“...In return for this enormous bailout, Malaysia’s Finance Ministry is to undertake to pay billions to CCCC on top of the actual cost of the project.

“The contract works thus:
Total contract value: RM60 billion
Actual assumed cost of project: RM27 billion
CCCC profit margin of 4.55 percent: RM2.729 billion
Additional differential: RM29.8 billion

“The so-called ‘additional differential’ is the amount needed to compensate China Communications Construction Company Ltd (CCCC) for its support of 1MDB. Thus the Malaysian public is expected to pay double the proper price for the railway simply to bail out Najib Abdul Razak and his associates. The amounts to be paid on behalf of 1MDB total an astonishing US$7.46 billion. This includes the debts due to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund which is currently suing 1MDB over unpaid loan guarantees.

“According to the Sarawak Report documents, the bail-out also reaches companies controlled by Jho Lo - and by mega rich former Sarawak chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, which were used to allegedly funnel money to Najib.

“The deal also gives China additional advantages from which it would benefit for years to come, limiting Malaysia’s ability to open later projects to competitive bidding, notably the adoption of China’s rail technology for future major infrastructure. CCCC will get a 10-year break on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and income taxes, allow CCCC to select suppliers and sub-contractors without reference to the government.

“Meanwhile the government will take responsibility for land acquisition along the route.”

- Phillip Bowring in Asia Sentinel, Aug 10, 2016

Then there is this 2009 World Bank Report on the debarment of one ‘CCCC Bank’ for fraud and I wonder if this is the same bank we are going to be dealing with. According to several reports the bank is involved with projects in the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Maldives, and Uganda. If this is the same bank Malaysia has signed a deal with, how do we explain it to the rakyat?

Are these true of what we Malaysians are forced to deal with? Reading the analyses and report above gave me the chills. The long-term implications can be devastating - economically, politically, culturally, and geo-politically. Are we selling the country by the shipload of renminbi? Where is the critical sensibility and the political-moral compass in this type of deal?

What have we done in the name of nationalism, patriotism, and anti-Communism? What have we done to the future generation in the name of covering up the 1MDB debts that has ruined the nation? From the Forest City to the proposed Mao-KL City we are willingly surrendering ourselves to a Chinese colonising strategy. A new form of ‘bunga emas’ (golden tree of Chinese hegemony) we are offering in the name of glamourised debt-bondage.

These questions should be haunting us as we read of the Najib-family visit to China, at a time when the people of Malaysia are in so much unrest and the need to speed up racial sentiments, post-post-May 13, 1969 has become a common feature of today’s protest and counter-protest movements especially between the Malay-Muslims and the Chinese Malaysians primarily.

The composition of the members of the red-shirt and the yellow shirts and the messages and battlecry slogans we are reading of late, signify a clash between the Malays and the Chinese. Certain things remain the same - the playing up of racial, besides religious, sentiments.

The ruling regime of the National Front still think that the Chinese are the ‘immigrants’ and will forever remain so - at least while Umno, the dominant Malay political party, is still in power.

The Chinese and the non-bumiputras have not been accorded equal rights especially in the granting of educational funding and scholarships - a way to maintain the hegemony of the Malay professional and ruling class in an educational conveyor belt build upon the inspiration from the Apartheid system.