In a moment when Washington and Beijing are locked in an escalating contest for influence across the Asia-Pacific, two thinkers who have spent decades in the region offer a perspective that cuts against the grain of mainstream Western commentary. Vijay Prashad, a major thinker today and executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and author of over forty books on the Global South, is an expert n geopolitics and on the struggles for equality and equity for all people. He argues for India and China to step up to their rightful place in history, culture, and economy. Layne Hartsell, a research fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and Bioregional Letters at North Valley College, Mindanao, interviewed Prashad and brought a complementary lens to the discussion of current geopolitical affairs. Their nuanced and sometimes provocative conversation dealt with China and BRICS as Threat or Transformation.
For Asia, Both thinkers agree that China can be a transformativeo along with India and ASEAN ascending. Prashad and Hartsell resist the binary framing that dominates Western discourse on China. Prashad, known for his critiques of American and British hegemony, situates China's assertiveness in the South China Sea and its Belt and Road Initiative not as naked expansionism but as the behavior of a major power responding to decades of encirclement by US military infrastructure — from Japan and South Korea to the Philippines and Guam, though with caution considering how great powers likely act in the world. Hartsell adds that while China is authoritarian and has imperialism, historically it has not been an aggressive country, including when it had the capability for domination due to high development of technology (gunpowder), ships, logistics and organization. Currently, US aggression against Iran is a confrontation of China. Prashad argues that this context is routinely stripped from Western analysis, leaving audiences with an incomplete and often misleading picture that “if we don’t confront China, they will get us”.
Hartsell, approaching the situation from the standpoint of energy, economy, and environment — his signature 3E Bioregional Framework for revillaging with energy, economy, and environment — sees China's rise as inseparable from the global transition away from fossil fuel dependency. China's massive investments in solar, wind, and battery technology, he notes, are reshaping the economic geography of Asia and the World in ways that the old Cold War categories simply cannot capture. To speak of China purely in security terms, Hartsell suggests, is to miss the deeper structural transformation underway particularly with their outright claim that “we have over-urbanized and must bring the state back closer to nature” and with Mencius or Mengzi (372-289 BCE) central to planning.
ASEAN: Between Giants
Concerning ASEAN, both scholars see a bloc that is far more strategically sophisticated than it is given credit for in the Western press. Prashad points to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — the vast trade agreement anchored by ASEAN and China — as evidence that Southeast Asian nations have already made a pragmatic calculation: deep economic integration with China is not a vulnerability to be managed but an opportunity to be leveraged and enjoyed. The framework effectively sidelined American-led trade architecture in the region, a development that received far less attention in Western capitals than it deserved.
Hartsell, drawing on years of living and working in Asia emphasizes the profound diversity within ASEAN — ten nations with vastly different histories, political systems, and relationships with Beijing. He cautions against treating ASEAN as a monolith. Vietnam's wariness of Chinese influence is historically rooted in ways that differ sharply from Cambodia's or Laos's closer alignment, and as Philippines and Indonesia chart their own independent courses with high rates of growth. What unites them, he argues, is a shared commitment to strategic autonomy — a refusal to be conscripted into either a US-led or a China-led bloc.
The Question of Multipolarity
Perhaps the deepest point of convergence between the two thinkers is their shared conviction that a multipolar world is not only emerging but is, on balance, a more stable and just arrangement than the unipolar moment the United States enjoyed after 1991. Prashad frames this through the lens of the Global South's long struggle for self-determination, tracing a line from the Bandung Conference of 1955 through the Non-Aligned Movement to today's expanding BRICS grouping. For him, China's growing role in Asia is one part of a broader story about formerly colonized nations reclaiming agency over their own development.
Hartsell grounds the same argument in the practicalities of the energy transition and bioregional development. The old model — in which Asian nations exported cheap goods and raw materials to the West while remaining dependent on Western financial institutions and security guarantees — is breaking down. In its place, he sees the emergence of new regional supply chains, new development financing mechanisms, and new frameworks for scientific and technological cooperation that might converge with the leadership for ecocivilization in China and a new preservationism. Drawing on his own country, the United States, from 140 years ago go, he foresees the absolute necessity of the expansion of preservationism, a tremendous good that the U.S. “exported” to the world in the 20th century and how China might lead based on Mencius’ and Chuang Tzu.
A Word of Caution
Neither thinker offers an uncritical view of China. Prashad acknowledges that Beijing's unilateral claims in the South China Sea are legally and diplomatically untenable, and that a negotiated, multilateral framework for demilitarizing the area would serve everyone's long-term interests. Hartsell raises concerns about the concentration of technological power and the risks of one form of dependency simply replacing another, whether the dependency is on Western finance or Chinese infrastructure investment though Chinese prudentialism is categorically different than the aggressive U.S. model over the past 80 years, and then that of the West over the past more than 500 years.
What both share, ultimately, is an insistence that Asia be understood on its own terms — through its history, its material realities, and the aspirations of its peoples — rather than as a theater for great power competition mapped from Washington. In that insistence, they offer a corrective that is as timely as it is necessary.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist and is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. Vijay is also the chief correspondent for Globetrotter and appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).
Layne Hartsell, (USA) 雷恩∙哈特塞尔 - 마이클레인핫셀 - Research Fellow in 3E: Energy, Economy, Environment at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Department of Philosophy, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and in Bioregional Letters at North Valley College, Mindanao, Philippines. He is a member of the board at Korea IT Times. His previous affiliations include Sookmyung Women’s University and Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea
