This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 1, 2025 - December 7, 2025

For centuries, the Pearl River delta had been the trading hub for anyone wishing to trade with the Chinese Empire. When one considers the dynamics of China’s political economy over the last millennia, this makes a lot of sense. Not only had the most active foreign traders sailed in from the south, through what we today call the South China Sea, the economic centre of the empire itself had over time shifted century by century southward as well. The political, military and strategic centre had to remain in the north though; this was because invaders had always come from the north and northwest. And on horseback, not in ships.

Today the Greater Bay Area (GBA) is the world’s most dynamic economic district, and it has been recognised as the most innovative region in the world, ahead of the Greater Tokyo Area, and then US’ Silicon Valley.

Beyond a simple economic acknowledgement of these dynamics lies the deeper effect on the family of nations of the current rise of China as a whole. Indeed, the comprehensive success of China’s reform and opening-up programme, started haltingly in 1978 and boosted in 1992 by Deng Xiaoping’s pronouncement to the country on the inevitability of the policy, has had epiphanous effects on geopolitical analysts, diplomats and scholars.

For the Global South, by which is meant countries that have been having difficulties becoming rich and stable, their postcolonial possibilities and ambitions are being revisited. What really is the middle-income trap that most countries cannot get out of? Is it a technical dynamic, or is it the considered result of hegemonic structures developed in the late-colonial and post-colonial age?

With the West reacting so aggressively to the rise of what it sees as a new superpower, questions have been inevitably raised about the nature of Western hegemony itself, and its adamant stance against losing control over major global supply chains. Measures undertaken by Western powers in recent years in reaction to China’s growing influence in the world have led to fears that “deglobalisation” was happening, and this would split the world into spheres of influence, detrimentally duplicate technological innovations, and maybe lead to a third world war.

Where Southeast Asia is concerned, the rise of China offers new geoeconomic conditions and opens conceptual doors once tightly locked for reimagining nationhood, geopolitics and supply chains.

Independence for the European colonies came during the Cold War, and just after World War II (or the Pacific War in East Asia — if one wishes to be more specific, as one should do for analytical clarity). To understand how nationhood tended to be understood at that time, and how it was fought for, one needs to embrace the notion of “colonial multipolarity” under the colonial world order. It was that condition that made the colonies, when they transformed into uncertain nation states, as territorial as they now became.

It took a long time before neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia began to imagine regionalism as a necessary factor in their development process. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), from the very beginning was part and parcel of the ideological warfare that was raging across the world between communism and capitalism. It was only with the end of the Cold War that Asean could expand its membership to include all countries within the broad region bordered between China, India, Australia and the Pacific Ocean.

The 21st century, then, has been the time when Asean increasingly could promise to be an internationally significant force, and a forum to be taken seriously as an independent organisation.

The historical significance of the forming of strong economic ties between China and Asean becomes obvious if we consider that process to be the regionalising of nation-building. More succinctly, it may be understood as decolonisation happening in a regionally orchestrated sense.

The formation of colonies to suit the national empires of Europe saw them growing along varied cultural trajectories even if they were neighbours. Independence saw them unable to reject the path dependencies — to say the least — of their colonially determined nationhood.

While countries like Vietnam, or Burma, fought off their colonial masters in wars of independence and distanced themselves from the latter, others like Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore continued to maintain strong connections with the UK.

One could see this condition as the first stage of national independence. Those who fought wars of independence tended to isolate themselves, having turned their backs on the world as defined by their former masters and their allies. The sores ran deep. For the latter group of nations, the opposite happened. Their post-colonial consciousness was tied strongly to Britain and to the colonial metropolis. Thus, regional independence failed to take place, and was thought of more as a curiosity than a realisable vision. The region’s newly independent countries remained suspicious and ignorant of each other — alienated, untrusted and unneeded even. Within each country, nationalism as ideology fanned identity politics on one hand, and class warfare on the other.

The economic prowess of neighbouring China today has allowed for regional integration to be reimagined in the post-colonial age. Considered that way, the apparent deglobalising effects of this is to a large extent, the delayed process of regional post-colonial independence outside of nationalistic frameworks. Nation-building, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the nominal South, now requires much rethinking. The Asean project, consciously slow and inclusive in decision-making, and centred around the three forms of community building — strategic, economic and sociocultural, has to raise its goals and pace.

