Understanding - and measuring Chinese influence across Southeast Asia

• The Challenge
• The Solution
• The Outcome
  

The Challenge

A European government ministry was aiming to get a better, more nuanced understanding of Chinese influence in Southeast Asia and how it evolved over time – and they also wanted it measured.

The first challenge facing Adarga’s team of geopolitical experts, part of Adarga’s Research Institute, was defining ‘influence’ in a way that’s quantifiable and consistent. The second was developing the relevant metrics for influence that could be reliably formulated for each bilateral relationship based on available data. The third was to adapt these metrics to as comprehensive a range of national activities as possible, from government to trade to digital infrastructure.

The Solution

This was not the first time the team had encountered these challenges. Adarga has developed cutting-edge models of national influence, defined as ‘the capacity for Country A to comprise the autonomous decision-making of Country B’. Adarga’s model quantifies national influence across ten strands of national activity ranging from politics, natural resources, defence, and security to economics and finance, technological innovation, culture and demographics. This meant that Adarga’s researchers were able to identify specific dependencies and the asymmetry of relationships, layered with expert qualitative assessments, ensuring both comparability across countries and sensitivity to country-specific circumstances.  

Having employed Vantage, Adarga’s AI-driven information analysis tool, to help conduct the widest possible qualitative assessment of the issue of Chinese influence, they combined this with more quantitative analysis, using their proprietary models and data to measure and understand Chinese influence over ten Southeast Asian countries over a ten-year period. Finally, Adarga’s in-house expertise was augmented by its network of internationally recognised subject matter experts from across academia, business, and politics.

The Outcome

The results showed an increase in China’s influence across the board, particularly in Cambodia and Laos, and indicated that China’s influence was driving shifts in the regional balance of power.

This included the major role of digital infrastructure projects and technical standards that would tend to lock in dependence on China; the emergence of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore as a regional economic counterweight to China; and resistance to Chinese political influence in the Philippines and Vietnam. Adarga’s scoring system identified a significant increase in Chinese influence over Thailand (economically, militarily, in science and technology, and culturally) following the 2014 coup and the associated diplomatic distancing of the USA.

Since receiving the analysis, the ministry in question has been using it to make better decisions based on a more systematic understanding of China’s relations with Southeast Asia, describing Adarga’s approach and findings as "a blueprint for our work".

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Adarga is a British AI leader specialising in information intelligence. Its software and services are deployed to the UK armed forces, intelligence agencies, and government, providing them with vital capabilities to better exploit the information at their disposal and achieve decision advantage. 

Adarga's solutions accelerate and enrich the analysis of in-house and open-source information, driving productivity and quality of insights. The technology is being applied to use-cases such as intelligence analysis, strategic planning and policy, C4ISR, flight risk assessment and supply chain risk. It’s been proven to help users achieve results over 20 x faster, use 300% more sources, and significantly improve the quality of outputs being delivered to decision-makers.

In addition, Adarga's specialist analysts are helping organisations to better understand the threats, opportunities and vulnerabilities they are facing when it comes to geopolitical risk so they can generate economic, technological, supply chain and security resilience. The team delivers in-depth, tailored analysis, underpinned by Adarga's own information intelligence software and curated and proprietary data sets, for unique insight and foresight into geostrategic developments.