Malaysia has a stake in the South China Sea dispute—and not just where territory is concerned. As ASEAN Chair next year, there are opportunities to take advantage of and complications to avoid.
In May this year, Chinese oil company China National Offshore Oil Corporation placed the HYSY-981 oil drilling platform approximately 130 nautical miles from the Vietnamese shore. This caused simmering anti- Chinese sentiment to boil over into riots; Chinese and other Asian-owned factories were torched in business parks in Binh Duong, Dong Nai and Ha Tinh provinces in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government acted to quell the riots to protect its relationship with China, and it was not surprising that at a public diplomacy forum in Singapore—the Shangri-La Dialogue in early June—the Chinese government drew flak from the US and Japan, and also a guarded censure from the Vietnamese1. While HYSY- 981 was announced to have completed its mission in mid-July, one can only speculate if it was withdrawn for purely operational and technical reasons, or if international pressure had contributed to this in any way.
Among many of Malaysia's interests in the South China Sea, the most strategically important is the area disputed with China off northern Sarawak and northeast of Sabah which holds significant oil and gas reserves, some in which drilling platforms are currently operating. It’s a very severe dispute—Malaysian oil and gas acreage maps can run to 400km into the South China Sea, but the nine-dotted line comes up to 37km off the coast of Sarawak.
Such episodes are one of many in a long-running series of maritime disputes about China’s claim of “indisputable sovereignty” over most of the South China Sea. Beijing’s “nine-dotted line” claims 95% of the area and encompasses clusters of islets and reefs such as the Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands—once deemed mere navigational features but which now have economic, political and security significance. For Malaysia, the challenge lies in that the Chinese claim comes within tens of miles of the Sarawakian coastline. This claim has been promulgated since 1959, when China published an official map of China. As it is, the maritime border disputes involve four Asean states and China.
