Abstract
In 2004, Malaysia celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its normalization of ties with the Peoples’ Republic of China with much fanfare. Thailand followed suit in 2005. Indeed, Malaysian and Thai relations with China have come a long way since Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok were driven by shifting geostrategic conditions in the mid-1970s to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing despite the fact that their respective policy makers continued to view China with grave apprehension. While contemporary scholarly attention in the field of international relations of East Asia mostly focuses on shifts in Chinese grand strategy and foreign policy, an equally pertinent dimension to the equation is how regional states understand and have responded to these shifts. To that end, this chapter focuses on the response from two regional states that were traditional Western allies sharing deep apprehensions toward China for domestic and strategic reasons during the Cold War, but nevertheless were compelled at various points to recalibrate China policy in tandem with changes in their respective internal and external contexts. Furthermore, a comparative study of this nature throws up interesting observations on similarities and differences in terms of the drivers behind how regional states view and respond to the gradual rise of China.
1. Joseph Liow and Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman are Associate Professor and Research Associate respectively at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.
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Notes
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© 2009 Shiping Tang, Mingjiang Li, and Amitav Acharya
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Liow, J.C., Osman, M.N.M. (2009). Coping with Complexity: Trends in Thailand’s and Malaysia’s Relations with China. In: Tang, S., Li, M., Acharya, A. (eds) Living with China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622623_8
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