 Your Excellencies, Dean, colleagues, and friends, I'm Kong Yun-Fong, Vice Dean for Research and Li Ka-Sheng Professor of Political Science at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. And on behalf of the school and the Lowe Institute, it is my pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's launch of the Lowe Institute Asia Power Index 2019. When Dr. Michael Fully Love, Executive Director of the Institute, approached us about participating in this launch, we said yes immediately and enthusiastically, not only because Michael and I go way back to his Oxford days, but primarily because I'm a real fan of the index. So allow me to share a personal anecdote about how that came about. Last year, this time, I was struggling to write a paper for the British Journal of International Affairs on how power in world politics has changed in the last 100 years. Truth be told, my teacher Joseph Nye has cornered the market on power. Soft, hard, smart, sharp. What have you? He has written a book on all of these things. So what else is there for me to write about on power, right? As I did my research, I stumbled upon the Lowe's Just Released Asia Power Index, and their findings, on which Michael and Herbie and Bonnie will regale you later, they resonated so seamlessly and brilliantly with my evolving ideas that the index occupied a very prominent place in the eventual essay. Without the index, I think the essay would have been much more woolly and wishy-washy. Now, I marveled at the methodological rigor, the transparency and the gumption of the index. Let me just say something about the gumption part. All measures of national power face a vexing conundrum. And that is, when you say that country A has x, y, z power, it begs a question. Does that tell us anything about its ability to achieve the political outcomes that it wants? In other words, its power like money, fungible. The answer by the leading theorists of power is yes, but only to a very limited extent, because so much depends on the issue or the context. Having nuclear weapons, for example, is not much help in persuading OPEC to lower its oil prices, right? The Asia Power Index seems dissatisfied with this issue-oriented way out of the problem, preferring instead to confront the challenge head-on by going beyond just relying on our traditional measures of power resources, such as the size of the economy, military spending, and so on. They do this by coming up with measures for four types of influence, not just resources. What they call cultural influence, diplomatic influence, defense networks, and economic relationships. So if you score high on these measures, you are presumably better at converting your resources into desired political outcomes. And lo, we had the nerve to combine these measures of influence with the traditional measures and then sum them up into a single metric for each of the 25 countries that they treat. This is a very impressive achievement for those of us who study these things. The index tells you about A's ability to achieve its outcomes better than most similar studies out there. Let me end on a slightly different note. As I worked on my essay, I had to settle on an acronym for the Asia Power Index instead of repeating it every time. The acronym happens to be A-P-I, or API. And for those of you familiar with Bahasa Indonesia or Malaysia, API means fire. Although I would wish otherwise, you have to wonder whether this might be an apt metaphor for the geopolitics of Asia in the decades to come. On that somber note, I'll better hand over the stage to Dr. Michael Fulilof. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Ambassador's High Commissioner's Consul's General. First of all, thank you very much, Professor Kong Fung Yuen. Prof Kong for that kind introduction. As Yuen hinted, he was one of my professors at Oxford, one of my favourite professors. And it's delightful to see him again today. Thank you for what you said about the gumption of the index. That's something we pride ourselves on, is gumption and ambition and a bit of audacity. Thank you for pointing out... I know that the Singaporeans always love acronyms, so I knew that you would come up with something like API. Thank you for pointing out what it means in Bahasa, API. It's funny you mentioned that because today, Hervé Lemer here was interviewed by BBC World. And the background, it's quite funny if you want to look it up, the background on the stage is of the world presented as a ball of fire. And I did have to say on Twitter, let me just make clear for the record that that's not a finding of the Asia Power Index, that the world is going to explode. But perhaps we were asking for it, Prof Kong. Thank you also to the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School, Professor Danny Kwa, who's with us this evening. We're delighted to collaborate with your school. So thank you, Professor. Welcome, everybody, to this global launch of the second edition of the Lowy Institute Asia Power Index. Everybody joining us online as well as people here this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, when former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gave the keynote speech at the 2017 Shangri-La Dialogue, he paid tribute to Lee Kuan Yew's wisdom and his insights on the relations between states and indeed also on the relations between people and even animals. Mr Turnbull reminded us that in 1966, when Singapore was but a year old, Prime Minister Lee cited the old Chinese saying, big fish eat small fish, and small fish eat shrimps. After independence, Prime Minister Lee initially saw Singapore as a shrimp, but he concluded after thinking about it that Singapore could make itself unpalatable to bigger fish by becoming self-reliant and strong, and Singapore could make friends with other fish through strong alliances and collective security. So this was a wonderful insight and I'm pleased to say that our Asia Power Index covers both of those elements, making friends and making yourself unpalatable, but we also cover everything in the ocean, the shrimp and the fish both great and small, and we show I think that even the smallest nation can swim with the big fish if it is nimble and savvy. Ladies and gentlemen, global wealth and power are moving eastwards towards Asia, and we need research tools to track that nature, the nature of the speed and the extent of that shift, and that's why three years ago the Institute commenced work on this ambitious Asia Power Index. Last year we launched the first edition in the United States at the Asia Society in New York. We went to Washington, we briefed it to the White House, the Pentagon, to the intelligence community where a senior CAA analyst told us it was the best attempt at quantifying power that he had ever seen. We took the index around Australia, but also to the World Economic Forum in Davos, to Bangkok and to Beijing. This year we decided to launch the second edition of the index here in Singapore. Why? Because of Singapore's strategic location, because of the caniness of Singaporean strategic policy dating back to Lee Kuan Yew, because many of us admire what Singapore has made of its strategic circumstances. And if you're coming to Singapore, then why not come to the Lee Kuan Yew School and why not come in the week of the Shangri-La Dialogue? Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to pay tribute to Hervé Lemma here, the director of the Asian Power and Diplomacy Program, a very impressive young scholar who's shown enormous intelligence and wit in leading a small team to produce this first-class product. I'd also like to pay tribute to Bonnie Bly, the research fellow on the project and Hervé's partner in crime. I also want to mention other colleagues at the Institute who've played a role because this has been a whole of Institute effort. I'd like to mention Anthony Bubolo and Alex Oliver, successive research directors while the index has been developed, but also other colleagues like Roland Raja, Lydia Papandreou, Aaron Bassett and many others. Let me tell you how the rest of the evening will work. I will invite Hervé Lemma here to come up and give us a short, sharp summary of the findings of the index, and then I'll share a panel to discuss the findings. So let me hand over to Hervé Lemma here. Thank you. Thanks very much. So it's time for the big reveal. The screens are descending in a very sort of slow but suspense-filled manner. In the meantime, let me just tell you, we know that Asia's economic transformation is changing the distribution of power globally. We didn't know how fast, we didn't know in what domains of power, and we didn't know where this would lead. But it's very clear, even if you look at GDP, in 1995, four of the largest five economies globally were situated in the transatlantic space, and they were the United States, followed by four of its treaty allies. Today, three out of the four largest economies are in Asia. China, if you take it at purchasing power parity levels, has already exceeded the US in economic size. India is the third largest economy globally, and Indonesia will level Germany by 2023. And in parallel, we know that there are tensions brewing in our region, which will determine the course of war and peace in the 21st century. So against this backdrop, and for a second year running, Bonnie and myself have assessed 25 countries with not only what they have, but also what they do with what they have, and that's a critical distinction. We go as far west as Pakistan, as far north as Russia, and as far into the Pacific as Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Now, it's not just economic resources that we think matter to our assessment of power. We think there are at least eight thematic distinctions to be made here. We have military capability, we have resilience, by which we mean the capacity to deter real or potential threats to state stability. That's particularly pertinent for the shrimp out there. We've got future resources, which looks at the projected distribution of economic, military and demographic resources. Why? Because that already impacts our perceptions of power today. And as I said, it's not just what countries have, it's what they choose to do with what they have in terms of diplomatic networks, in terms of their economic relationships, in terms of their defence diplomacy, and finally, but certainly not last in terms of their cultural influence. So we have 126 indicators, 30,000 data points, and when we map all of that, we come to an assessment of the distribution of power in Asia, which looks something like this. Now, three big trends before we move into the country results. One is we are picking up on the fact that the international order is changing from an open and consensual one, since the fall of the Cold War, to one, define more by competition and zero sum politics, certainly between the largest players. Two, I think globalization will continue in this period of great power competition, but perhaps not involve China and the United States together. What that means is a more hazardous variant of globalization, dominated by spheres of economic influence. Three, and somewhat paradoxically, it means that middle powers become more important to the balance of power in negotiating the relationships with the two largest players that are gridlocked, and as they have to deal with a region in which U.S. strategic predominance is fading and China's ambitions are sharpening. So what does this mean in terms of five big results? Because as I say, we have limited time, and I will just canvas what we think are the big results for this year. The United States remains the preeminent power, but in our assessment has become a net underachiever. By that I mean it is still the largest military force in the world and in the region. It is also a cultural influence in our region, a cultural influencer in our region, not just in terms of the exports of cultural goods and services, not in terms of movies and music, but also in terms of the way that the information landscape is wired in Asia. People still consume English news. If you look at where countries in Southeast Asia devour their foreign media, it tends to be American publications, even if you're reading about Chinese politics. You're not necessarily reading Chinese publications about American politics yet. That's a critical distinction. But the problem comes with the revisionist economic agenda of Washington and the clash that presents in terms of the traditional consensus-based leadership the preeminent power used to forge in our region. And one of the biggest upsets for the United States this year is that it's ranked third behind both China and Japan in terms of its diplomatic influence. And if you want to look at foreign policy in particular, the United States lags even further behind in 11th place. And on top of that, as Professor Kong was already alluding to, in our assessment of the power gap, the United States has become a net underachiever. Now, what does that mean? It means that the US should perform better, according to our model, than it does on the basis of its size and its resources. You'll notice that China is also an underachiever. And it tends to be the smaller players, like Japan, like India, sorry, not India, like Singapore, that tend to be the overachievers in our region because smaller powers band together to pursue their geopolitical interests. And it explains why the region is more than just a two-player game. There are other players here. There are India and Japan in particular, which form a separate placement in our rankings as major powers. What we see is that Japan is a classic overachiever. Whilst it is lagging in military capability, it does much better in terms of its diplomatic influence. In that sense, we think it's a quintessential smart power using the country's limited resources to wield a top four ranking across the four influence measures. Now, maintaining a liberal order has become a key organizing principle under the premiership of Shinzo Abe. And Tokyo has successfully resuscitated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was an ambitious free trade agreement first led by the United States. But in the absence of that kind of multilateral initiative by the U.S., Japan has filled a void. Now, where do we stand on