By Datuk Prof Dr Mohd Faiz Abdullah

On the eve of President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Kuala Lumpur, Donald Trump had a message for Vietnam, where Xi had just concluded a visit: “They’re probably trying to screw the United States.”

It was as fashionably boorish as it was predictably accusatory. Yet, in its own capricious way, the remark captured a broader truth: the geopolitical contest between the United States and China has become more intense, more zero-sum, and, more difficult for others to navigate.

For Malaysia, this sharpening rivalry has turned what might once have been a ceremonially significant state visit into a high-stakes diplomatic feat. Xi Jinping’s presence in Malaysia from 15 to 17 April was choreographed to a T and deeply symbolic. But the backdrop – of tariffs, tantrums and tectonic global shifts – ensured that the subtext mattered just as much as the spectacle.

At first glance, the pageantry played to familiar themes. There was warm praise for over 50 years of diplomatic ties, the reaffirmation of China as Malaysia’s largest trading partner, and grand talk of a “shared future”.

Yet beneath the ceremonial warmth of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s state banquet speech on 16 April was a carefully modulated diagnosis of the global landscape, one increasingly defined by fragmentation, friction, and retreat from multilateralism.

“In some quarters,” the Prime Minister said, “the rules-based order has been turned on its head – dialogue has yielded to demands, tariffs are imposed without restraint, and the language of cooperation is drowned beneath the noise of threats and coercion.”

Increasingly Troubled Waters

While no names were mentioned, the implication was unmistakable. Anwar’s sharper notes were directed not at Beijing, but squarely at Washington. His allusions to “economic tribalism”, to the “weaponisation of market access”, and to the “unilateral whim” replacing multilateral cooperation were subtle but unmistakable rebukes of American protectionism. They were Malaysia’s way of signalling, with diplomatic temperance, that the old certainties of Pax Americana can no longer be taken for granted.

As American tariffs disrupt global markets and Washington oscillates between assertiveness and retreat, countries like Malaysia are left to chart a course through increasingly troubled waters. For a country whose international trade is largely settled in US dollars, vulnerability to American monetary and trade policy is not an abstraction, but a hard constraint.

Across Southeast Asia, governments are having to reimagine the architecture of economic resilience and diplomatic agency. The instinct to hedge – to maintain working relationships with both China and the United States without becoming beholden to either – is not new. But the current climate demands more than agility, nothing short of a worldview that can withstand pressure without succumbing to polarisation.

It is this dual reality – dependence and disquiet – that explains much of the nuance in Malaysia’s approach to Xi Jinping’s visit. On the one hand, China will be central to the region’s future.

Under Xi’s leadership, China has offered Malaysia infrastructure, investment, and industrial partnerships that few others can match. The Belt and Road Initiative, long a fixture of bilateral cooperation, is being reinvigorated with new commitments in AI, green technology, and advanced manufacturing.

President Xi’s speeches may invoke harmony and “a community with a shared future” – but they arrive amid growing regional concerns about overcapacity, trade imbalances and strategic overreach. Chinese industrial goods – cheap, abundant, yet increasingly high-tech – are flooding Southeast Asian markets. Local producers are struggling to compete.

Structural Vulnerability

Businesses worry that China’s excess production capacity, especially in sectors like electric vehicles and solar panels, could overwhelm regional markets if access to the United States continues to narrow. What may begin as an economic boon could, if neglected, morph into a structural vulnerability for Southeast Asia.

So, beneath the ceremonial warmth lies a cooler calculation: Malaysia values its ties with China, but it does so with eyes wide open. It welcomes investment and deeper engagement with Beijing, but seeks to do so from a position of agency, not conformity.

Looking ahead, the challenge for Southeast Asian states like Malaysia is not simply to choose between Washington and Beijing. It is to prevent the need to choose at all. Yet that space to manoeuvre is narrowing.

Even the European Union, with all its economic clout, now finds itself under pressure to dial back its ties with China as a condition for smoother trade with the United States. If a bloc as large and influential as the EU could be coerced into binary alignment, the constraints facing smaller powers become all the starker.

Nor is the strategic picture any easier. In earlier decades, American power was widely viewed as a stabilising force in Asia – one that helped keep regional rivalries in check, deterred adventurism, and preserved an uneasy peace across the Taiwan Strait.

Today, that balance is under visible strain. Where the US presence once anchored regional stability, it increasingly risks unsettling it. The concern is no longer just about deterring adversaries – it is also about ensuring that the United States itself does not become a source of escalation.

Measured Optimism

Washington may no longer be the predictable offshore balancer it once was. Nor, for that matter, is Beijing seen through rose-tinted lenses – Malaysia engages China with measured optimism and clear-eyed purpose. Both giants are shifting, and neither offers easy answers.

China’s steadiness, praised in Anwar’s speech, is not taken at face value. It is cautiously welcomed, so long as it does not morph into hegemonic ambition. It was an opportunity for Malaysia to restate its worldview: one where engagement trumps exclusion, dialogue outlasts discord, and prosperity is something to be shared, not hoarded or weaponised.

The Prime Minister captured this ethos with quiet elegance: “Trade is not a contest of winners and losers, but a shared endeavour. Its aim is not domination, but the advancement of all.”

Such words may not shift the tides of great power rivalry. But they do signal that, in an increasingly polarised world, there remain those who still believe in bridges – built not just of steel and stone, but of principle and foresight.

For Malaysia, this is not a matter of idealism. It is a sober, strategic choice.

-- BERNAMA

Datuk Prof Dr Mohd Faiz Abdullah is Chairman of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia.