Japan and India courted southeast Asian leaders yesterday, a day after China signed a landmark deal with ASEAN to create an Asian free trade market of 1.8 billion people by 2015. Officials from the 10-member Association of South East Asia Nations (ASEAN) and Tokyo said tariff-cutting talks on their Japan-ASEAN trade zone would start in April and be wrapped up in two years.

“We were very, very stimulated by China’s initiative,” a Japanese official told reporters at the summit in the sleepy Laos capital. “We want to make it speedy, not because of China, but because this sort of negotiation needs impetus.” ASEAN’s free trade deal with China is due to be phased in from 2010, and its agreement with Japan, who sent Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Vientiane, by 2012. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, another guest at the annual jamboree of ASEAN – which groups Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, the Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar – also made plans to get its own regional trade zone done and dusted by 2016.

“India is a country which has been growing at 6 to 7 per cent for the last several years and this is a fact which is of interest to ASEAN countries,” said Indian foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna. Amid a flurry of trade deals all designed to keep pace with China’s growing economic and political clout, South Korea, the last one of the three North Asian guests at the summit, also pressed for a piece of the action.

Seoul, which edged closer to a mini-free trade pact with Singapore on Monday, said it would open talks on reducing trade levies with its southern neighbours in early 2005. Not to be outdone by Japan, negotiations with South Korea will also take only two years, a summit statement said.

In a free trade frenzy sparked by China’s moves two years ago, the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand also put in their first appearances at an ASEAN summit with overtures for their rendition of a free trade zone. However, Australian Prime Minister John Howard put some Asian noses out of joint with his refusal to sign a non-aggression pact with ASEAN, a stance that has led to calls for his exclusion from the forum in the future.

The ever-broadening grin on the face of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao each time he appeared in public bore testimony to China’s growing confidence in its ability to turn economic into political power in its strategically important southern reaches. “The agreements signed today show that China-ASEAN relations have developed on their original foundation to a new level,” Wen told reporters after the trade deal was signed.

Another sign of Beijing flexing its muscles was an initiative on Monday to establish an East Asia Summit (EAS), echoing Malaysia’s proposed East Asian Economic Caucus, stillborn a decade ago after encountering stiff opposition from the US.

Beijing’s commitment to such a summit “will not budge an inch as China grows stronger”, Wen said late on Monday. Details of the EAS, which first appeared in a summit statement that was then withdrawn, remain sketchy, but the idea was sufficiently controversial to prompt an exercise in damage control from top ASEAN officials. Secretary General Ong Keng Yong insisted plans were only at the “brainstorming” stage and suggested communique writers had jumped the gun in giving a new name to a forum that brings together ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea, a group hitherto referred to as “ASEAN+3”.

However, in a sign talks are not as smooth as initially planned, duties on “sensitive goods” such as sugar, iron, steel and cars would be cut to below 20 percent only by 2012. Furthermore, the deal only encompasses ASEAN’s six more advanced economies The four poorer members — Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar — have until 2015 to comply. In the first nine months of 2004, China’s trade with ASEAN countries grew by 35 percent from a year earlier and is due to surpass $100 billion this year.

<B>John Ruwitch</B>