“...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.

Seen as suspects and loyalty questioned

The Chinese in Malaysia are seen as suspects and their loyalty questioned, at least on the eyes, ears, hearts and minds, of the Malay political leaders, as the ones still in control of the economy. Although they grew up here, contribute to nation-building, and do not pay allegiance to Mother China, they are still considered ‘pendatangs’/immigrants.

The Malayan Communist party, led by Beijing-trained Perak-born MPAJA-Communist-anti-Japanese and British Chin Peng, was outlawed and I am sure the Red Book of Mao Zedong is still banned.

But here is the irony when we become desperadoes. When there is no other way to get out of the quicksand of the 1MDB and the global quagmire that is making us well-known as a country with a record of the worst and most complex, puzzling, and mysterious case of money-laundering - the 1MDB Grand Theft Global Fiasco.

Buying more vessals and modernising the military, again and again? Who are we arming against in this region in which the Asean countries are not enemies with one another - didn’t we sign the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (Zopfan), or the Bandung Declaration of non-alignment?

But each AseanN government it seems is at war with its own people. Weapons manufacturing and sales require demand and supply? What kind of conflict are we trying to create in order for new battlefields to be created, requiring new weapons supplied by China? US, Russia, China - top three largest manufacturer and supplier of arms we cannot become patrons and buyers to, unless we are looking for kickbacks and re-enact the Altantuya Shaariibuu-Scorpene Affair.

First, like a Pavlovian dog we sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement - an Obama Programme to block China and to stop those trillion-dollar cheap and of low quality China goods from flooding the American and Asian markets. Then we play golf to cement our ‘friendship with the US’.

Now we are ‘unfriending’ the US perhaps because we are angry at the Department of Justice for witch-hunting the Wolves of Backstreet. And next we are dating China to make the US salivate with jealousy. We want to follow the footsteps of the Philippines, ‘doing a Duterte’ but with a mysterious and puzzling reason the magnitude many times that of the too-big-to-fail-yet-collapsed American Enron and Arthur Anderson.

Yet do we understand the meaning of sovereignty and the ever-changing nature of East Asian politics in the matrix of world affairs post-Obama, post-New American Century Doctrine, pre-Donald Trump, pre-warmongering Hillary Clinton?

Or - must we stay at home, safeguard Malaysia's sovereignty, build national unity, ride the wave of globalisation gracefully and carefully, not aligning our country with any warmongering super power and its war machinery, and most importantly not sell lock-stock-and-barrel our country - from Johor to Perlis to Sabah and Sarawak - to foreign companies with those fancy names such as Forest City, Underground Sino-Malaysia City, or cheap goods flowing in like a tsunami that come-a-visitin’ all too frequently?

We thought Independence/Merdeka brought us the sense of pride in the country - but what we now have is total insanity, leaders bailing out children’s bankruptcy, making the poor and the powerless want to jump off the Penang Bridge in anger, losing their sanity!

Irony and idiocy is governing our political ideology. How do we come back to our senses and radically rethink our developmental philosophy and policies? A lot of damage has been done even since the early 80s - with Malaysia Inc Privatisation Policy, and the Look East Policy. We simply could not handle a wide-open economy with those bulls and bear running amok destroying our sovereignty, pride and dignity - that will one day lead us to abject poverty.

DR AZLY RAHMAN grew up in Johor Baru, Malaysia and holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in International Education Development and Masters degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He will be pursuing his fifth Masters in Fine Arts, specialising in Fiction and Poetry Writing. He has taught more than 50 courses in six different departments and has written more than 350 analyses/essays on Malaysia. His 25 years of teaching experience in Malaysia and the United States spans over a wide range of subjects, from elementary to graduate education. He has edited and authored six books; Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present, Future (2009), Thesis on Cyberjaya: Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian State (2012), The Allah Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity (2013), Dark Spring: Essays on the Ideological Roots of Malaysia's General Elections-13 (2013), a first Malay publication Kalimah Allah Milik Siapa?: Renungan dan Nukilan Tentang Malaysia di Era Pancaroba (2014), and Controlled Chaos: Essays on Mahathirism, Multimedia Super Corridor and Malaysia’s ‘New Politics’ (2014). He currently resides in the United States where he teaches courses in Education, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Political Science, and American Studies. His forthcoming book, One Malaysia, under God, Bipolar, a joint project between Gerakbudaya and World Wise Books of New Jersey, USA, is his seventh compilation of essays on Malaysian Cultural, Creative, and Critical Studies. He is currently working on his eighth book, on Gifted and Talented Education in Malaysia, honouring a prominent educator. Twitter, blog