Southeast Asian Studies in China

Paper Abstract: This paper comprises three key sections. The first section sketches the history of Southeast Asian studies in China. Although other scholars have undertaken this task in far greater detail, the section highlights the political and geopolitical aspects of change in scholarly trends, particularly the politicization of scholarship and historical methods from the Qing dynasty to the present day, for the uninitiated. Having set the context for further inquiry, the paper proceeds with the second section, which explores how Southeast Asian studies has become a niche discipline in which universities and research institutes, both established and young, specialize as part of their vision for long-term growth and from which the state receives expert advice for policymaking and geopolitical outlook in the context of China’s increasingly complex interactions with contemporary Southeast Asia. Aiming to historicize in a specific setting the emergence of Southeast Asian studies in China, which responded in part to the Western domination of Asian studies in general, the third section examines the case of Thai studies from its inception during the late nineteenth century to its current state as arguably the most thematically diverse and geopolitically relevant subfield of Southeast Asian studies in China. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of producing knowledge about Southeast Asia for business and people-to-people cultural exchanges between China and Southeast Asia.