China and Southeast Asia: Global Changes and Regional Challenges

12. BALANCING, BANDWAGONING, OR HEDGING?: Strategic and Security Patterns in Malaysia’s Relations with China, 1981–2003 by Joseph Chinyong Liow

Strategic and Security Patterns in Malaysia’s Relations with China 281 12 BALANCING, BANDWAGONING, OR HEDGING?: Strategic and Security Patterns in Malaysia’s Relations with China, 1981–2003 Joseph Chinyong Liow INTRODUCTION Over the past decade, there has been extensive interest in the field of security studies in Southeast Asia for the political and strategic ramifications of the emergence of China as a great power. The extant literature however, has focused primarily on the so-called “Strategic Triangle” of U.S.-China-Japan relations and how its dynamics might have an impact on the region.1 Significantly fewer attempts have been made at looking at the policies of individual Southeast Asian states towards China. This chapter is an attempt to address this lacuna by studying Malaysia’s foreign policy towards China over the past two decades of the Mahathir administration. This time period has been chosen for three reasons. First, there is a dearth of scholarship on Malaysia-China relations that covers the post-Cold War era. Second, it has been over the last twenty years that the academic and policy community in East Asia began to view China as a major power with the potential to affect the regional, if not global, distribution of power. This impression has certainly 12 China & SEA Pt IV/Ch 12 20/1/05, 12:24 PM 281 282 Joseph Chinyong Liow gained greater urgency in the post-Cold War years with certain circles in the International Relations community viewing China as the successor to the Soviet Union as the United State’s main political and strategic adversary. Finally, the past twenty years has itself proven to be somewhat of a watershed in the study of Malaysian foreign policy, for it was during the Mahathir administration that the Malaysian Government took on a more active profile and role in international affairs, a development that is poignant to MalaysiaChina relations. Given that it has been suggested on several occasions that Southeast Asian states appear to be bandwagoning with China, this chapter begins by exploring some conceptual paradigms relevant to the understanding of Malaysia’s posture towards China.2 Following this, the study investigates Malaysia-China relations in terms of the continuity and change in its China policy over the last two decades, but focusing primarily on the post-Cold War era. In the main, the chapter contends that a discernible shift has taken place in Malaysia’s China policy over the last decade, which in turn demonstrates how Kuala Lumpur is seeking to secure its own interests by navigating closer to Beijing. THEORIZING HEDGE DIPLOMACY: A VIABLE POLICY FOR SMALL STATES? International politics, the prominent International Relations theorist Kenneth Waltz once declared, is based on great powers.3 Yet despite the claims of Waltzian “grand theorists”, a literature on the role of small states in international politics has grown considerably.4 Summarizing the vast scholarship on this topic would be beyond the scope of this chapter. What is being suggested however, is that the concept of bandwagoning, ironically enough extrapolated from the neorealist school of International Relations theory which Waltz himself was pioneer and progenitor, provides conceptual insights as to how smaller states can adopt policies to preserve and advance their interests vis-à-vis great powers.There are however, variations in bandwagoning behaviour that need to be illuminated. A common belief among neorealists is that under conditions of power disparity, weaker states tend to coalesce with other like-states against the powerful to preserve security and try to affect either the distribution of power or in response to threat perceptions.5 As the oft-quoted Kenneth Waltz articulated: “secondary states, if they are free to choose, flock to the weaker side; for it is the stronger side that threatens them”.6 This proposition was later refined by Stephen Walt, who argued that “states balance against 12 China & SEA Pt IV/Ch 12 20/1/05, 12:24 PM 282 Strategic and Security Patterns in Malaysia’s Relations with China 283 threats rather than against power alone”.7 While Walt conceded that power was an important factor in assessing trends in military alignment, he introduces geographic proximity, offensive capabilities and perceived intentions in order to augment his argument that states do not balance against power per se, but threat.8 The logic of bandwagoning, on the other hand, suggests that states in such situations in fact align themselves with the stronger. Many neo-realist scholars further...