 So, welcome, one and all, this evening to the 82nd George E. Morrison Lecture in Ethnology, as it is formally called. Before we start, I'd like to acknowledge that we're meeting tonight on the unseeded lands of the Nanowall and Nambry peoples and acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging and in particular acknowledge the presence of any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people in the room today. Tonight as I say is the 82nd George E. Morrison Lecture. The George Morrison, the Morrison Lectures are the ANU's oldest public lecture. Indeed, they predate the ANU. The Morrison Lecture was endowed by, it says in the formal thing, Chinese residents in Australia and the first lecture was given in 1932 in the old Institute of Anatomy, which is now the National Film and Sound Archive. The lectures were given annually from 1932 until the Second World War when they lapsed. Then when the ANU was founded, one of the first things that the ANU did was to reinstate the Morrison Lectures and they've been going, I think I'm right in saying, every year since. I won't bore you with the list of the great and the good who've given this lecture, but they are really, as someone who comes from Chinese studies, there's not many greats of Chinese studies who have not given this lecture. It's a jewel in the crown of our university. Tonight's lecture is being given by Professor Evelyn Goh, who is the Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies here at the ANU. I'm not going to introduce Professor Goh, much so I'd like to. It's much more appropriate that I invite Amy King, Associate Professor Amy King, to do that honour. Amy, for those of you who don't know, is Associate Professor in the Strategic and Defense Studies Centre in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. She has particular expertise in Chinese foreign and security policy and Chinese-Japanese relations and the Asia Pacific region in general. She, her book from 2016, China-Japan Relations After World War II, Empire, Industry and War 1949 to 71, is, I think it's safe to say, a major work, if not the definitive work, on that field. Amy, would you like to come and introduce Evelyn? Thanks so much. Thank you, Ben, and it's wonderful to be with you all this evening. It's a very special privilege for me tonight to introduce our speaker, Professor Evelyn Goh, who, as Ben has mentioned, is the Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies, as well as the Deputy Director, responsible for research in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. My first encounter with Evelyn was actually through her work, I think. My first close encounter, I suppose, through her work, when I was a PhD student, sitting in Oxford's Rothamere American Institute Library, where I had the good fortune to read Evelyn's doctoral thesis and what then became her first book with Cambridge University Press, which focused on the monumental shift in U.S. policy towards China in 1972. We actually commemorated the 50th anniversary of Nixon's historic visit to China this February, and as Evelyn wrote a couple of months ago, Nixon's China trip helps us to think through a crucial question, how does radical policy change occur? She answered that question in her first book, showing that radical policy change does not just happen overnight in response to a billiard ball-like shift in the balance of power, but instead through her close analysis of U.S. presidential archives and other historical works and a focus on political discourse and narratives. Evelyn showed how American policymakers gradually redefined their ideas about China over many years, how they considered and debated a range of different policies towards China, and how important it was for the Chinese side, as well as the American one, to be ready for radical policy change. From the U.S.-China relationship, Evelyn then turned her sights to the wider East Asian region, and in particular Southeast Asia, returning in fact to her earlier history as a geographer of Southeast Asia, and particularly the Mekong region. In a series of high-profile international articles, Evelyn pioneered work on the strategies that Southeast Asian states have adopted towards the great powers. These articles overturned the idea that Southeast Asian states were non-strategic or merely passive recipients of the policies and behavior of the great powers. Instead, Evelyn became the first scholar to explain the concept of hedging by Southeast Asian states, and the impact of these hedging policies on Asia's wider regional security system. These works defined Evelyn's place as the world's leading scholar on Southeast Asian security, with her publications on reading lists around the world and her research taken up by policy audiences in the region, the U.S. and China, and very much bringing her to the attention of scholars and policy audiences here in Australia. In 2013, the ANU was fortunate to lure Evelyn from the United Kingdom to join SDSC here at the ANU. That year, Evelyn also published The Struggle for Order with Oxford University Press, a book that marked her out as a rare East Asian regional specialist, with expertise on China, the U.S., Northeast and Southeast Asia. I find The Struggle for Order to be the book on my bookshelf that I've returned to more often than any other. It's not always an easy read, but to my mind, there's no better explanation of the U.S.