JAKARTA From South Korea to Indonesia, China is rapidly strengthening its
economic presence across Asia, gobbling up foreign investment and chipping
away at the United States' position as the region's economic engine.
As it buys up goods, parts and raw materials from its neighbors as never
before, China has accompanied its new heft with diplomatic efforts to
assure them that it wants to offer cooperation, not competition. Many have
rushed to China's embrace and are nimbly shifting their economic
alliances, particularly as the United States makes its way through only a
tentative economic recovery. "For all these countries in Asia, China is
such a large force, the only rational response is to figure out how to
work with it," said Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution. "It can't
be stopped." The United States remains an essential trading partner for
Asian countries but is becoming somewhat less important in the face of
China's rise, analysts say. Some see China's economic thrust, more
apparent now under its newly minted membership in the World Trade
Organization, as the beginning of an inescapable process of China
replacing the United States as Asia's dominant power.
Inevitably, said James Castle, a longtime American businessman in
Indonesia and until recently the leader of the American Chamber of
Commerce in Jakarta, "the policy leverage of the United States as the
great market is sure to decline." China is already an economic and
political threat to Japan, the prime ally of the United States in the
region, these analysts say. Lardy said China's trade was now growing at a
faster rate than Japan's was during its boom years in the 1960s and 1970s.
Asian exports are rebounding on the strength of this rapid expansion as
China buys more and more from its Asian neighbors.
Here in Indonesia