Between February and September, the three services of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the China Coast Guard participated in 11 regional defence diplomacy engagements.

As the US and China woo with military drills, who will Southeast Asia choose?

Peace and Friendship-2023 was not the biggest multilateral exercise China has held with its Southeast Asian neighbours in terms of the number of countries involved. In October 2018, China co-hosted with Singapore the Asean-China Maritime Exercise (ACMEX), in which the navies of nine Asean member states took part (landlocked Laos was an observer).

The more recent drills did, however, involve the largest number of military personnel.

According to China’s Ministry of Defence, 3,000 sailors and soldiers took part. As each of the five Southeast Asian countries contributed around 100 to 150 personnel, PLA forces made up more than 80 per cent of participating forces.

In addition to its size, Peace and Friendship-2023 was notable in that it provided further evidence of China’s move towards multilateral defence cooperation.

China is undertaking this shift gradually and following in America’s footsteps. Over the past decade, the US military has transformed several of its annual bilateral exercises into multilateral drills, most notably Cobra Gold, Balikatan and Southeast Asia Cooperation and Training (SEACAT).

The advantage of multilateral exercises over bilateral engagements is that they help improve interoperability between and among all the participating countries. In addition, some countries are reluctant to exercise with their neighbours unless a bigger country like the United States takes the lead.

Peace and Friendship-2023 is in fact the fifth iteration of the drills, which started as a table-top exercise between Malaysia and China in December 2014. The PLA and Malaysian Armed Forces then went on to hold two field exercises: a naval exercise in the Strait of Malacca in September 2015 and a small jungle warfare training exercise in November 2016.

Two years later, the drills became a multilateral engagement when the Royal Thai Armed Forces contributed a small number of troops to Peace and Friendship-2018, another naval exercise off the coast of Malaysia. Another iteration of Peace and Friendship was planned for 2020 but was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Peace and Friendship-2023 was that the naval forces from two Southeast Asian claimants in the South China Sea participated. (Cambodia, Laos and Thailand sent only ground troops.) Vietnam sent the Gephard-class frigate HQ-016 Quang Trung and Malaysia the Kedah-class offshore patrol vessel KD Selangor (plus some special forces troops by air).

Although both countries’ navies had exercised with the PLA Navy before – both bilaterally and in ACMEX – this was the first time they had done so in a China-hosted multilateral exercise. Zhanjiang, moreover, is the headquarters of the Chinese navy’s South Sea Fleet, which is responsible for upholding Beijing’s territorial and jurisdictional claims in the South China Sea. Those claims have regularly led to friction between the Chinese navy and the Vietnamese and Malaysian navies.

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Marcos Jnr says China showing interest in South China Sea atolls that lie close to the Philippines

Marcos Jnr says China showing interest in South China Sea atolls that lie close to the Philippines

It is noteworthy that the other main Southeast Asian claimant in the South China Sea, the Philippines, did not take part. As the exercise got under way, the Philippines was already hosting Kamandag 7, a training exercise in northern Luzon involving 3,000 troops from the US, Japan, South Korea and Britain. Kamandag 7 also began life as a bilateral exercise in 2016 before expanding into multilateral drills.

China and the Philippines are currently going through another of their tense periodic spats over Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal. As such, it is hard to envisage the PLA Navy and the Philippine Navy working alongside each other in a friendly and cooperative manner. But with Vietnam and Malaysia, relations are a bit calmer with Beijing over the South China Sea. For Vietnam, it was another demonstration of how it balances relations with the US and China.

Overall, however, Peace and Friendship-2023 broke little new ground.

As with most of China’s previous exercises with Southeast Asian militaries, its focus was on building non-combat cooperation to address transnational threats such as piracy and maritime terrorism, as well as activities like search and rescue and humanitarian relief. Such threats are relatively uncontroversial, as they are perpetrated by non-state actors or arise in the aftermath of natural disasters.

Moving forward, we can expect the frequency and size of China’s bilateral and multilateral military exercises with Southeast Asian countries to increase.

But whether these events will become less performative than they currently are is another matter. The advanced drills the US military regularly holds with its Southeast Asian counterparts require a high degree of strategic trust.

China has already established a fair degree of trust with Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, primarily because they do not have territorial or maritime boundary disputes with Beijing. But with other regional states, and especially those that have overlapping claims with Beijing in the South China Sea, deep trust is much harder to win, and in some cases possibly unwinnable.

China, however, probably calculates that events like Peace and Friendship-2023 help reduce the trust deficit with some of its neighbours, even if only marginally.