A Question of Rebalancing: Malaysia’s Relations with China

By admin-s On Jul 22, 2014

Malaysia’s traditional security policy has been to steer clear of great power rivalries. That’s now becoming easier said than done, says Felix Chang. China’s growing assertiveness in Southeast Asia is indeed starting to put Kuala Lumpur’s customary approach to the test.

Felix K. Chang, Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)

Malaysia’s dispute with China over islands in the South China Sea never created the diplomatic strain that the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did in March 2014. The fact that the Malaysian government poorly handled the search for the missing jet and that most of the plane’s passengers were Chinese triggered a public furor in China. Many called for a boycott of Malaysian goods and travel. Chinese authorities openly criticized Kuala Lumpur. They even allowed the families of the missing Chinese passengers to protest outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing. (One can imagine what China’s response might have been had the airline been Japanese and the search bungled by Tokyo.)

Tensions were still evident two months later when Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak visited Beijing to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Malaysia. Chinese social media pounced on Najib’s decision not to visit the families of the missing passengers and intimated that his government had not yet disclosed everything it knew about the incident. Even Chinese officials, who officially praised their “friendship” and “partnership” with Malaysia during Najib’s visit, found it necessary to further press Malaysia to find the missing plane. [1] The friction between the two countries was all the more notable given their close relationship over the last couple of decades. By and large, Malaysia has been willing to give China the benefit of the doubt in its dealings with Southeast Asia. That willingness partly arose from Malaysia’s attempt to maintain a certain distance from the West, despite its strong ties with it. In fact, some Malaysian leaders, especially former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, seemed to delight in commenting on the distinction between “eastern values,” which they believe Malaysia shares with China, and the liberal democratic values espoused by the West. On a more practical note, they also sought to benefit from China’s economic rise to enhance their political stature at home. That inclination has led Malaysia to pursue a China policy that tended to “prioritize immediate economic and diplomatic benefits over potential security concerns, while simultaneously attempting to keep its strategic options open for as long as [possible].” [2]

Drivers of Malaysia’s China Policy

Of course, keeping strategic options open has been a hallmark of Malaysian foreign policy. Historically, Malaysia’s leaders have been wary of all external powers. That should not be surprising given their country’s colonial past and its abandonment by its security guarantor, the United Kingdom, at a time when the region was riven by Cold War conflicts. Hence, Malaysia has long advocated turning Southeast Asia into a “zone of peace, freedom, and neutrality.” It helped found the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) so that the region could chart its own course. It encouraged ASEAN countries to put their economic development above external security concerns. Malaysia even suggested that the other members of ASEAN reach out to Hanoi after its conquest of South Vietnam in 1975. Malaysian leaders believed that the best way for their country (and all the region’s countries) to achieve regional stability was to craft an international environment in which all countries were interested in good relations with one another. [3]

But with the end of the Cold War, Malaysia seemed to tilt towards China. There were good reasons for it to do so. Economic imperatives pulled Malaysia toward China, whose economic rise was gathering steam. Since then China has become Malaysia’s largest trading partner with bilateral trade likely to top $60 billion this year.[4]Meanwhile, Malaysia was pushed toward China by what Kuala Lumpur saw as the West’s shabby treatment of it during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. In Malaysia’s hour of need, the West imposed onerous and intrusive conditions for financial assistance that grated on the pride of Malaysian leaders. [5] And so, even as some of its neighbors now sound the alarm over Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, Malaysia has so far resisted attempts to draw it into the fray, regardless of its own dispute with China over those waters. (One could argue that Malaysia has been a free rider—benefiting from its neighbors’ efforts to challenge the legality of China’s claim without bearing any of the costs.)

Yet Malaysia’s reticence to challenge China may run deeper than any diplomatic strategy driven by national interest. Malaysia is an ethnically divided country, with Malays (locally referred to as the bumiputra) in the majority and Chinese as a substantial minority. That divide has been the source of considerable strife throughout Malaysia’s history. During the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, a sizable portion of Malaya’s Chinese community, inspired by China’s communist ideology, took up arms against Kuala Lumpur. Anger between the two groups peaked again in 1969 when violent ethnic riots erupted. Even today ethnic tensions lurk under the surface in Malaysian society, propagated by far-reaching affirmative-action policies that favor thebumiputra over Chinese-Malaysians.[6] The potential for such internal conflict may well have made good relations with China a tacit imperative for the Malaysian government.

There may be a further cultural component to Malaysia’s approach to China. “After the riots of May 1969 the Malay leadership clamped a lid on discussions of race or communal relations. For Malays, talking about trouble makes matters worse.” [7] Many Malays seem to feel that time is the best healer of pent-up passions; so the best way to handle “unpleasant and even dangerous situations is one of avoidance and silence, of repressing emotions in the hope that the problem will go away if matters are smoothed over.” [8] Thus, Kuala Lumpur may believe that, since there is little to be gained from confronting China now, it should discretely bide its time. That contrasts with how China has tended to react to affronts from abroad. Historically, Chinese leaders have “bewailed, almost with pride, China’s mistreatment by foreigners—a tradition which is expressed in the National Humiliation Day celebrated by [Beijing] as a reproach to the Soviets [during the Cold War], and in their complaints about Taiwan to the United States.”[9] These cultural differences in dealing with troublesome issues have made China’s public criticism of Malaysia over the Flight 370 incident all the more grating on Malaysian sensibilities.