Singapore's relations with China reflect its acute awareness of sensitivities in ASEAN over its being the only Chinese-majority state outside China; and its need to strengthen its hand in its dealings with Beijing by placing its China initiatives within a larger regional framework. ASEAN is, therefore, an integral part of Singapore's policy towards China. Singapore drew on ASEAN's ability to provide its members with a multiplier effect in their international relations although it was (and is) not a supranational organization along the lines of the European Union. But in drawing on ASEAN as a diplomatic resource, Singapore keenly was aware that there was more than one view of China among regional states. The crisis over the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia had revealed fault lines in the ASEAN view, from one extreme in which Indonesia's closeness to Vietnam attested to its suspicion of China, and the other extreme, in which Thailand and Singapore believed that Beijing was the lesser threat to Southeast Asia. The disappearance of the Cold War and the end of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia transformed such perceptions and approaches, but there were residual differences over China in an expanded ASEAN that included, not least, its former nemesis, Vietnam. In emerging as ASEAN's most articulate exponent of the need to engage China, Singapore gave apprehensions of China due weight. However, its response, which emanated from its general policy of engagement, was that a peacefully rising Beijing must be given a stake in the Southeast Asian status quo by having its legitimate interests accommodated — even as regional states sought to ensure that America remained the balancer power in East Asia as a whole.

It is outside the scope of this work to describe the evolution of China's relations with the individual states of ASEAN, or to show how the interplay of intentions, interests and behaviour among the external powers — America, China, Japan, Russia and, increasingly, India — influenced the direction of regional affairs. What is important is to recognize that Southeast Asia was not just another region coming to terms with China's rise.