THE MALACCA dilemma, one of China’s greatest strategic vulnerabilities, forces the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to have a clear interest over the Southeast Asia.
As an investment-led economy, the PRC cannot afford any country to close off the straits of Malacca and throttle its economy. One of the ways it has dealt with this problem is by building overland routes that bypasses the straights, giving them access to trade routes and ignore possible blockades.
One such route is the Fish and Rice, a collaborative initiative between China and Cambodia to modernize agriculture and fisheries along certain parts of the latter nation.
Like the Gwadar Corridor in Pakistan, the Corridor’s stated goal is economic growth and prosperity. It’s more likely that it is an overland insurance plan for when the United States Navy parks ships along the Malacca Strait, blocking that trade artery to China. The same plan is likely behind the Fish and Rice Corridor.
The problem is that these Corridors pass through countries which are relatively unstable. I hope we all remember the brief war between Pakistan and India a few months ago. If that conflict had escalated to a full-scale war, I think it very likely that Gwadar would have been hit. The same story is happening now in Cambodia.
Although Thailand and Cambodia have signaled a truce, I don’t know how genuine those intensions are, given the rhetoric. Continued war renders the Fish and Rice Corridor vulnerable at best and defunct at worse. In this sense, instability in the region is an incentive for the United States and a vulnerability to China.
In general, any instability, particularly in Southeast Asia, is bad for China, as it disrupts trade and investment. For those on the other side, though, this is less of an issue. The Philippines, for example, is not affected by the Thai-Cambodian war other than a fracturing of an already dysfunctional Southeast Asian region. The same is true for many regional countries that may not like China’s regional strategic goals.
And here lies China’s problem. It needs Southeast Asia to keep trade lanes open, but no amount of intervention or investment can change the region’s fault lines. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has tried to fix them. It has failed. China is not likely to do any better./PN
