China and the US: Who Will Better Understand Southeast Asia?

In the contest for influence in Southeast Asia, Washington and Beijing agree on one thing: the region is indispensable. Yet, beneath the flurry of high-level summits lies a quieter divergence in how both powers cultivate knowledge about the region. The US is hollowing out the university-based programmes that have long trained its students in Southeast Asian languages, history and politics. China, conversely, is elevating area studies to a top-tier, state-backed academic field. Beyond a shift in academic funding, this divergence exposes a fundamental difference in the kind of knowledge each system values, and how those choices may shape each power’s ability to understand Southeast Asia’s complexity.

In the US, area studies have never been detached from national strategy, but its funding model has proved fragile. Historically, Title VI National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships were explicitly designed to serve national needs by supporting language instruction, research and public education. However, this foundation is being abruptly dismantled. Following the sudden termination of federal Title VI funding in 2025, the US knowledge ecosystem has been pushed to the brink. The consequences are immediate and visceral. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is shuttering all six of its area studies centres, including the Carolina Asia Center, while the University of Washington has had to seek emergency funding to prevent its Khmer language program, one of only seven of its kind in the US, from disappearing entirely. This is an ecosystem that takes decades of fieldwork, language training and trust-building to cultivate, yet only a single budget cycle to hollow out.

Regional expertise often begins with knowledge not easily reducible to policy relevance: literature, local newspapers, archival sources, village politics, religious life, oral histories and conversations that do not fit neatly into policy memos. This is why universities matter. They sustain forms of inquiry whose value may not be visible during the next budget cycle. When funding is cut, it narrows the future pool of Americans who can study Southeast Asia in its own languages and on its own terms.

China is taking the opposite path. Country and regional studies (区域国别学) became a first-level graduate discipline in 2022 and was added to China’s undergraduate major catalogue in 2025. Official narratives, including speeches from President Xi Jinping, emphasise comprehensive, interdisciplinary, practical and timely research on the politics, economy and culture of different countries and regions. For Southeast Asia, this expansion reflects proximity and geopolitics. China is deeply involved in the region through trade, infrastructure and diplomacy. It is also entangled in several territorial disputes with countries in the region.

This investment should not be dismissed. China’s system can scale quickly, encourage language training, support policy research and align expertise with diplomatic priorities. However, scale is not the same as understanding. While China now boasts over 300 research institutes dedicated to Southeast Asian studies, top-down directives shape which questions get asked. When area studies are built explicitly to serve national strategy, scholars face incentives to produce work that is current and politically legible. Such work has its value, but the top-down approach can incentivise short-term policy relevance over deep social knowledge, and ideological legibility over open-ended inquiry. Scholars of Southeast Asian studies in China have already noted this “policy turn”: rapid growth in language programmes, dominance of short-term policy research, and the marginalisation of humanities subjects.

The future competition over Southeast Asia will not only be fought with ships, summits and investments. It will also be shaped by who can understand the region beyond their own ambitions.

This creates an asymmetry. The fragmented US model allows intellectual autonomy but is vulnerable to budget politics. The coordinated China model is likely to produce more region-focused personnel at scale, but risks treating Southeast Asia primarily as an object of Chinese policy. One system may produce too little expertise; the other may produce expertise too tightly organised around state priorities.

For Southeast Asia, neither problem is trivial. A US with fewer language-trained regional specialists may rely more heavily on English-speaking elites, think tank policy briefs and simplified strategic categories. It may see Southeast Asian states mainly as partners, hedgers, swing states or sites of Chinese influence. China’s model has a different risk: it may generate abundant knowledge about how Southeast Asia matters to China, but less patience for evidence that complicates Beijing’s preferred narratives. For example, research on the Belt and Road Initiative is often encouraged to highlight connectivity, development, and economic cooperation, even though such infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia also raise serious environmental and social questions.

The lesson is not that American area studies is pure while Chinese area studies is instrumental. Both traditions have been shaped by power. US area studies were also a product of strategic anxiety, particularly during the Cold War. Nor should one assume that Chinese scholars lack curiosity or independence. The narrower point is that the political economy of knowledge production matters. How expertise is funded, evaluated and rewarded affects what a country comes to know.

Southeast Asia is multilingual, religiously diverse, historically layered and politically heterogeneous. No great power will grasp it well by treating the region merely as a chessboard. Washington should not assume that China’s top-down investments will automatically produce shallow knowledge. Beijing should not assume that more centres and majors will automatically produce deeper understanding. The real test is whether either country can sustain institutions that encourage people to read patiently, travel humbly, argue openly and take Southeast Asian agency seriously. Universities and think tanks in the region can shape how outsiders study it by expanding fellowships, joint research and immersive residencies that anchor regional expertise in local debates, languages and intellectual communities.

For the US, cutting regional studies while declaring Southeast Asia strategically important is self-defeating. For China, building area studies as a strategic discipline may increase capacity, but not necessarily a deeper appreciation or interpretive depth. The future competition over Southeast Asia will not only be fought with ships, summits and investments. It will also be shaped by who can understand the region beyond their own ambitions.

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