The Community of Shared Futures: China’s Counter to Indo-Pacific Narratives

Abstract

The idea of the Indo-Pacific Region has involved several competing and contradictory narratives of regional order shaping and being shaped by the overall geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions of major stakeholders’ competition and cooperation. This chapter attempts to examine the idea of China’s Community of Shared Future (CSF) as a counter conception of the regional order presented in Western narratives on Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP). Prima facie, having evolved from China’s Asia–Pacific Policy from late 1980s, the idea of CSF emerged has a major alternative from China’s imaginations of regional order since 2010. The roots of CSF though are also traced to China’s neighbourhood policy in the early 2000s followed by China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiatives from 2013. These have since come to be major components of this CSF counter-narrative that are already undercutting Western discourses on the Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Led by the United States and its friends and allies FOIP has been advanced as an extension of the liberal international order. Such a conception of Indo-Pacific is portrayed as aimed at creating an open and inclusive regional order. But while there are divergences within FOIP narratives, one of the drivers behind the idea has been their shared concerns about the rise of China and the need to counter its rising influence in the region. While China has remained the main trigger for the FOIP narratives yet existing debates have paid less attention to China’s own conception of Asia–Pacific regional order. By dwelling on Chinese IR writings and official discourses to chart the evolution of CSF, this chapter seeks to provide a critical assessment of the Chinese alternative approach of community building to evaluate its efficacy as counter-narrative and what it means for the evolving Asia–Pacific/Indo-Pacific geopolitics.