ASEAN plus Three (APT) As a Socializing Environment: China's Approach to the Internationalization of APT

In East Asia, several formal and informal regional institutions have been established in the last several decades to promote regional integration. However, it is difficult to identify which is the dominant institution and determine how it is working. ASEAN Plus Three (APT), representing the first institutionalized effort to combine Northeast and Southeast Asia and further promote integration in this institutionally undeveloped region, is central to the regionalist view of international relations. 1 Moreover, China’ s approach to the establishment of APT and changes in its regional behavior have attracted scholarly attention. This article combines an empirical analysis of China’s approach to APT with a theoretical discussion of APT’ s institutional design in order to illustrate how APT is working as an environment of socialization in the context of regional integration.