Three questions for Malaysia’s new foreign policy

"And China claims the South China Sea and the Spratley Islands and ignores our claims." (1) There has never been any official Chinese statement (ROC or PRC) claiming the South China Sea. The repeated official statement made by the PRC is "China has sovereignty over all the SCS islands and their adjacent waters". The 11-dash (now 9-dash) line was first published by the Republic of China in 1947 without saying what it meant. It could simply mean maritime rights in the area. (2) The Spratly Islands are also claimed by Vietnam (almost wholly) and the Philippines (around 90%), not only China.

Ana02:55 AM, 01 Feb 2019

Local politics require a different set of sloganeering but can we apply such an approach to international relationship? By now, we must be aware that even mighty Trump had to take actions out of this fear.Of course, we have to wait to see the final outcome of his strategy to contain China. At our level, I see that the OBOR is a strategy that China wanted to develop to enhance her connectivity with those nations which are not directly under the influence of the big brother West. So whether we like this concept or not, we are going to be affected by the alignment of this OBOR system. China has taken the opportunity to link up the Eurasian landmass with the blessing of Russia, this will pull the CIS nations under both their influence. Now coming back to the ASEAN Region, it is obvious that Vietnam , in spite of her issue at the South China Sea, has gained huge growth rate in recent years as witnessed by the over 6 Million TEUs of container in the HCM ports last year. They hardly handle much money losing operation of transshipment boxes which sadly has inspired some jokers to want to compete for. By the way, Port Klang handled less than 4 M TEUs in indigenous volume. This clearly showed that Vietnam had played the game to her economic advantage.The most interesting sector for Malaysia is also in counting the number of containers we could handle , sadly in competition with our nearest neighbor who operate a string of terminals across the world. In this competition, we prefer to offer all kinds of incentives to the lines hoping aganst hope that this could change the current scenario without bother to understand the whole spectrum of the shipping industry, which all agree is encountering huge challenges which by the way are created by the industry itself. So where is our real interest in this aspect? With more cash to be loaded into Port Klang -Carey Island, what happen if Thailand agrees to open up Pak Dara Port for development? With all the ho-ha at Sri Lanka, in spite of all the negative political comments, she had handled over 6 Million TEUs last year. The same can be said of the Greece port of Piraeus, now considered as the Eastern Europe gateway. This industry has mind boggling impact on nations which depend much on the logistics supply chain. And with their e-commerce, things are going to be much more interesting for all of us!

Kenneth GOHh12:47 AM, 01 Feb 2019