China? Because China, the emerging superpower, netted the highest gains in our overall assessment. And I'm just going to go into its profile here. For the first time, China ranked first in our assessment of economic resources, and that's despite slowing growth rate. The world's largest trading nation has also paradoxically seen its GDP become less dependent on exports. What does that mean? It probably means that China is less vulnerable than many other countries in our region to the escalating trade war. Access to Western markets will likely prove increasingly marginal as well to the global ascendancy of Chinese tech. Why? Because China's economy has shifted to a domestic consumption model, making large-scale implementation of new technologies like 5G easier to achieve at home. But more importantly, China has also become the largest source of foreign investment in developing countries, which means it can roll out its technologies in emerging markets. So if I have a look at the levels of the relative importance of China as a foreign investor in the countries of a region, it's quite noticeable, and this is as a percent, the strides that it's making in its immediate neighborhood. Now, what does this mean in terms of military capability as well? China still lags the United States, but it's chosen to concentrate its resources and modernization efforts on its nearer broad in contrast to America's global military posture. Within its region, China's defense budget is 56% larger than ASEAN, Japan, and India combined. So you can have a look at that here in terms of defense spending. India is another quite interesting result. What it lacks in influence it makes up for in scale, and I think the best comparison or point of comparison is with Japan. So if I go to Japan and I compare it with India, the two powers almost present mirror images of each other. Japan is an overachiever in terms of cultural influence, in terms of its defense diplomacy, in terms of its economic relationships in the region. And even in terms of its diplomatic influence where it's ranked second, India ranks highest in terms of the sheer scale of the economic size of the country. Its military capability is ranked fourth, its resilience is ranked fourth as well, and its future resources are bright. It's going to add over 200 million people to its working age population by 2045. Where it lags, however, is in diplomatic influence where it's down by two rankings. In economic relationships, which suggests that Narendra Modi's act east policy lacks substance, and in terms of its defense diplomacy, we know it's a non-aligned country, but it's meant to be doing more even in terms of its non-allied partnerships. What about other countries that have done well? It's notable that North Korea has made the most gains behind China. The nuclear power jumped five rankings in diplomatic influence just in the last year since the first summit took place between the United States and, well, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Now, it starts from a low base. It was ranked in 21st place for diplomacy last year, and now it's ranked five places higher than that. What does that suggest? It suggests to us that summit diplomacy, ostensibly on equal terms with the United States, has elevated and partly normalized North Korea's regional standing. So if I go into North Korea's profile here and have a look at where it made the most progress, it tends to be in things like its diplomatic influence, where it's jumped five places, but also in our assessment of its future resources, as what it really wants is a lifting or relaxation in the international trade sanctions regime. But in the absence of that, the relaxation in its enforcement is already enough of a concession to register an uptick in its outlook for its economy. It has also advanced in military capability by one ranking, and this is rather ironic because we are no further along to denuclearization. To the contrary, we've estimated that North Korea has produced enough fissile material to build 12 new nuclear weapons since the first summit. So it has not compromised on its hard power, but it has gained on its influence in the region. There is an interesting mix of other middle powers that have made strides over the last year. Malaysia in particular has fared better under the Prime Minister Mahathir, his surprise return last year, really shifted things around and left China rather perplexed as well as to where Malaysia stood with regard to the Belt and Road Initiative. But again, it suggests that there's a new emphasis on trying to get better terms from China's largesse. And Malaysia, and not just Malaysia, Myanmar as well, was successful in renegotiating the terms of flagship Belt and Road Initiative projects in favor of the borrower, and which suggests that actually China's inability to convert its economic soft power into bigger leverage or more influence in other domains remains in question and rather limited. Vietnam has also scored incredibly well. Vietnam has made strides in its military capability. It's also exceeded to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It's played a much more robust role in terms of its economic diplomacy. That contrasts heavily with Taiwan, which is the only territory in our index that has registered a downward shift in our assessment of power. Why is that? The diplomatic outcast has become even more isolated. It lost two diplomatic allies last year when we mapped the number of countries that we had economic relations with, which are a small grouping anyway. And on top of that, the relative scale of Taiwan faced with the military modernization efforts of China is diminishing, and that is actually something that's rather worrying for people concerned with the balance of power in Asia, because Taiwan remains a core check on the ambitions of China to become a full-fledged maritime power. There are silver linings, however. Taiwan is up in technology. It's also up on defense diplomacy as a result of its exchanges with the United States. The final point I want to make is that ASEAN centrality and the Big Tent diplomacy convened around it is often dismissed as an inadequate and anachronistic mechanism for managing great power politics. However, I think Taiwan offers a case in point that suggests that its absence from those same multilateral forums proves that regionalism still carries strategic benefits for those inside the Big Tent diplomacy. Eight out of ten ASEAN countries registered upward trends in their overall power score in 2019, and I think that is rather counter-intuitive. So whilst there is often a temptation to reduce the complexity of Asia's international order to a two-player game, in reality I think the Indo-Pacific system is sustained and created by a much wider array of actors, and that's what we hope we've given you a sense of today with this latest edition of the Asia Power Index. Thanks very much. Terrific. Thank you, Herve. I think you've got a sense of both the insights that fall out of the index, but also the richness of the interactive version of the Institute, and let me encourage anyone who's interested to check out the URL, check out the