One could argue that colonialism was essentially about the colonialists taking advantage of inequalities that they discovered as they traversed the oceans and landed in faraway places. It began with pure force — with military might, economic greed and religious excuses. But that stage of conquest and colonisation was not sustainable. And so, the inequality became structural, including uneasy alliances and distancing between different colonial powers. This state of affairs tended to evolve to become ideological inequalities, most notably as “racism” in its various forms, such as “orientalism”, or “the White Man’s burden” to govern inherently less civilised humans.

As the South continues its long process of liberation — of decolonisation, Europe is plunged into its own need for some deep self-analysis. The braked process of decolonisation in the South before the rise of China is understood in the West as proof of its superiority, its entitlement and as the right to privilege. History continued to be written by the West.

For Western Europe, good governance has since 1945 tended to be measured in social democratic terms, despite the dislike for socialism and communism represented by the Soviet Union. That middle-path form of governance has been expensive, and held its own weaknesses.

Across the Atlantic, social democratic values were considered way too leftist by most Americans. But to the post-WWII European mind, nation-building is largely a social democratic project, with high taxes, strong and interventionist governments and safety nets for the population. The impetus for regionalism in Europe has thus been quite different from that in Southeast Asia, and the early denial of the strength of nationalism in the European Union project is now coming home to roost, one could say.

Where the US is concerned, over the same period of time, from 1945 to 2025, being a major victor in WWII, with the other three “victors” under its thumb, and now having to conduct a hot-and-cold war against the four big victors, the Soviet Union, it organised for itself a “world order” that made it the inheritor of European global hegemony. It became Britannia 2.0.

Colonial multipolarity became American unipolarity.

Over the years, managing the hegemonic system required to rule over an unruly world, it failed to invest in its own nation-building.

Here, the term “supply chains” needs to be expanded to include more than merely material production. Controlling energy, military power across the globe, global payment systems, the education system, the mass media, global logistics and communication and so on have been the major concerns of the American Empire.

In that context, the “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” movement is a cry of anguish from many Americans, reflecting decades of neglect in Washington’s nation-building — a term that in Europe connotes welfare, social safety nets and public support. It is in fact a class war, a direct expression of the income gap and disconnect implanted by a post-war American regime felt drawn to contain communism on one hand, and maintain Western hegemony on another.

America had risen like a phoenix from the sufferings of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Through The New Deal and the military investments in WWII and the Cold War, it quickly transformed into Britannia 2.0. This led it to focus on securing control over the world and maintaining control over all key supply chains. This neglect of nation-building finally led to the much delayed protest movement we call MAGA. The (Gramscian) hegemonic downgrade that the US must now suffer, along with its key allies, Europe and Japan, is a subject that needs to be deconstructed thoroughly. Revealing the mechanisms and the conceptual locks of global hegemony is a fateful undertaking for the late period of decolonisation we now live in.

Where Asean member states are concerned today, the big challenge is about surviving the unwillingness of Western hegemony to give up its ideological and hegemonic apparatus in order to allow for a mutualist, multipolar world to develop. At the same time, in facing that challenge, it has to rein in China’s impatience and lack of understanding of the worries of its small hedging neighbours.

Given the picture drawn in this paper, Asean and its member states, keeping in mind the decolonising potential of the next few decades, should develop: (i) immediate responses in the form of diplomatic strategies and trade negotiations; (ii) medium-term initiatives aimed at region building and not only narrow nation building; and (iii) longer-term constructing of mutualist multipolarity. Strategically, what they should aim for is “regional consolidation” instead of existing comfortably in “colonial spaces”. It may be a matter of “biting the bullet” in the short term so that decolonisation can gain more meaning, as envisioned when the United Nations was first formed.

Countries in the South should start with greater consciousness about hegemony — as understood in the Gramscian sense (that is, power embedded in popular attitudes and discourses) For starters, Western foreign policy thinking has been influenced by military thinking since the very beginning, and thus the analogies and trains of thought of post-WWII international relations show great preference for aggressive connotations found in words like “traps”, “chip war” and even “G2”. This presumption of international hierarchism threatens to recreate and perpetuate a world where most countries and most peoples have to be suppressed for the sake of the few.

This article is based on a presentation given on Nov 1 on the panel “Protecting Global Welfare threatened by Trumpo-nomics” at the GBA-Asean Conference on Trade, Finance and Sustainable Development, held on Oct 31 in Hong Kong, and on Nov 1 at Shenzhen. Datuk Dr Ooi Kee Beng is executive director of Penang Institute, and visiting senior fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute.

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