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This essay traces the structural sources of Malaysia's South China Sea policy. It argues that Malaysia's ‘light-hedging’ approach is primarily a smaller-state's response to growing systemic pressur...

The year 2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regional networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative: Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity provide both 'big picture' assessments of China's role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.

This chapter offers a small-state perspective on the presence of China’s connectivity-based Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Southeast Asia, a prioritized region of the rising power’s economic statecraft, especially since President Xi Jinping announced the initiative in late 2013. Viewing “connectivity†and “gaps†as two sides of the same coin, the chapter focuses on the role of the BRI in bridging key gaps in the host countries. Among the key findings is that the effects of China’s BRI push – taking place alongside the pulls of several host countries – have been mixed: bridging links are being developed, but missed links persist. Specifically, while the growing BRI presence is showing early signs of narrowing the physical and developmental gaps in several Southeast Asian countries, the process has also highlighted the enduring – and in some cases deepening – perceptual and political gaps between China and host countries. This chapter argues that the persistent gaps and missed links are a product of power asymmetries, bilateral complexities, and divergent domestic political imperatives across the countries. Significantly, while the gaps have constrained and challenged China’s BRI agenda, they have also motivated Beijing to devote more capital, diplomatic resources, and political will to the cross-border negotiation treadmills with the smaller countries, especially as competing powers enter the Asian connectivity game one after another. Further strengthening the bridging links and addressing the missed links is central to the prospects of the BRI in shaping global governance in the twenty-first century.

Malaysia and China have seen one of the most cordial and productive relationships in the Asia-Pacific throughout the post–Cold War era, one with implications beyond their bilateral ties. However, relations were tested through a series of unprecedented events in 2013–14. This article analyzes how the Beting Serupai incidents have impacted Malaysia’s evolving South China Sea policy, and then assesses the impact of the MH370 and Sabah kidnapping incidents on bilateral relations. Finally, it makes an overall assessment of the implications of these events, focusing on the developments after Najib Razak’s visit to Beijing in May–June 2014.

This article explains Malaysia's US policy under Prime Minister Najib. It argues that to the extent that there is a “shift” in Malaysia's policy, its substance has been shaped by structural and domestic considerations. Structurally, in the face of a fast rising China, Malaysia is compelled to keep a more balanced relationship with all the major powers. This structural push, reinforced by Obama's “pivot,” has been nonetheless limited by a concern about the risks of entrapment, abandonment, and antagonism. Domestically, there are economic and political motivations to develop closer ties with Washington. These, however, have been counteracted by a calculation of not wanting to align too closely with America. These structural and domestic determinants together explain the smaller state's strategy towards the superpower at a time of systemic change.

Using Malaysia’s China policy as a case study of a smaller state’s response to a rising power, this article challenges the mainstream neorealist notion that the growing capability and geographical proximity of a rising power tend to induce fear among its weaker neighbours. By tracing the transformation of Malaysia’s China policy, the article’s findings indicate that power asymmetry and geographical proximity have no inherent logic of their own; rather, whether and to what extent the two variables will prompt smaller states to become fearful and/or attracted to a rising power is often a function of intervening factors at the domestic level, i.e. the imperative of ruling elite’s domestic legitimation. In the case of Malaysia’s China policy, it is the ruling Barisan Nasional elite’s desire to capitalize on the big power’s rise—for the ultimate goal of enhancing and justifying its political authority at home—that has driven the smaller state to adopt a hedging approach characterized by an inclination to prioritize immediate economic and diplomatic benefits over potential security concerns, while simultaneously attempting to keep its strategic options open for as long as the systemic conditions allow.