-led order in Asia. Evelyn shows us how East Asian states have helped to legitimize and construct a U.S.-led order since the end of the Cold War, how they have sought to incorporate China within this hierarchical order, and how Japan plays an unusual and often overlooked order-building role in the region. Japan and China are the subjects of Evelyn's most recent book, Rethinking Sino-Japanese Alienation, History Problems and Historical Opportunities, which was co-authored with Barry Bazan and which won the 2021-22 International Studies Association Asia-Pacific Distinguished Book Award. In this book, Evelyn again sheds completely new light on an old problem. She and Bazan explore the shared responsibility of China, Japan and the West for the good and bad parts of their modern history. To make us on a 500-year historical journey to show how, at key junctures between the 15th and 19th centuries, China and Japan negotiated great power bargains, which enabled relatively peaceful relations between the two, and think through the possibilities of a future strategic bargain between China and Japan. Beyond Evelyn's voluminous research and writing, she's a highly valued member of the Australian policy community, where she's valued for her expertise on the region and has provided expert education courses and advice on Asian security, Chinese influence and strategic diplomacy, in particular to the Department of Defense over the past decade. Here at the ANU, she has also created a lively community of graduate students and early career scholars working on Asian security. She's been instrumental in promoting traditionally marginalized voices and perspectives within our field. I'm thrilled this evening to be able to introduce a scholar who has reshaped our understanding of the East Asian region, my colleague, mentor and friend, Professor Evelyn Gull. Thank you very much, Amy. I'm not quite sure that I deserve that fulsome introduction, and I'll try to live up to that in what I'm about to share here in this limited amount of time that we've got. Let me begin first also by thanking Ben Penny and colleagues at the Center for China and the World here at the ANU for this very kind invitation. It's a real honor and privilege to be delivering this lecture tonight. Given that this is a lecture series that began with a focus on ethnology, I'm going to ask first, for colleagues in the room who might happen to be ethnologists, to forgive my slight cannibalization in the title and the focus of what I'm about to say. I'm not, of course, an ethnologist, neither am I an ethnographer. I have in this lecture, though, made up an idea of international political ethnography to help put across the main message that I'd like to deliver in this lecture. As you will have seen from the advertising, the starting point of the lecture on living with China's resurgence in East Asia is less China than East Asia. And I'm going to depart slightly from the cynic focus of this lecture series and think about how the rest have been responding to living with, resisting China's rise since the end of the Cold War in this region. Now, over the past 40 years, East Asia has been pretty much the vanguard of learning to live with a resurgent China. So I think that focus on East Asia is due. What's interesting about it, of course, is that there has been significant variation in the way East Asian states have responded to and have strategized about living with China. And regional policymakers, most interestingly for me, have often not behaved according to what many have expected them or theorized that they would do. And so those apparent departures from expectations in responding to China is what primarily animates this lecture tonight. I'd adopt insights from political ethnography and argue for an approach that privileges the viewpoints of what we might think of as our informants when we do fieldwork. In other words, East Asian policymakers. And to privilege broadly East Asian points of view and local and regional social political context in order to understand regional responses to a powerful China. From this part of the world that has had arguably to live longest with this resurgent China and also the historical variants of powerful China's in the past. So I'm going to shape what I'm about to take your time up with for the next 45 minutes or so in the following way. I'll give you a couple of headlines about my approach and argument and then say a little bit about my community of study, which is East Asia, and then the meat of the matter. I'll necessarily only be able to illustrate from a very rich database, if you like. Forms of living with China on the ground, which I think should be of interest and are most pertinent to the correctives of to how these questions have been approached so far that I feel are worth highlighting. So that's how I'm going to do it. And let me begin by explaining how I've cannibalized with apologies. Ethnographic approaches in what I've done in my work and proposed to continue doing in my research and train my students to do. In the spirit of political ethnographies, I'd say it's an approach that, as