A Study Of The Risks Of Malaysia’s 2018 General Election For Sino-Malaysian Diplomacy

In the past fifty years,China has made great strides in its diplomatic relations with Malaysia.Malaysia is strategically located as one of the window countries in Southeast Asia,one of the major countries in ASEAN,and one of the important countries responding to the Belt and Road Initiative.However,Malaysia was hit by a "political tsunami" in 2018,and the country is still in turmoil.It not only puts Malaysia’s political development in a difficult situation,but also poses certain risks to the diplomatic cooperation between China and Malaysia.The purpose of this paper is to study the "two-tier game" in the context of "domestic and international political interaction","winning pool" and "interest preference".The paper aims to explore the diplomatic risks of China-Malaysia after the 2018 election in three models,with a view to proposing matching responses.How to prevent various types of diplomatic risks and avoid them from escalating into diplomatic crises is one of the serious challenges facing Chinese diplomacy at present.The aftermath of the 2018 Malaysian general election has highlighted two sources of public diplomatic risks for China and Malaysia: one is the intricate Malaysian domestic politics;the other is the unpredictable international political situation.The reasons for this are: first,the analysis from the domestic and international political interaction model,which is mainly due to Malaysia’s domestic political instability combined with the economic downturn and the impact of the Sino-US game and regional competition;second,the analysis from the winning set model,which is mainly due to Malaysia’s domestic political limitations and the strategic choices of top decision makers;and third,the analysis from the interest preference model,which is mainly due to the different interest groups in Malaysia.The crisis of cooperation is exacerbated by the different interest choices of Malaysian domestic interest groups.Therefore,to deal with the risk of Malaysian public diplomacy,China can start from three aspects:first,strengthen international and inter-regional international political interactions to avoid expanding the scope of diplomatic risks;second,expand the winning collection of diplomacy with Malaysia to promote strategic docking,economic cooperation and humanistic exchanges;third,grasp Malaysia’s interest preferences and reasonably use various diplomatic tools to eliminate the cooperation gap.In the dynamic game environment,with the evolution of international,regional and Malaysian domestic political situation,the difficulties and challenges facing China-Malaysia relations may increase.In the process of implementing the "Belt and Road" initiative,how to avoid the negative impact on China’s cooperation with other countries due to the "change in the sky" is still an important issue that we must face squarely.