index at power.loweyinstitute.org, because you can see just in the way that Herve manipulated it, the ability to play with it, to change the weightings if you wish, to compare individual countries, to dig down to the indicator levels is very impressive. Let me invite the other panellists to join the stage, if you would. Let me ask each of Prof Kong and Prof Badge Pie, what did you make of the overall findings, and perhaps I'll start with you, Ewan, to what extent did it conform with your understanding or your perception of the balance of power in Asia, and what extent did it differ? Thank you, Michael. It confirms perfectly with my understanding. That's why I like it so much. I think... Let me just share a couple of thoughts. One is that the index shows clearly that Asia is bipolar, and this is actually a very important finding, because if you have been following how analysts and decision makers in the region talk about the region, the dominant characterization is that it is multipolar or trending in that direction. So the low index disagrees and says that it is bipolar. The second point I wanted to share is that now bipolar situations are associated with geopolitical rivalry, as well as military conflict. Think of the US-Soviet Cold War competition and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Not very reassuring. Will this logic then, if this is a bipolar system today, be replicated in the coming Cold War between the US and China? The geopolitical competition, yes, it is happening. For me, this will be a struggle for the number one position of hegemony in Asia. The US wants to maintain its hegemony and China wants to displace it in due course. This is quite natural in the course of international politics. Whether it will lead to a military clash is harder to say. It depends in part on how fearful the US is of China's rise. It depends on how patient or impatient China might be it depends on the alignment choices of states in the region and a host of other imponderables. I have other thoughts I would like to share but I think I'll stop there. Great, I want to bring Hervé and Bonnie in on some of your points but let me first go to Prof Badge-Pie. Yeah, thanks very much. I think seeing the United States and China at the top was not particularly surprising but it's good to see that confirmed. I thought two or three things struck me as a bit unusual. The first is that if you look at the Eurasian landmass there's basically no competition. China and Russia dominate the landmass enormously from Vladivostok pretty much up to the Baltic certainly in the Asian landmass and it's interesting that whether India rises or not India is not a player in the Eurasian landmass cut off by the Himalayas and by Pakistan so with China's rise and sort of rehabilitation of Russian power the Eurasian landmass has basically fallen if I could use those words under the sway of China the China-Russia partnership so I think this very much shows that to be the case. The second is that if you look at the numbers the United States and its allies and quasi-allies in 2019 basically have either not seen an increase in power or have fallen in power whereas the countries that have increased in power are China, Russia and North Korea so the entire sort of western inclined system led by the United States has either stagnated or has declined in power that's another interesting point I thought I was surprised that all the Southeast Asian countries I think Hervé made this point have increased in power and it may surprise people but it surprised me that Singapore sits atop all 10 ASEAN countries as the most powerful country so the little red dot despite the size of Indonesia and so on actually comes out on top in terms of its power and I think for the region that's interesting I'll just finish with one other thought that I thought and I shared this earlier with the team which I found a bit anomalous given China's rise and its spot which is that this year Chinese military power has actually declined and so I thought it would be nice for the audience to kind of get the interpretation of the group on why that's the case so China's rising but its military power actually fell off this year I'll just stop there two questions I might go to Hervé on some of those and give you a shot at some of them I think the question of the bipolarity of the region and whether this inclines the region towards conflict perhaps some sort of Cold War style conflict and of course we are also seeing the decoupling in many ways of US and China so Hervé you might address that Prof Badjpai had these interesting points about the Eurasian land mass being dominated by China a relative decline of the western inclined parts of Asia compared to China, Russia and North Korea and then of course Singapore and I might say that we didn't rig the numbers to compliment Singapore because we knew that we were launching it this year Singapore always does very well always punches above its weight to use that phrase for reasons that I might invite Hervé to tell us about Sure, so thanks and incredibly interesting remarks there I'm fully, I'm surprised as well to see the degree to which the western inclined block has remained stagnant in some sense it's what we know we're talking about developed markets who are not growing the same rates other than Australia these countries are no longer growing demographically either and so it's expected but it's a stark reminder of what's happening in terms of relativity the region is inherently bipolar I agree I think we are heading towards a new chapter in great power politics where under most plausible scenarios short of conflict the US and China the US will not be able to halt the power differential the narrowing power differential between itself and China I actually think that that's still in gender's opportunity though for middle powers and that may also explain why in some sense choice and bargaining power or bargaining leverage is a form of power and it may go some lengths to explaining why 8 out of 10, not all, but 8 out of 10 managed to trend upwards in the region the uncertainty that that creates forces choices but choices of form of power and we saw that with the increased degrees of opposition that President Xi Jinping's flagship Belt and Road Initiative has engendered over the last year now when it comes to China's military capability there's no question that actually things get more difficult China's military rise is not linear it's spending a lot more money but it's not just about creating new capability it's about maintaining the capability you already have and maintaining is a very costly endeavor just as the Americans the more you build the more you have to sustain at current levels at the same time wages for your armed forces become more expensive and if you're going to be competing at the cutting edge of technology with the United States you're going to be investing much more in your R&D and so I think in some sense the transitional phase that the PLA finds itself in where it is actually cutting down its armed forces where it has to contend with a region that is also doing more to hedge against China's military rise explains why there is that small dip in its military capability score from last year whether that is a dip that becomes a longer term trend too soon to tell I would doubt it but it does serve to remind us that China's rise in a military domain or any other domain is not linear or self-sustaining it's going to be a challenge Can I pick up I'm going to come back to the point that Prof Badge Pie made about the relative decline of the Western powers in terms of their rankings I mean you can see at a global level too that if Western countries could get their act together as it were if they were all of one mind if they were better coordinated in terms of economic size military capabilities then they're a very formidable network and I think that applies in Asia as well the problem is, or one problem is that the current President of the United States is a skeptic towards alliances he's not really interested in he's not interested in it appears in for example half submerged water features on the other side of the world he's not focused on that sort of stuff and my observation is that countries that have been beneficiaries of the US-led order in Asia and around the world have actually been slow to respond to this stimulus they've been slow to stand up and say okay if the United States is less interested in supporting this order what can we do so maybe I can ask anyone on the panel who's interested what would it take to shake some of these countries out of their torpor do you think and do more to support an order that to date has benefited them you mean the countries in Asia yep actually I mean we are seeing Japan step up in certain ways yep I think the mantra of the countries in East Asia especially in Southeast Asia has been that they really do not want to choose between the US and China but I've been making the point that as the geopolitical rivalry intensifies choose they probably will have to there'll be strong pressures from the US and from China asking them where to who are you going to align with if you signed up for the Belt and Road Initiative for the so-called win-win cooperation I mean can anyone in Southeast Asia afford not to sign up on this particular issue or if you say don't let Huawei into your telco infrastructure because if you do that you risk losing US intelligence well those are choices that countries here will have to make and from their choices you probably will get a sign on the moving future alignments now Southeast Asia's choices matter greatly for the superpowers because it is about forging a winning coalition on the political diplomatic front if almost all of the ASEAN countries were to side with one of the superpowers it will severely undermine the power or influence of the other not just in Asia but also globally for example in places like the UN and the WTO I mean I would just say that I guess everyone has pretty much already made a choice about how it's going to play the game between the United States and China which is I mean I think even India now which is to play a hedging game and to use the very fact it is an increasingly bipolar order to by threatening to tilt either this way or that way increase its own bargaining room and so I mean just to take the example of India you can see how it flirts with China when it's under pressure from the Americans as it is today over trade visas differences over Afghanistan differences over how to work with Iran and even over arms purchases from Russia so the Wuhan opening to China and all of that is a signal to the Americans that if you're not more helpful we're going to tilt somewhat back to China and I think when India is under too much pressure from China it begins to tilt towards the Americans and Southeast Asians have done that very well so I think that I mean contrary to what you say about shake them out of their top or I mean I think they have quite actively figured out how to live in this new world and they're seeing a regional order where they'll use the bipolar competition to tilt somewhat this way and tilt somewhat that way in order to increase their own bargaining room and I think it would be interesting to see what the Chinese and the Americans do in an order where no one's going to commit very decisively to either power just to exploit that space just to play devil's advocate you can play that hedging game when both superpowers are engaged in the great game in Asia but isn't the danger for many Asian states that if the United States does step back from the region if a re-elected President Trump or a future president says why are we involved with these commitments on the other side of the world then isn't it a much less congenial strategic environment for most Asian states in the sense that there's one huge resident power that dominates and it's harder to play the two off because none of us want to live in the shade of one big state is that a danger that if we're not too careful we may drive the Americans away and then find ourselves in a more difficult strategic circumstance? Well I'll just say very briefly I came back from a conference in China and it seemed to me the burden of judgment there was that the United States was not coming from Asia at all and there were still troops in Japan in South Korea American ships are quite aggressively patrolling in and present in the South China Sea and the East Japan Sea the Americans through FOIP the Free and Open Indo-Pacific are making a play to sort of come back and establish a presence on everything from infrastructure to trade and so on in Asia and so they didn't see an American retrenchment and I think we're probably being a bit too quick and being carried away by Trump's tweets, in fact on the ground the Americans are present and he hasn't taken them away so I would say that that bipolar structure will remain and we'll have these countries continue to exploit this so I'm not as worried perhaps as you would I think one shouldn't take for granted that let's say the majority of states in Southeast Asia will be very against a situation where you have one dominant power in Southeast Asia I mean during the Cold War they were quite happy to live with Americans in Germany provided America provided the goods and the economic goods so in today's world I can imagine Southeast Asians doing their calculations in such a way that they may go with the one who can provide them with their economic growth or for that matter there'll be still some lingering strategic distrust say of China but if China is the economic wave of the future and if you know the railroad initiative can bring everyone up the calculations may be such that and if America indeed for domestic political reasons will have reservations about being the world policeman the Southeast Asians may do the calculations accordingly and say so long as we continue to make a good living and we are strategically either way you have to answer to a higher authority doesn't make that much of a difference let me bring Bonnie Bly into the discussion if I can earlier Bonnie one of the panellists was talking about behavior at the United Nations and I think that's one of the new indicators that we've introduced this year can you take us through some