Expendables 2 Sub Indo

[Mandy Geise]

Editors note: Huang Yongfu is an economic affairs commentator. After earning a PhD, he started his career at the University of Cambridge and then moved on to the UN system. His current interests lie in global development and Sino-U.S. links. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Although not expressly stated, the joint statement issued after the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) special summit held on May 12 to 13 addresses diverse topics on economic ties and connectivity, corresponding to the IPEF to a large extent. To bring back its economic leadership in the Asia-Pacific region, the Biden administration uses the IPEF to replace the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, a comprehensive trade agreement the U.S. designed to contain China but abandoned in 2017.

As the U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has indicated openly, the IPEF will be an "arrangement independent of China." It is in fact designed to exclude China from the trading and supply systems in the Indo-Pacific and undermine its influence under the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world's largest free trade agreement, by offering alternative supply chains so as to encourage regional economies to "decouple" from the Chinese market.

As such, an essentially closed, exclusive and confrontational arrangement with clear geopolitical and ideological intentions will be installed within the region, which deviates from the principles of openness, inclusiveness, equality and reciprocity of multilateralism the region has long followed.

Therefore, the IPEF is not a traditional free trade agreement with mutual open market access and tariff exemption to address the immediate economic concerns and necessities of regional economies, but a geostrategic counterbalancing contraption to drag regional economies into the bandwagon against China.

More specifically, the IPEF represents continuity between the colonialist past and neocolonialist present in the Indo-Pacific region. In the past 45 years the U.S. has been instrumentalizing Southeast Asia, treating the region as its reservoirs of cheap labor and raw materials, and simply placing its interest ahead of the interest of those economies, since it started formal diplomatic engagement with the ASEAN in 1977.

Today, neocolonialism is coming to a large extent in a reincarnated form although colonialism has gone for the most part in Asia, which was almost synonymous with the most unfortunate developing world in the colonial era. The colonized Asian nations were ruled as expendables, losing untold wealth to the old colonial powers through unequal exchange and within a sophisticated regime of financial dominion.

The term neocolonialism is an unambiguously negative one. First used after World War II, the term refers to the continuing control of former colonial powers typically developed countries over less-developed countries through indirect means.

The neocolonialism represents a further development of Western capitalism when a colonial-like exploitation is conducted via the power of capitals (either multinational corporations, or global and multilateral institutions), where a form of global interactions in which transnational corporations and global and multilateral institutions combines to perpetuate colonial forms of exploitation of former colonies.

The Treaty of Rome signed in 1957 marks the beginning of neocolonialism, a new form of economic domination of European countries over their overseas dependencies. According to the Treaty, which established the European Economic Community (EEC), or Common Market, French-occupied Africa and the colonial territories of Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands were included within the European Common Market under trade arrangements.

With the deepening of Cold War and under the policy known as Truman Doctrine, the U.S. government took indirect means and, in particular, by means of the economic, financial, and trade policies of transnational corporations such as the investments of multinational corporations and global and multilateral institutions like foreign aid, to extend its sphere of influence and, in some cases, control foreign governments. Among others, ASEAN was treated by the U.S. as an anti-communism bulwark and a geopolitical battlefield amid the Cold War.

In a coordinated effort with other former colonial powers, the U.S. offered a large amount of money, aid or investments to any government, conditional on accepting U.S. protection from communism or taking steps favorable to the United States. The U.S. and other developed countries also interfered in internal affairs of formal Asian colonies by alleging political repression or human rights abuses and helped install regimes that serve the benefit of foreign companies and act against their own country's interests.

Given the America's geopolitical and geo-economic maneuvering and apparently taking little heed of inclusive regional cooperation, the IPEF will not be a collective economic endeavor to better the region, but detrimental to regional development, cohesion and stability.

On the one hand, the American neocolonialism via the IPEF could weaken and damage regional cohesion by picking up few countries while leaving the rest behind. Regional stakeholders long have aspirations for cooperation, collaboration and regional integration, such as the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, which tones down confrontational rhetoric and calls for cooperation and collaboration among stakeholders. On the other hand, the IPEF will cultivate regional economies to be subordinated to and be dependent on the U.S. and other former colonial powers and become their reservoirs of cheap labor and raw materials.