I said, privileges regional actors' perceptions of and strategies in managing China's rise. The treatment of East Asian actors as subjects rather than objects of study. In other words, East Asia is not a region in which great power contests simply unfold as exogenous factors. This idea of the spirit of political ethnography would emphasize for me, I think, particularly three things about how we approach these questions. First of all, you know, with an eye to capturing what will look like a very messy and complex picture by privileging the points of view of the actors in question in the region and through observation of not just their words but their actions as well, but within the context of the life world, which they understand to be theirs, not the world in which we think they ought to live in. And that observation over a period of time, not merely in the present in the context of today's policy debates. Secondly, a privileging and explicit understanding that when we look at how the region is responding to China's rise, we are really focusing on the insider's views and interpretations. In other words, the effort goes into understanding the intentions and meanings that these actors assign to their own actions, capturing the inner functionings, if you like, of, say, the strategic thinking process in name your East Asian state. Thirdly, that emphasis also on local, or some say micro, but local processes at the country and regional levels, rather than an abstract reliance on assumptions or imputations about what states ought to do in general in responding to rising powers. So these three elements, I think, for me hark towards, hark to an ethnographic kind of approach, which we don't often, in my field, international relations, strategic studies, explicitly acknowledge as important, although it does obviously inform the kind of research that many of us who are regional Asian specialists or China specialists all do. So it's worth being explicit about this. Now, I could, at this point, begin to fight theoretical battles about how this might or might not align with or compete with realism, et cetera. I'm not going to do that. I'd like to simply emphasize that what I've said about the three points to think about, points of view, context, local processes, are fairly commonsensical for most of us who have spent time in any region, being regional or area specialists. I'm much more interested in showing how our knowledge making as scholars changes when we actually engage with meaning making among the subjects of our study, and why that difference can be vital for some of the most urgent and important strategic and policy challenges that we face today in our region. And I think there's no other case that illustrates this better than not simply the observation about China's rise, but the observation about how China's neighbors have responded to this in the past three decades. So just to give you the headline, my broad argument here is that East Asian states do not think about China in a vacuum by itself. They don't think about China purely through the lens of US-China competition. Rather, East Asian states think about China always as part of a broader nationalist, as well as systemic set of considerations. That's my sort of argument in brief, which I proceed to unpack and hope will be made obvious in what I'm about to say following this. Now let me say a few words about my community of study, East Asia. I use East Asia in the way it is used in the region to denote the combination of Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. So China, Japan, Korea, and the 10 nation states of Southeast Asia which are collectively encapsulated within the association of Southeast Asian nations. Now, it's worth pausing for a moment here to take a few minutes to remember what an unusual collection of states this is. It is our region, so we kind of take it for granted that we forget that it is quite an odd bag. We have Japan, which is the second to third largest, currently third largest economy in the world, and an inspirational Asian miracle, first generation Asian tiger in economic terms, but nevertheless an abnormal power still today. With the history of regional aggression and expansionism, also the only country that has ever suffered a nuclear attack, attacks ever to date, currently still militarily emasculated by its post-war constitution and therefore more of a trading state than a full-fledged great power. Next to Japan, we have Korea, the longest lasting stable polity in the region over about 1,000 years of existence in approximately its current state borders since the Koryo dynasty. Today, a pop-cultural superpower, but however, since decolonization and since the end of the Second World War, a divided country and a separated people, heavily dependent on a variety of other states to help stabilize and perhaps eventually resolve this situation of separation. Alongside that, if you move further south, we have Southeast Asia, kind of similar to Korea in some ways, there is a Korean proverb, when whales fight, the shrimp's back is broken. There is a very similar Southeast Asian saying, when a bit noughtier, when elephants fight or also when they make love, the grass gets trampled. So that sense of being at the mercy of neighboring