Innovation Emerging As A New Pillar Of China-Malaysia Ties: Ambassador
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 5 (Bernama) -- Innovation is emerging as a new defining feature of China-Malaysia relations, with cooperation expanding into artificial intelligence (AI), the digital economy, green technology and high-end manufacturing, said Chinese Ambassador to Malaysia Ouyang Yujing.
He said the agreement to jointly build a regional hub for cooperation on new quality productive forces, reached during Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Malaysia last year, had provided clearer direction for practical collaboration in emerging industries.
“The two countries will promote the integrated development of industrial, supply, value, data and talent chains, jointly establish laboratories for emerging technologies, set a regional benchmark for high-quality development, and support each other’s modernisation endeavours,” he said.
Ouyang said this in his lecture titled “Innovation, Partnership and Shared Prosperity: China-Malaysia Community with a Shared Future in a Changing World” at the UTM Ambassador Global Lecture 2026, organised by Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Kuala Lumpur here on Wednesday.
The ambassador said investment and cooperation by Chinese companies in Malaysia had gradually expanded beyond traditional infrastructure and engineering projects into emerging sectors such as high-end manufacturing, green energy, new-energy vehicles, AI, cloud computing and green finance.
Citing an example from the digital economy, he said Chinese companies were participating in Malaysia’s development of 5G networks, AI applications, smart cities, the industrial internet and digital infrastructure.
Ouyang said Chinese enterprises had also participated in the development of ILMU, Malaysia’s first large language model, while companies including Huawei, ByteDance and Alibaba had invested in Malaysia’s AI and data centre industries.
He also welcomed Malaysia’s participation as a founding member of the World AI Cooperation Organisation, saying China looked forward to strengthening bilateral cooperation under the organisation’s framework and sharing the benefits of AI more widely.
“The development of AI should not be a solo performance by any single country, but a symphony of global cooperation,” he said.
Ouyang said Chinese enterprises operating in Malaysia were placing greater emphasis on localisation through local procurement and employment, vocational training, university-industry partnerships and joint research and development.
Many companies, he said, were shifting from merely investing and building factories towards creating shared industrial ecosystems involving technology transfer, supply-chain collaboration and long-term contributions to Malaysian society.
He cited the East Coast Rail Link as an example, saying the project had created more than 20,000 jobs during its construction phase, trained over 1,000 Malaysian railway professionals and benefited thousands of local companies through subcontracting opportunities.
On university cooperation, Ouyang said UTM had established partnerships with several Chinese institutions, including a joint AI laboratory with Zhejiang University and intelligent manufacturing cooperation with Wuhan University of Technology.
UTM and Xiamen University also signed a memorandum of understanding in April to expand collaborative innovation in AI, advanced engineering and other fields through the China-Malaysia International Institute for Advanced Studies.
Meanwhile, UTM Vice-Chancellor Prof Ts Dr Mohd Shafry Mohd Rahim said Malaysia and China should focus on transforming their expanding academic and research partnerships into practical outcomes that improve people’s well-being.
He said cooperation was increasingly important as the world faced complex challenges such as climate change, planetary health, migration and the rapid development of AI.
Mohd Shafry said UTM’s recent cooperation with Chinese institutions included the establishment of the China-Malaysia International Institute for Advanced Studies with Xiamen University and research collaborations with Nanjing, Tsinghua, Peking and Zhejiang universities.
-- BERNAMA