The U.S. uses the IPEF to establish a unilaterally dominant economic cooperation arrangement with regional economies such that the U.S. could force regional economies to adopt certain domestic economic policies or higher standards of binding rules and regulations over the labor, environment, and digital trade issues to serve U.S. interests, which will hurt the regional economies.

I was straight off the plane and ushered into the immigration office. Apparently I was supposed to have an onward ticket to prove thatI would be eventually leaving Indonesia. What? A boat ticket to leave Sumatra, impossible to obtain from Australia or anywhere in Indonesia other thanat the departure point. I was informed then that I will have to buy an airline ticket to anywhere before I can enter the country. Having been in this situation before I didn't need to be a genius to understand that this was a request for an exchange of financial gratuity, but being western I am also opposed to bribing officials. So it was the old I-can-sit-you-out-longer-than-you-can-sit-me-out. After about five minutes of polite agreeance with everything the official said but doing nothing, and him realizing that he was losing business as other potential customers were being funnelled to his counterpart in the nextoffice, he grudgingly stamped my passport with a brief lecture not to doit again and I was free, well at least I was in Indonesia.

As expected the bike was not available for collection until9 am Monday and there I was waiting on the doorstep at 9 am. I could seeit still bubble wrapped, but not for another three hours could I ride away.Apart from the expectation again of gratuity, and again refusal, the procedurewas easy. Mind you I did have a carnet and a letter from the local Directorof Customs to say that I could import the bike. A very helpful letter indeed.

Now the first ride. If you don't know what a Harley-Davidson Electraglide Classic is then picture this. A 375 kg bike, fully loaded,all black and shiny, not new but lovingly maintained without a scratch,being let loose on the streets of an Asian traffic nightmare. A bike designedfor the touring roads of USA, Europe or Australia. A bike designed to movefreely and not lumber in traffic. You ask why did I bring it here? Well,it is on the way to the USA by land, and if I want to get there, I haveto go here. Bursting from customs into the traffic in the pouring rain wasindeed a fair test of concentration for a person who last rode the desertedhighways of Australia. Stop start, riding the clutch and not travelling over50 km/hr were the norm. Distances between bikes, cars and trucks eithergoing in your direction or oncoming were frighteningly close, and to topit all off I was stopped twice by policemen within the first 60 km of riding.Well I guess the bike was a bit unusual, and I guess they just wanted alook, or some money, but if I was to be stopped every 30 km for my entirejourney in Indonesia it would be frustrating to say the least. The reasoningfor stopping me, no front number plate, check papers, it didn't really matter. Nice slow look at the bike, check of documents that theycouldn't read, talk of trip to the police station, and after curiosity satisfiedand no possibility of financial gain I was allowed to depart. It was atthis time I decided not to see another policeman while in Indonesia. I wasn'tsilly, I did see roadblocks, but policemen at booths and on the roadsidewaving red flags were just out of my sight. Whilst this might sound dangerous,to me there was no choice, everyone in Indonesia wanted to see the bike,and I simply didn't have time to show all 190 million of them.

To venture out into the countryside of Bali was the next step, hopefully without getting lost, Lake Batur about 90 km north the overnight destination. First stop Balinese dancing and a test for the bike's security. I had installed a burglar alarm and other anti theft devices hopefully to keep my bike safe but also to keep my carnet deposit safe. The bike valued atA$20,000 and the carnet bond of A$28,500 was more than I could afford to lose.However my concerns soon moved away from outright theft to loving damage. The bike had some theft test devices hanging from it. It had a flag and a bedroll, both expendable, to see if they would be stolen. On the entire journey these remained exposed, day and night, and are still with me. But the problem was the need for the locals to look, then touch, then sit and fiddle with everything. The unintentional damage from fiddling became the major concern. The inevitable scratches of rings and shoes being dragged across the tank or panniers. You cannot blame the Indonesians as their culture allows this, but at times it was frustrating and a solution was needed to minimize the damage. For short stops in view, the remote control alarm. Don't touch or you activate the alarm. No language barrier problems getting the message acrossto understand that signal. And for longer stops, out of sight, the bike coverjust seems to make the bike vanish. One minute there are fifty people lookingand touching and the next it is gone and so are they. This was to be theritual for the rest of the journey.

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