China carefully navigates ties with Straits Chinese

By Lucy Hornby

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - When Chinese president Hu Jintao arrived in Singapore for a state visit this week, he announced China's favorite diplomatic gift -- two pandas -- but chose his words very carefully.

Hu spoke of the two nations' "close friendship" and "cultural ties," but avoided any mention of a shared ethnic heritage in a nod to sensitivities in a region with long ties to China, and an equally long wariness of Chinese domination.

The pandas would be a "fitting symbol of the close friendship and strong ties between Singapore and China as we celebrate 20 years of diplomatic relations next year," Singapore's foreign ministry said.

It was not until 1990 that Singapore opened relations with the People's Republic of China, which it had accused of supporting Communist movements in neighboring Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic Chinese Singaporeans descend from people who fled civil war and Communist rule in the 20th century.

Now, Singapore and its neighbors are eager to build trade ties with China, but have no interest in becoming vassal states. A call by modern Singapore's founding father, Lee Kwan Yew, for the United States to remain engaged in the region ruffled feathers of nationalist Chinese in the mainland.

"The size of China makes it impossible for the rest of Asia, including Japan and India, to match it in weight and capacity in about 20 to 30 years. So we need America to strike a balance," Lee said in a speech in Washington on October 27.

Powerful currents pull the Chinese of Southeast Asia to greater engagement with China. Singapore's trade with China hit $52.4 billion last year, and its government promotes Mandarin teaching to help business ties.

The ties are not just commercial, but strategic. Hu's trip this week to Malaysia and Singapore, the first by a Chinese president in 15 years, included a visit to Malacca, and a view of narrow Straits through which its energy supplies must pass.

"The big change with China is that it got over being a stodgy, ideological player," said Ernie Bower, Southeast Asia program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"Since the Asian crisis of the 1990s, it stepped up its game and came to Southeast Asia with a charm offensive."

PANDA DIPLOMACY

Part of that charm is panda diplomacy. The arrival in Singapore in 2011 of two Chinese pandas will help Singaporeans -- about three-quarters of whom are ethnic Chinese -- form a positive impression of mainland China. Since the Ming dynasty, Chinese merchants, especially from the coastal province of Fujian, have followed the shipping lanes south to wealthy tropical port cities.

The voyages as far as Africa of the Chinese-Muslim admiral Zheng He marked China's greatest naval reach until the present day. Zheng He's treasure ships traded silks and porcelain for wood, spice and feathers, and also intervened in local politics. China has returned to the high seas in recent years, as its economy boomed. Its ships now transport oil, coal and copper from as far away as Africa and its navy protects convoys against Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden [ID:nHKG280943].

Up to 80 percent of China's oil imports and 30 percent of its iron ore imports pass through the Strait of Malacca -- a narrow, congested waterway between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Natural gas and minerals are also shipped north through Indonesian sea channels and the disputed South China Sea.

Singapore's Lee warned of China's military build-up, and ambitions in the South China Sea in waters that are also claimed by neighboring Southeast Asian nations.