Malaysia's ‘Durian Diplomacy’ needs comprehensive strategy, not slogan says think tank

With the first ever Malaysian durian festival successfully held in Nanning, some local news started to harp on the term ‘durian diplomacy’ in their reports about the king of fruits’ larger than life reception in China.

It is true that the Chinese market has a special penchant for our Musang King which one can find it in a lot of varieties (pizzas, coffees, cookies and so forth) apart from the frozen pulps in the local supermarkets there.

And it is also accurate to say that there is a huge potential of our Musang King to be marketed into China, should Beijing allows our fresh durians to be imported to the country in the near future.

But to allege that the recent Malaysian durian festival is a show of our ‘durian diplomacy’, is certainly a farfetched proposition to start with.

For one, diplomacy is not just an ad hoc or an one-off activity to achieve a particular country’s aims or objectives within a foreign setting. It has to be supplanted with a comprehensive strategy which serves to guide the direction and substance of the diplomacy that one is engaging in.

This includes involving different public and private stakeholders as well as using different forms of instruments of diplomacy to achieve targeted goals within a foreign setting. In the case of ‘durian diplomacy’, it is obvious that we are still at the stage of exploring the opportunities and ways of tapping the Chinese market as a durian exporter rather than an all-round player flexing our (durian) soft power to the world’s most populated nation.
For Malaysia to fully capitalize on the ‘durian-mania’ trend in China, a long-term comprehensive strategy is therefore needed. For this purpose, Anbound would like to suggest the following measures. First and foremost, start a nationwide campaign that showcase durian as the means to attract the Chinese (and other) tourists to come to Malaysia.

For one, this will balance the current foray of having every durian exporter to sell their frozen pulps to China without long-term considerations of uncontrolled, inflated prices. But more importantly, it will help Malaysia to earn hard cash from the tourists’ spending, especially from the huge bulk of Chinese tourists.

To achieve this, a bipartisan effort should be instrumented in which both the ruling and opposition-held federal and state governments come out with their own ‘durian tourism’ campaigns throughout the year.

This maybe initiated at different periods and with distinctive themes — all with the aim to provide choices for the prospective tourists. No doubt, the multiplier effects from such nationwide effort will definitely dwarfed those localized durian campaigns’ conducted in smaller towns, such as Bentong.

Private stakeholders such as durian sellers and other retailers, on the other hand, can participate by showcasing their variety of products during durian buffet activities or even ‘durian open day’ events. And these may be in the forms of fresh durians, ice-creams, dodols, coffees, stickers, key chains, magnets or children toys. Such coordinated value addition exercise (through creative campaigning and diversification of business retailing), in turn, serves to leave more tourists, especially the Chinese, to spend their cash here.

Second will be creating a platform to facilitate the durian and other related sellers to sell their products within the Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba’s Taobao.

While negotiations are still under way between Malaysia and China in lifting the latter’s ban of our fresh durian exports, the Malaysian government can train more local small traders to market other products (such as frozen pulps and durian-related ones) in Alibaba’s app and website via the recently launched Digital Free Trade Zone (DFTZ) platform.

This will certainly cut the middlemen costs as these small enterprises will no longer bounded by the conventional way of selling them via the shops as we witnessed today. By reducing the stakeholders into the local small traders and Alibaba itself, the resulting prices for their goods will be cheaper and such prices may even fall further if more and more small traders are competing with each other for mass volume sales online.

Of course, the impact of such phenomenon will be beneficial for consumers as a whole. With durian-related products in China sold in competitive prices, this will at least stabilize the
prices of these products in Malaysia since the huge Chinese demand remained to be the main
determinant of their prices.

A similar trend is foreseeable once China allows the imports of our fresh durians and provided that the small durian farmers can directly import their durians through Alibaba.

The burden, therefore, falls on the Malaysian Digital Economic Corporation (MDEC) to ensure they provide effective and quality facilitation to these small durian-related companies via the DFTZ platform. Otherwise, the current inflating prices of these durians and their related products will continue to jump by leaps and bounds for the coming months and years. 

Finally, the Malaysian government should initiate cultural performances and tourism promotional efforts alongside the durian festival which will be held annually in China.

The recent Malaysian durian festival in Nanning was a good example where our cultural
performances were staged on the sidelines of the three-day festival.

We can even make our durian festival serving a greater purpose by showing tourism promotional videos to the Chinese visitors who come to enjoy our durians or their related products in the future.

For this purpose the Malaysian Consulate General, tourism and agricultural ministries as well as private companies participating in next year’s durian festival should work together to brand
Malaysia as a tourism haven and boost our national image among the Chinese audience. 

In all, a comprehensive strategy that includes these three measures will generate tangible and
numerous opportunities and multiplier effects for both the public and private sectors.

This will be much more practical than harping on the ‘durian diplomacy’ slogan as done by some
of our local media lately. More than that, Malaysia should take this rare opportunity to enhance its soft power especially after the fallout of the MH370 incident a few years ago.

It is only through such purposeful and coordinated efforts among all stakeholders that Malaysia’s soft power can take root through durian festival in China. And the fact that many Chinese still
lack adequate knowledge of Malaysia, will only facilitate such construction of our soft power.
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Chia Siang Kim and Hansen Li are Analysts in Anbound Malaysia, a subsidiary of Anbound
China which is a leading private think tank based in Beijing. The think tank is also a consultancy firm specializing in China-ASEAN cooperation. For any feedback, please contact: siangkimchia@anbound.com.