Malaysia, Charting Its Own Course in Southeast Asia
China needs regional middle powers like Malaysia as much as they need China.
By Phillip Orchard
In most ways, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s four-day visit to Beijing last week stuck to what’s becoming the standard script for visiting leaders from China’s weaker neighbors. Mahathir praised China’s development model and asked for Beijing’s support in helping shore up Malaysia’s economic problems at home.
And like his counterparts across Southeast Asia, Mahathir didn’t leave empty-handed; the two sides inked several deals, including a bilateral currency swap agreement and a Chinese pledge to import Malaysian palm oil and agricultural products. This script may seem to echo elements of Imperial China’s tributary system, in which peripheral vassal states would seek trade and favor with the Middle Kingdom in exchange for shows of deference. That’s because a China-centric regional order, with its weaker neighbors economically and strategically tethered to Beijing’s orbit, is essentially what Beijing is trying to convince the region to accept today.
And like his counterparts across Southeast Asia, Mahathir didn’t leave empty-handed; the two sides inked several deals, including a bilateral currency swap agreement and a Chinese pledge to import Malaysian palm oil and agricultural products. This script may seem to echo elements of Imperial China’s tributary system, in which peripheral vassal states would seek trade and favor with the Middle Kingdom in exchange for shows of deference. That’s because a China-centric regional order, with its weaker neighbors economically and strategically tethered to Beijing’s orbit, is essentially what Beijing is trying to convince the region to accept today.
The historical parallels of modern China’s ambitions are probably not lost on the spry 93-year-old Mahathir, who first entered government in Malaysia in 1964, when Beijing was still grappling with the fallout of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Yet, the prime minister has not been playing the role of supplicant. Rather, to put the strained bilateral relationship on more equal footing, Mahathir has been portraying Malaysia as following in China’s footsteps after less glorious episodes of Chinese history. Shortly after his election in June, for example, Mahathir cited China’s experience renegotiating “unequal treaties” – a series of humiliating pacts that the Qing dynasty signed at gunpoint with Western powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries – as his rationale for suspending some $23 billion in China-backed Belt and Road Initiative projects signed with Malaysia’s previous administration. And in a news conference with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang last week, shortly after rebuffing Beijing’s efforts to revive the projects, Mahathir effectively described BRI as “a new version of colonialism” in the region. (Parts of China, of course, were colonized as a result of the unequal treaties.)
That the prime minister was received so warmly (and sent home with a bundle of goodies) anyway suggests that Beijing is learning from past mistakes, navigating political minefields in partner states at a time when BRI projects are facing intensifying scrutiny across the globe. It also illustrates just how much China still needs Malaysia – and how middle powers like Malaysia today can bend “tributary” relationships to their own aims.
What China Sees in Malaysia
The sprawling, vaguely defined Belt and Road Initiative serves a range of Chinese goals. Some infrastructure projects are intended to open up trade routes that bypass maritime chokepoints which, if blocked, would bring the Chinese economy to its knees while integrating less developed provinces in the Chinese interior to the global economy, helping reduce China’s steep wealth imbalances between the coast and the interior. Some BRI projects are aimed at cultivating political influence that Beijing hopes it can use to pull strategically important states into its orbit. Some projects (deep-water ports, for example) are intended to eventually function as bases for China’s burgeoning blue-water navy – or at least that’s what BRI critics claim. In some countries, Beijing is simply using its diplomatic power to win contracts for firms back home and keep China’s vast industrial base humming while the Chinese economy enters a protracted period of slowing growth.
Malaysia’s role in BRI embodies all of these objectives. The country’s strategic value stems primarily from its position at one of the world’s busiest sea lanes. The gap between peninsular Malaysia and Malaysian Borneo is the southern gateway to the South China Sea and a thoroughfare for seaborne trade bound for the Malacca Strait, the length of which peninsular Malaysia runs. Some 80 percent of China’s oil imports pass through these waters; roughly half of Chinese exports do as well. Denial of this passage would be a threat Beijing could not abide. Malaysia also happens to be a party to the dispute over China’s voracious territorial claims in the South China Sea. Naturally, Beijing is keen to discourage the country from banding together with other claimants like the Philippines and Vietnam to push back against China’s assertiveness in the waters – not to mention aligning tightly with the U.S., Japan, India and Australia.
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