great powers is fairly similar in these two areas. We think about Southeast Asia, the most marked characteristic about this innately diverse region, for me, is that it is a thoroughfare. That gets you that sense very quickly of how being not just, you know, this sense of being squashed between great powers, Uno's famous characterization of Burma being hemmed in like a tender gourd amongst cactuses, and Burma-Myangma situation is very obvious in that sense, but the whole region, being a thoroughfare in trade terms, in transport terms, in geopolitical terms these days, is almost designed to be trampled over like grass by any elephant, really. And that's a fact. But I'd like us to take away from that the sense that that fact doesn't necessarily lead to the conclusion, therefore, that, you know, the lot in life of the careers in Southeast Asians in the world is to accept fate, right, and to accept that you just have no choice in going to be trampled over by others. The implication very often from the ground when you talk to policy makers and when we observe medium and long-term ways of managing great power politics in these regions, in these countries and regions, which includes both Korea and Southeast Asia, you know, very often the emphasis is much more in trying to avoid the elephants or whales fighting and trying to prevent them from loving each other too hard, as well, okay? So there's a sense of agency that comes out in spite of that thoroughfare character. And I'd like to acknowledge my colleague, Robert Cribb, Professor Robert Cribb's permission to use this, my favorite, and my students in the room will know this, this is my favorite diagram at the moment from his forthcoming in Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, volume three. For me, this visualization of the multiple tribute relationships at the turn of the 19th century in Southeast Asia, where we find Southeast Asian policies having hierarchical relationships with a large variety of superordinate powers near and far at the crossroads between China and India, between cynic Asia and Islamic Asia with the insertion of the European great powers as well, neatly encapsulates the sense that I'm trying to say to you that being a thoroughfare means the imperative for much greater agency, more that it means that it's your inevitable fate to get trampled upon. So that imperative to manage difficult great power, encroachments, rise and fall of multiple larger entities around you is something very real for this region, historically and in the present. Now I hope that these highlights from the ground should begin already to suggest some pretty obvious reasons why some of the usual frustrations that policy and other communities outside of the region might feel when approaching a region like this and trying to squeeze the region into preconceived boxes of what countries ought to do in the face of rising China. Again, as Amy said in my earlier work, I did a lot of work on Southeast Asian strategies towards great powers and the reason I did that was because I was frustrated by people constantly saying to me that Southeast Asians have no strategy. The obvious answer to that is not that Southeast Asians have no strategy, they just don't do strategy the way you think strategy ought to be done. But that doesn't mean there is no strategy and the task clearly is to engage in the research and the kind of international political ethnographic kind of work to unpack what that strategy may look like on its own terms. Similarly, we get complaints about why won't Japan balance China properly? At the end of the Cold War, we had complaints about why is there no Asian NATO, right? Then 20 years later, we had, well, why are there all these multilateral institutions that are just talk shops? Why is there no strong military action or allegiances that we can actually promote in this region, et cetera, et cetera? And I'd suggest that many of these questions, answers to many of these questions, begin with some of the content that I'm about to share with you in the next section. In the next section, I'm going to highlight what a more explicitly and ethnographically sensitive kind of research is able to do for us in understanding how East Asia lives with a research in China. Before I go there, though, I'd like to raise a reminder, right? When we talk about agency, right? Agency by definition is open-ended or choice by definition is open-ended, right? If agents in the region have choice, it means that they can choose one way or the other or in multiple ways. Just because they don't make a choice that you approve of doesn't mean they haven't made a choice, all right? And I'll just raise that caveat now and it'll probably make sense when I go to the highlights. Now, I'm only able to provide some highlights from a very wide range of research done by some very exciting scholars working out of this sort of approaches currently in the literature. And I'm going to briefly touch on four points. This thing about great power management highlight the non-binary nature of the strategic approaches in the region towards China, emphasize the economic security in nexus and then end with a reminder about the primacy of domestic politics in explaining how the region lives with the resurgent