What Hu Jintao referred to as The Malacca Dilemma in 2003.
There are alternative sea routes* but all are much longer and most are susceptible to closure/interdiction.
From the South China Morning Post, May 26:
Foreign Minister Wang Yi tells counterpart that keeping the critical global shipping lane open is ‘a shared aspiration of all countries’
Singapore is committed to keeping the Strait of Malacca open, the city state’s top diplomat Vivian Balakrishnan told his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during talks in Beijing.
According to the Chinese government, the Singaporean foreign minister on Monday said that keeping the critical global shipping lane open was in the interest of all parties.
Balakrishnan also voiced Singapore’s support for free passage through the strait and other international waterways, the Chinese read-out showed.
According to the read-out, Wang was quoted as saying that “safeguarding the security of global industrial and supply chains and the smooth flow of maritime traffic is a shared aspiration of all countries and is in the common interest of the international community”.
“China is willing to continue making efforts to this end,” Wang added.
The foreign ministers’ talks came as the US-Iran conflict and the ensuing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz have thrust China’s so-called Malacca dilemma back into the spotlight.
The matter arose last year amid speculation that US President Donald Trump’s administration could be eyeing shipping chokepoints around the world as a strategic priority, after the White House repeatedly stated it wanted to “take back” the Panama Canal from alleged “Chinese influence”.
Connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans, the Malacca and Singapore straits together form a continuous corridor that is the world’s busiest route for crude oil and petroleum liquids in terms of barrels per day.
The roughly 800km (497-mile) funnel, measuring under two nautical miles at its narrowest point, carries nearly 40 per cent of global trade and about one-third of the world’s seaborne oil and other liquid cargo....
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