During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the security managers of ASEAN's leading member nations were preoccupied with the problems posed by the rise of the People's Republic of China as a great power on the Southeast Asian stage. China's growing economic importance and political presence have been coupled to military programmes that now give China conventional force capabilities to reach all of Southeast Asia. As we enter the second decade of the century, China, assertively pressing its great-power interests, seems ready to challenge various among the fundamental elements that have underpinned ASEAN's approach to the construction of a benign regional security environment.

Among these elements, ASEAN has assumed the common interest of all regional actors in a non-threatening, stable, and peaceful region. This approach has been framed by the normative strictures of the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC), with its pledge of the non-use of force. Recent events stemming from long- standing issues of sovereignty in the South China Sea and ultimately of access to its resources, however, lead to questions about the logic behind ASEAN's assumptions about the common interest. This turn of events has given new volume to concerns voiced — pitched at different levels of alarm — that, if the Chinese challenge to ASEAN's vision is successful, it could lead to a Chinese regional paramountcy and to the subordination of Southeast Asia to the economic and political demands of the Chinese state.

ASEAN's regionalist strategy to meet the challenge has been two- pronged. The first is that of the Lilliputians: to bind the giant Gulliver that is China in a web of ties. Although no thread is alone sufficient to restrict the giant, all the threads together hopefully serve to constrain Gulliver's freedom of movement. The ASEAN states have enmeshed China in complex patterns of multilateralism in ASEAN Plus One, Plus Three, and Plus Six — this latter in the form of the East Asia Summit (EAS), now expanded to a Plus Eight.