China. Let me start with great power management. Look, regional strategies vis-a-vis China are actually great power management strategies more holistically, all right? They're not just strategies to deal with China per se. I know that there are countries that have strategies that are to deal with China per se, US-China policy, for example. Regional strategies tend to put China in that bigger context of one of the multiple great powers that regional countries have to deal with for one reason or another. We often think that strategies are about winning wars or fighting them, all right? Or that strategies are about coming up with a string of ways and means to achieve a particular end. At least we do in strategic studies. By broader systemic context, I mean that when you look at how East Asian states deal with a resurgent China, very often the focus tends to be on ways to negotiate or help facilitate or shape the broader regional order, right? Within which they and China and other powers reside, right? That broader shaping of the broader system rather than simply accumulating power vis-a-vis China or simply winning a potential war with China. Most of the energy and time is spent on thinking about how to shape that order around which China and regional players must play a game. Let me illustrate. There's a lot of text, but it is quite important to get through what is expressed here. Let me borrow from my colleague, Nobu Tamaki, here who in a recent article in the journal Contemporary Politics tries to explain what contemporary Japan's approach to strategy looks like. A few things about his, I think, very detailed investigation based on interviews and understanding of the context, the kind of context I speak about from which Japanese policymakers operate and try to articulate their aims. He talks about yes, Japan is pursuing a rules-based order, yes, right, but importantly, the perception in Tokyo is that this is a pursuit which is via both balancing mechanisms, things like the alliance with the U.S. various forms of building up deterrence capabilities, both that as well as seeking domestic consensus building involving China. All right, number one. And secondly, this intriguing claim that Japan is attempting to find common ground with China based on strengthened alliance networks. I think that very beautifully illustrates what I'm trying to get across here about that broader, more multifaceted approach to thinking about living with China, not necessarily an approach that says we're going to fight China solely or we are going to accommodate China solely, but an approach that has this fairly subtle and sophisticated notion of what seems like diametrically opposed dualisms. Find common ground based on alliance networks but aren't alliances supposed to delineate us versus them and then to fight wars? But no, right, from this point of view, alliances are there to bolster you in some way so that you can find a way to live with China with a new consensus. Not so that you can fight them when the next war with China necessarily only. And the third part to emphasize from this fairly dense explanation that therefore in this context, the Japan-US alliance is of course the most important policy tool but just one of the policy tools for realizing this broader order within which it might be possible to live with China. So I mean by this sort of broader approach the sense that if one went and tried to say, well, is Japan balancing or bandwagoning? Is it balancing China or is it accommodating? That's simply the wrong question. There is no answer to that question from this kind of investigation of what the Japanese think they are doing. Because that's not what they think they're doing. This is what they think they're doing. A combination of quite subtly knitted together notions of how internal balancing, external balancing in terms of the alliance and diplomatic consensus building involving China actually intersect with each other as part of a coherent holistic strategy. Now it's not just Japan. We could do this exercise and go through the particularistic manifestations of this type of layered thinking that deals with apparently opposed policy tools and strategic options. And I'll just give you one more example, which is the Korean example drawing from Jiyeong-ee's very, I think, again, my students will know this because they have to read this for a useful contribution to the National Bureau of Asian Research's 2020-21 Strategic Asia Volume. And Yi really tries to explain, vis-a-vis China, right? She's trying to explain why the South Koreans have apparently reached some kind of non-decision about whether they're actually going to balance China or by leaving closer to the US alliance or not, right? She says, look, the kinds of threats that South Korea faces from China is not what the American audience usually thinks it ought to be. It's much more political and sometimes economic even than military in nature. Now this is quite radical, coming from what we think of as one of the massive flashpoints in East Asia, right? And in that context, because of that, the US alliance, she argues, is better understood as a mechanism to enhance South Korea's position and political leverage to deal with China and others. So the alliance isn't for warfighting