Executive Summary
1. Since the early 1990s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has made great efforts in developing ties with political parties in Southeast Asian countries. By 2005, it had official relations with 39 political parties in the region.
2. At the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, the CPC had ties with less than 10 Communist Parties. A policy shift then took place under former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in which he advocated a new type of interparty relations, namely, that parties of all countries have the right to independently decide their own affairs according to their own circumstances. This paved the way for China to start building ties with political parties in the region, regardless of their ideological orientations.
3. The newly established relations with other political parties served China’s overall objective of reform as it allowed the CPC to learn economic and governance lessons from other countries. The new relations also served to promote and strengthen state-to-state relations.
4. Although the CPC started late in developing relations with non-socialist parties in Southeast Asia, the development has been stable, smooth and fruitful. This success has a lot to do with the cautious and thoughtful approach that CPC has adopted, that is, from fostering mutual respect to mutual understanding and finally, mutual trust.
5. The CPC managed to improve relations with parties of both similar as well as different ideologies. With parties of the same ideology such as those in Vietnam and Laos, relations have been deepened as the party delegations sent are not only on the central committee level but also on the level of provincial party committee. They do not just focus on political issues, but on trade and economic cooperation as well. Closer party-to-party relations also greatly promoted their state-to-state relations because the three communist parties are all parties in power in their own countries.
6. With parties of different ideologies, the relations between Chinese and other Southeast Asia political parties have also been growing and are becoming increasingly multi-faceted. This has come a long way from the history of suspicion that used to taint relations during the early days of the Cold War. Now, the CPC not only exchanges views with Southeast Asian parties on regional political and economic issues but it also strives to build trade ties with these countries.
7. Beyond strengthening bilateral relations with individual parties in Asia, CPC also sought to build a multilateral framework for cooperation among all the political parties in the region, for which the International Conference for Asian Political Parties (ICAPP) offered such a platform. This arrangement worked because of several reasons such as the tolerance among parties of different ideological views and their common purpose in bolstering party-to-party relations so as to promote a peaceful, prosperous and stable region
8. The relations between CPC and political parties in Southeast Asia are likely to strengthen in future because firstly, political parties continue to play an important role and hence they would want to learn from each other’s partybuilding experiences to ensure their own political survival at home. Secondly, there is also rising recognition amongst all the parties that friendly party-toparty cooperation is an important basis for sound state-to-state relations.
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