust in East Asia grows deeper, to become an exciting process of “Cultural Crisscrossing” between peoples, and between nationalities.

Cultural curiosity is not a one-way street, in the end. It is not a two-way street either. In fact, it tends to spread out in all directions if given a chance, and if no political agenda gets in the way.

In a multipolar world, multilateralism at all levels tends towards becoming the norm. Diversity will be increasingly seen as a strength, and as the reason for us to be curious and respectful of each other.

Thank you everyone for listening.