necessarily. It's political leverage as well. And again, I mean, I could paraphrase this, but I think she puts it very well, so I'll give it to you in her own words. This makes a difference palpably to policy execution, she argues, because if one approached the US ROK, US ROC alliance, focusing merely on the role of military deterrence of North Korea, that will turn the alliance into a suboptimal mechanism that is geared only at crises and squander the broader role that the alliance can play, right, by creating peace and security in the region, she argues, and she goes into some detail in this, in the report. So understanding that broader order context gives us entry points, multiple entry points, to think about potential policy and strategic partnership leverage as well. I was going to hide the slide in the interest of time. I forgot. Amy, though, did highlight the book, Struggle for Order, from which this comes. The reason I was going to hide this in the interest of time because everyone hates where they are on this hierarchy, apart from American audiences. But I put it out there as an illustration of this, what I'm saying here, about having a broader sense of the order, the purposes of facilitating some sort of order coming out of individual state strategies to respond to China's rise. And this comes out of that study I did in 2013, with that broader question of, well, there's panoply of in-between things that all the East Asian states are doing, what does it amount to? And at the time the argument was, yeah, it amounted to this. This was the hoped for outcome of those strategies that China would be integrated somehow into the pre-existing US-led order, but in a way that was stably subordinate in the second rank to the United States. I'm not saying this is what has happened, or that this is what we've got now, but that was the aim. Just trying to illustrate the thinking about order and that broader picture that I referred to. Now, very quickly then, I've already said, non-binary ways of thinking is something that really jumps out at you for anybody who has spent any time talking to their interlocutors in East Asia about, well, how do you deal with China? How do you think about China? And for international relations scholars, particularly, this is a massive challenge because most of the tools that we have, theoretically, are binary tools. You're either X or you're Y, you cannot be X and Y at the same time. Unfortunately, most behavior in response to a research in China is X and Y at the same time. And again, this is much more familiar to most of this audience. For a long time, the expectation was that, East Asian states would either choose to balance against China, in other words, contract stronger alliances or newer alliances within the United States, possibly with each other, to present a countervailing coalition to contain China balancing, or they would choose to bandwagon with China, right? Out of fear, sense of threat, lack of options, et cetera. These are binary options. You can do one or the other, you can't really do both. Well, apparently you can. And as Amy referred to very helpfully in her introduction, that's what I spent some years in my career explaining as a result of the kind of broadly ethnographic work that I sort of highlighted at the beginning, because talking to policymakers in East Asia makes it very clear that binary categories simply do not capture what they imagine themselves to be up to, right? And so this notion of hedging, which is a set of strategies that avoids the situation where one has to make that binary choice, right? It sounds straightforward, but it isn't. And one way of illustrating this is to think about ways in which practices, in this case in Southeast Asia, actively corrupt that binary sense of what balancing means, right? And I made an argument out of that study that suggested that maybe complex balancing was a better way of thinking about what they were doing because yes, it encapsulated deterrents against potential Chinese aggression by harnessing US forces in the region, but it also encapsulated what we might think of as traditional triangular politics, right, where weaker actors try to play off two stronger powers, but it also encapsulated what I called omni and meshment, right? Ways to try and socialize and mesh China as well as the United States and other great powers into regional norms and institutions as, you know, not a fallback, but as an option that was as live as the deterrents options. Now, what I'm trying to say here is that if we do that kind of work and we take meaning-making of our interlocutors and our informants seriously, it opens up a world of many more exciting and accurate ways of conceptualizing strategic action, right? I'm just gonna put out a couple of charts here of, you know, not stuff that I've made out, stuff that's already in the literature based on East Asian and other cases of concepts and frameworks for thinking about how one might respond to rising powers, right? This is just a selection. Why are we debating still between the binaries of balancing and bandwagoning when there are all these other concepts based on actual real-life activity that are out there? And I'd like to highlight this. Again, this is my second favorite diagram