of the changes that have happened in the 2019 index as opposed to 2018 and some of the findings that produced this year we added 13 indicators to our total numbers 126 now and as you mentioned one of the things we included was UN voting alignment we also take into consideration refined fuel security we thought that was really critical we also look at strategic ambition which I think would be of interest to you Professor Kong but yeah the UN voting alignment results have been fascinating what we found was that generally minor powers tend to band together much more at the UN and the results really show that countries like Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Nepal band together on the multilateral level and unsurprisingly the most rogue actor was the United States so its average alignment with the other countries in Asia was only at 26% and even with its allies it was pretty low so its closest sort of aligned voting partner at the UN was Australia but that was only at 64% so the United States pretty rogue actor comes to these votes in the Asian context not looking at non-Asian voting partners now China is a particularly interesting case when it comes to UN voting alignment there we found so the common narrative tends to be that China is swaying countries in the region to vote with it at the UN in exchange for economic investment using its cloud basically our results didn't actually show that at all so in fact there's a survey showing here China's most important partners in terms of its voting alignment were Russia and North Korea so Russia and North Korea tend to vote in alignment with China at the UN but if you have a look at all of Southeast Asia the alignment is extremely low obviously the US allies don't align with China but nor does Southeast Asia and that actually suggests that the narratives that we tend to hear if you look at the data and you look at this quite rich bilateral flows between countries you'll see it's not what we thought it was alright let me what I'd like to do now is go to the audience if I can I have lots of other questions I'd like to ask but we want to keep moving so we want to give people an opportunity to ask questions of the panel there are microphones arranged and I'm hoping that any minute there'll be a rush of people to the microphone thank you if you can't rely on the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School who can you rely on Professor Kua thank you very much for the presentation at the panel discussion it's been hugely interesting and extremely valuable for us to recalibrate our thinking about what's happening in the region I wanted to pick up on one of the remarks that Herve made early on in the presentation and it has figured implicitly in some of the panel conversation and that remark was we are global order is moving from what it used to be an open consensus based system to one now marked by competition and zero-sum thinking I hope I'm not misparaphrasing but I think those are some of the key phrases you introduced into this and I am curious how we go from the understanding of what's happening in terms of the API Asia Power Index to that kind of a statement so three points I might make in particular first is competition is of course not synonymous with zero-sum outcomes competition in a marketplace is good competition in the globalized trading system is good competition among universities is good we're all driven to higher levels of achievement so I'm curious about how you see the outline of this identification of greater competition and zero-sum thinking the second point I might make is that this comes tantalizingly on the heels of the statement about how we're moving from a transatlantic dominated four of the five largest economies world to one where the center of gravity as it were is more in Asia and I'm curious if there are connections to be made there then ok well I'll just leave it terrific point survey do you want to kick off yeah absolutely I think you know it takes us back to the contradictions because there are so many contradictory trends here one is that yes coalitions are what is required or what will be required by either the United States or China to prevail as the predominant power in Asia and yet both powers seem in some sense challenged by the by you know challenged in their ability to build these durable coalitions of countries and it isn't that the US is withdrawing geopolitically from Asia I don't think it is at all I think it's a very present actor I think it's a line system is still robust we don't just have a lot of treaty allies it has we also assess the health of those relationships and they are healthy but it is the fact that whilst the US is still a status quo power in terms of wanting to maintain its geopolitical advantages it has become in Gideon Rachman's word because this is an op-ed he produced a week ago a revisionist power in terms of its economic and trade agenda and there is a contradiction there in seeking to build alliances geopolitically but playing your economics unilaterally especially when the trade war isn't just targeted at China but also targeted at allies like Japan so the same kind of contradiction holds for China China is trying to build coalitions of the willing in terms of its economic diplomacy that's what BRI is all about it is a status quo power not a revisionist power it's a status quo power on economic diplomacy it wants to see the world of its organization maintained it wants to see deepening integration because that's exactly what the conditions that have allowed China to rise in the first place but it has become a revisionist power geopolitically and in so far as it's a revisionist power geopolitically in the South China Sea with 11 neighbors that it still has outstanding boundary disputes with or legacies of conflict with there is a trust deficit confronting China as well so these are contradictory trends I think again I would make slightly counterintuitive argument in the absence of either superpower to build durable coalitions in the presence of the contradictions that exist in their foreign policies there is actually room for maneuver here among middle powers but middle powers will have to play a much smarter game to maintain their comparative advantage we've seen that from Japan we're not seeing it from every country would anyone else like to jump in on those I mean just on Danny's point I mean I think you can see that when the United States and China is competitive it doesn't necessarily close off all the space and it's not necessarily all negative for smaller powers because as I was trying to suggest they're exploiting it they're trying to exploit both powers to their advantage I think Yunfeng thinks that the polarization is going to force smaller countries to choose and that would in fact be not such a great outcome but we'll have to see I mean there's a balance between whether they're inclined to do that or whether they're clever enough to exploit the distance between the two powers to their advantage and I think that's going to probably vary and their diplomatic smarts are going to show in whether they can exploit that so I think that's one could make