The growing salience of non-traditional security issues tended to work in favour of raising China’s profile in the region as few could be addressed without the participation of this Asian giant, which shared land and maritime borders with most of the East Asian countries. Further, China’s cooperative security approach was well suited to addressing these new security matters. These tended to be of a transnational character that affected the domestic security of states, rather than classic inter-state military conflict. They ranged from terrorism conducted by non-state actors unconstrained by territorial bounds to international crime involving narcotics, the smuggling of people, to money laundering, pandemics, climate change and even natural disasters. Such problems could not be addressed by one state alone, however powerful. Nor could they be managed by international organizations, although they had a role to play. Above all they called for cooperation of a new kind between states. Dealing with terrorists, international criminal gangs and so on required the different agencies of state governments, corporations and NGOs to work together. In the case of terrorists and criminals, intelligence agencies and domestic police forces now had to learn how to share information and work together. Similarly, money laundering, pandemics and so on went well beyond the provenance of foreign and defence ministries. Even when the military are brought in to help deal with natural disasters, their role is far from the conventional one, as demonstrated by their actions in the aftermath of the terrible tsunami of 2004.