of recent years. My students will also know this. As an example of innovative conceptualization coming out of work that emphasizes how the region responds to the rise of China. This is Rohan Mukherjee's publication in 2020 conceptualizing how East Asian and South Asian partners of the United States, allies and security partners, treat alliances as varieties of what he calls insurance policies, right? And he groups them on the combination of degree of probability of harm and degree of magnitude of harm that these states perceive themselves to be at risk of from China. And you get this really interesting analogies that separate out the kind of alliances that the United States has with Thailand, for example, which he puts under the travel insurance category from where Japan and South Korea are in the category of health insurance for people with chronic conditions is what he's put it. I can talk about this in a bit more detail that I'm interested, but I'm putting it up there again as illustration of that wonderful range of useful theorizing that could happen, that comes out of work that actually emphasizes perceptions on the ground. Now, the economic security nexus is something that Amy and I spend a lot of time banging on about in our individual work and our work together. And we do this because the meaning and practices of security in the region totally lie at that nexus of economics and what we think of as traditional security, in other words, military things. And this, again, there's no way of understanding how East Asia lives with China's resurgence without getting to grips with how economics and security are tightly intertwined in the region. And again, a good way to start, as I have said to my students, is to understand that regional concepts of security, and this is something that bleeds across Northeast and Southeast Asia, are not purely military. They are actually very explicitly comprehensive to use the regional term for it. And this can be tracked across national security, conceptualizations, formal written documents across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, ASEAN as a whole, Japan, of course, the most important player in the region that has actually popularized the idea of comprehensive security, but not a practice or an idea that is unique to Japan alone. So as the Malaysian ex-prime minister, Mahathir Mohamed, in his first manifestation in 1986 put it, security is not just a matter of military capability, it is national security is inseparable, is inseparable from political stability, economic success, and social harmony. Not at all surprising. This is a collection of post-colonial states in Southeast Asia, dealing with a range of state-making and nation-building challenges. The same might be said of Japan, a post-conflict, post-war state, dealing with challenges like that too. Now why is it important to know this? Well, it's crucial to know this because it's the economics stupid, apparently, which Bill Clinton had to remind us of in 1992, 92. Still sticking with the American reminders, it is important because it is embedded in the great power management practices of all East Asian states. It comes out in different ways, but I like this particular illustration, which occurred towards the end of the Obama administration when there was a great deal of impatience with where the Trans-Pacific Partnership at the time was not going. The Singapore Foreign Minister said to his American counterpart, John Kerry at the time, you know, look, are you going to do this or not? It's absolutely vital to get the TPP done. Trade is strategy, and to the Americans, you're either in or out. Everybody knows that this is important and you can't get it done. How credible are you going to be? Putting American credibility on the line at this point as the regional hegemon on the back of an economic deal is the most explicit explanation of the importance of the economic foundations of U.S. hegemony in the region, as we've known it. Now, the economic foundations of hegemony is something which, you know, in the contemporary era is one that we would expect, whoever the hegemon is, given the globalized international system. Now, why is this important? Well, it's important because in the past five or six years, particularly with the advent of Donald Trump as U.S. president, the main concern in the region about U.S.-China competition has not been whether there would be a war in the Taiwan Strait. That's not been the main concern. The main concern has been, is there going to be U.S.