a larger argument about the benefits of competition even between the United States and China which is just to say that in the effort that national societies have to put into competition they improve their efficiencies and competitiveness and so on they get more integrated societies and so forth so competition between great powers may not all be bad if they don't exceed certain limits let me yes Aaron Connolly double I double S Thanks Michael and thanks Irvay and Bonnie great product with this year's edition of the Asia Power Index I have a question for both of you I think one aspect that perhaps gets lost in this region when we talk about the decoupling that we've been seeing emerge over the last couple of years is human rights and I'm curious as to how two countries in particular that have had human rights issues over the last couple of years have fared in the Asia Power Index and that's Myanmar with 10,000 Muslim Rohingya in the Chinese state has that affected Myanmar's soft power at all and Bonnie in particular has it affected voting at the UN in terms of who aligns with Myanmar that sort of thing sanctions, economic sanctions has that affected them at all and then the bigger one which is China and the 1 to 2 million Uighurs who are interned in Xinjiang has that affected China at all Thanks very much So I think on Myanmar it is actually Aaron and I share a Myanmar interest it is you can actually see a small, let me just try to find it, it's so tiny and that's already half the story of Myanmar, it's such a large country and yet it's such an under performer in the region because it's so inward looking it's strongest performance I think is in military capability is geared at domestic security threats not trying to compete with powers outside of its borders and I think what we've seen is if you want to look at some trends that Myanmar has dropped in terms of its cultural influence and in terms of its diplomatic influence as well and where is that coming from it's coming from diplomatic network which takes on board things like the efficacy of embassies or it's just a lot of data points here but also it's multilateral power where we have looked at voting alignment in particular and that is also trending down for that now I mean it raises a bigger question because I think Myanmar is the only country in Southeast Asia to have had over 60 years of uninterrupted internal conflict and why is that important to our assessment of power because you need to be able to have domestic governance in order to be able to, as a baseline in order to be able to compete and advance your interest abroad in the absence of institutional stability you actually or a country becomes more vulnerable to being influenced from abroad, Myanmar has a long standing history of proxy warfare from Thailand, from China and now proxy warfare in terms of being supported by organized crime so it's not all state based but all these things are debilitating now coming back to China it's exactly the same the exact same principle applies so one of the eight measures of power and I always think it's the most underappreciated is this concept of resilience that we've got because by that we mean the ability of countries to withstand threats to just ability and one of the core pillars of that is something called institutional stability why does it matter that China's confronting atrocities in Xinjiang from our perspective I mean it matters in terms of human rights it matters in terms of value value based diplomacy but it also matters because a large proportion of spending towards security in China is actually geared at a domestic threat as opposed to an external threat and things become more difficult so one of the conclusions we make is that the biggest challenge to China's rise is not necessarily the United States it's itself it faces distrust in the region it also faces internal challenges such as the fact that you know has these conflicts taking place it's heavy handed response to them but also fundamentally demographically it's an aging society and that means that it's working age population is diminished by about 158 million people by 2045 that means a far less productive workforce that also means that the burden of expectations on the Communist Party changes towards enhanced public goods as opposed to as a huge economic growth rates so we think the challenges for China are substantial and they add to it's probably the fact that it could probably level with the United States but not necessarily surpass the United States as being the undisputed leader in our region Onee I want to give you a chance to speak as well Yes so what you raise is quite interesting so you're suggesting that Myanmar's voting alignment would have generally gone down in the region as a result of the human rights atrocities and as Hervé mentioned the results show it does slightly yes but in general it still has a really high result and that's because it's neighbouring countries still band together with it and often the UN voting patterns can be quite benign depending on the issue so in many cases you'll find it doesn't matter what the issue is they will band together and then in certain topics so for example on the South China Sea China will ramp up its pressure on certain partners to vote a certain way so it will be really interesting to then take all this sort of bilateral voting data and then link it back to the issue areas that they're looking at in specific resolutions and to do that you really need to do it over a few years as well so we've only done this for the first time this year but I think there will be some pretty interesting correlations between issue areas and then as you said human rights atrocities things like that It's interesting to see North Korea there ranked among the top voting partners for Myanmar Yeah We've got time for two more questions what I might do is take both of the questions at once and then give everybody on the panel the opportunity to choose like food from a buffet what they would like to answer so sir Hi, I'm Associate Professor Terence Lee from the Department of Local Science at the National University of Singapore so my question is largely about the drivers that you see with respect to the rise and the fall in the index you've had two years now to discern some trends about countries that are going up and countries that are going down so I want to put forth to the researchers of the index and as well to the panellists what do you think are the key drivers of countries that are going up or going down are they more domestic are they more transnational like something like globalization Thank you Terrific question and yes one of my colleagues from the institute Ben Bland Thanks Michael so my question relates to the point Herve was making about China's weaknesses you said that nothing short of war could stop the rise of China relative to the US but given all those concerns we know that the economy is also slowing because of the trade war China's faced increased pushback around the world it's got domestic problems in Xinjiang in Hong Kong isn't there a risk that you're overestimating China's rise and you're underestimating a lot of the fragilities of the system in your model Thanks Excellent I might Hong Kong do you want to address either of those questions about the drivers or about the weaknesses I have the thought Actually I was less concerned about the ups or downs in this one or two years because to me this is very unlike the times higher education ranking of world universities where every year universities jump many spaces what I really appreciate about this particular index is that if you look at the things that really count positions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 no change to me the more impressive finding is that actually the US and China according to the index remain the two superpowers in the region that explains a lot of the things that have been happening in the last 5 years to me I'm happy, I'm a happy camper I would throw in the technology issue for China it's not very clear there's quite a lot of unease over this Huawei affair and what it means and I think this idea that China has now got every technology covered and it doesn't really matter if the Americans place these sanctions and so on on them internally driven that's not going to be the case and if China wants to get out of the middle income trap and get to the next level it will have to pay a lot of attention to the technology issue and I would say just to be provocative that the Americans are testing the proposition that economic interdependence between China and the United States is so deep that it cannot in fact be challenged decoupling is exactly that challenge I think the ban and led group are sort of saying we can decouple it will hurt the Chinese more than it will hurt us and if it slows Chinese growth it could affect internal Chinese political stability and call into question the role of the Communist Party so they're drawing a parallel to how the containment game ended in the Soviet Union they fell behind technologically further and further behind and it got to a point where the Soviet Union unraveled so I think they're playing a much deeper game they maybe proved entirely wrong because China seems to be much more dynamic economically but I think we'll have to watch this trade war isn't a trade war it's really a technology war and so we'll really have to see how much the American technology denial kind of attempt is going to harm the Chinese economy or not and the only other point I would make which is not really related the questions is that but I suppose it is in a way which is very impressive that all the Southeast Asian economies are doing very well and these countries are rising in power and it does suggest that something to do with kind of economic regimes in these countries is the driver of their dynamism part of that is the link to China and the China market and maybe BRI will further boost their dynamism but it does look like they're going to be an enormous force for economic change and dynamism in Asia for quite a long time Bonnie So the question of change in the index is a really interesting one and I can tell you we were sweating bullets the day that the final results came out because we didn't know what it would look like until we got the final numbers you know every single final data point was finished up and we were quite happy with the outcome because on the top level there isn't much movement there's just been two ranking changes so North Korea takes over the Philippines and Laos takes over takes Mongolia so quite minor on the ranking side but then if you go below that level and look at the measures that's where the movement happening and as you'd expect there's movement there's less movement where it's about the structural underpinnings of a state's power so when we're talking about its geopolitical stability it's you know it's resources you know all those basic fundamentals demographics these things unless you have like a one China policy one child policy they're not going to change overnight then the most movement and the biggest surprises we saw in our results were in the diplomatic influence measure and that is also to be expected that's because you know you're talking about the mood of the day the individual at the helm you're talking about how effective is the country's diplomacy how ambitious is it being strategically and on those fronts you know you would hope for a bit more movement and we also took in some qualitative assessments there to incorporate those changes so yeah I think we were quite happy to add one more point to add as well as when you go through the index at home you'll see we were really careful and distinguishing between you know ranking changes and score trends so a country can actually be trending downwards in its score but overtake another country in its rank and that's because we're looking at relative power so it's not enough for you as a country to be relatively you know to be well you can actually be very stable as a country but if your context is changing your relative power is changing now results will change and I think that as well makes sense from a methodological and a theoretical point of view as well. Hervé you've got the last word just on this cold war I think the idea can we even call it a new cold war if it is one it will be different in two ways I agree with you the US is testing the proposition that interdependence can be weaponized and that is actually different to the last cold war we were dealing with distinct economic spheres of influence here we are dealing with interdependencies, mutual vulnerabilities and the US has decided to escalate so that's one point of departure with the last cold war. The second point of departure I think is the fact that keep in mind the Soviet Union had a GDP that was smaller than Japan by the 1980s so the US could leverage its larger economy very successfully and outspend essentially the Russians. Here we are dealing with the reverse dynamic China is the emerging market it will be larger despite challenges to its growth rate and it can sustain its economic growth because of this domestic consumption so that's the second point of difference the third point of difference which probably explains why we shouldn't even call it a new cold war is that I don't think we will have fixed blocks. I think Southeast Asia and the region will remain promiscuous between two superpowers locked in rivalry with each other and as far as both superpowers have an inability politically structurally to build these coalitions there will be opportunity for others to opportunize on the uncertainty I want to thank a couple of people I want to thank again Danny for hosting us today and Prof Kong and off Badge Pie it's wonderful to be here at the Leek on You School talking about big fish and small fish and shrimps and I particularly want to thank again Herve and Bonnie perfect timing as always I want to thank Herve and Bonnie and I want to invite everybody here to come to the lobby next door where we'll be having drinks you can sense I think how much these guys love talking about the index they've been closeted for a year doing nothing but the index so please come and talk come and ask some questions and please come and have a drink with us thank you very much