-China economic decoupling? Particularly technological decoupling. Because it's that thing that would have essentially hit at the heart of everything that was important to most regimes and governments and vested interests in the region. It is in that sense that we talk about economic security, nexus. They're not separate things, right? Security is underpinned by economic performance and at the end of the day, economic security. For all of these states. And that actually neatly allows me to segue into my fourth highlight, which is a reminder about the primacy of domestic politics, right? In trying to help us understand the range of regional responses to China's resurgence. I mean, there's a lot that we can say here and I'll just make two observations. Okay. First thing to say is that one of the main channels, right? That allows domestic politics to be so preeminent in mediating China's power and influence in the region is obviously, it's obviously the fact that Chinese economic means and political willingness helps in some very obvious ways to bolster the kind of performance legitimacy and regime security, which I was referring to just now, that comes out of economic performance. Chinese resources applied to the region have also been incredibly important in helping governments of the day, regimes of the day satisfy their key particular domestic constituencies, be these the armed forces, be these electorates in previously neglected parts of the country, doesn't matter about whether they're democracies or non-democracies in the region. Chinese resources go a long way in these domestic political channels towards helping governments and factions so for those reasons alone, the domestic picture is necessary in thinking through how China's effect has been in the region. There's many, many ways to illustrate this. I'll just stick with two. Coming back to South Korea again and I'm gonna stick with that very nice piece that I drew from before by Ji Yong-hee, the, you know, she talks in that piece about South Korea's strategic non-decision, right, on countering China as arising from these split interests and split politics within the South Korean system, right. Because of the nature of these split interests and politics that do not neatly follow party lines or issue lines, right, it creates a situation in which it's not actually politically sustainable for South Korea either, right, to join some sort of multi-electro US alliance against China, nor is it actually feasible for South Korea to wholeheartedly support China's regional and global ambitions, right, because of those split interests and split politics within Korean politics. So we get the situation in which South Korea is very often seen as a bit of a strange fish as what is apparently the linchpin alliance partner for the United States in Northeast Asia. I'm just going to skip to this in the interest of time, and actually not this one, I've talked about that already. Look at this in the interest of time. I've put up the example of Sri Lankan here that doesn't explicitly fall within the East Asia that I've denoted for you, but to make a point that broadly applies across the region. If you see the headlines, Sri Lanka, you know, that default, which happened on the 13th of April, right? You think, oh my goodness, it's because of those bad debts with China. It must be because of those bad debts with China. And then you go to your friend who is a Sri Lankan specialist, and they go, ah, you know, there's the agriculture policy, you know, there's the Roger Passers, and you know, what they've been doing in Sri Lanka for 20 years, and the domestic political context, right, within which China, into which China has waited with its investments becomes clear. And it's the awful combination of these things which creates the kind of situation we have here. But I put up Sri Lanka also to make my final point, which is that when we look at domestic drivers of China policy towards China in the region, we very often come up against this basic principle. Every country in the region, right, that can has gone first to look for key investments from somewhere else. Sri Lanka went first to India for financing for Hanban Tota. India wasn't going to throw good money after bad, okay? Every country that has had loads and loads of Chinese investment is still looking for other investors. Cambodia, right? Very active out there, Sri Lanka, very active out there. Every country that can, in other words, that has options, that is able to create options does not want to rely exclusively on China, right? The junta in Myanmar in 2011 decided to undertake limited reforms because of the fear that it had become over-reliant on China because of its international isolation, right? Now, that's gone pear-shaped as we know, but the intent was to avoid over-reliance on China. And so the issue about being able to create live options is the limiting factor, which again has policy implications for other powers who want to project influence within the region. So let me conclude because I've gone massively over time. The correctives, which I'm trying to put on the table here, in a sort of tour of East Asia, is to remind us that East Asia has lived and is living with the research in China within a broader systemic view, right? And has broadly adopted non-binary and non-zero-sum choices. And with a huge emphasis on the nexus between economic and security, economic sense security, and with the primacy of domestic politics driving a lot of these choices, right? So the overall corrective, I guess, I'm trying to say is that an ethnographic mindset to both the conduct of research in these areas, but also to the conduct of asking questions and having debates about how the region is living with China would be helpful, right? And I hope I've provided through this very brief overview of some of the most interesting research. I have been fortunate enough to be involved in or to collaborate in or to help encourage has been interesting and useful to you. Thank you.