Najib following Duterte into China’s waiting arms
COMMENT At what price has our country been sold?
The facts suggest a narrative that is as glaring as it is straightforward.
Najib Abdul Razak found himself with a huge mess on his hands with 1MDB’s financial troubles. A US federal agency was certainly not helping, even going so far as to open an official investigation into the troubled firm. Pretty much the entire western world was casting aspersions on Najib, whose alleged corruption had been laid bare for the world to see.
Who should come to his aid in his hour of need, but our friendly superpower to the north. A state that has never been sold on the idea of ‘human rights’, and which seems to only care about corruption within its borders.
China’s aid was certainly more than moral. Late last year, China General Nuclear Power Corp, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, bought 1MDB’s Edra Global Energy Bhd (Malaysia’s second largest power producer) for US$2.3 billion.
Soon after, China Railway Engineering Corporation bought a stake in 1MDB’s Bandar Malaysia development for RM5.28 billion (or RM7.41 billion, depending on who you ask).
This is an enormous injection of funds that saved 1MDB, and by extension Najib, from the brink of destitution.
The bill comes due
Playing in cinemas now is ‘Dr Strange’. A line from the movie goes, “The bill comes due, always.”
In the world of geopolitics, only the naive believe that things come without a price.
Over the last few days, we have learnt that the bill came due to the tune of a staggering RM143.6 billion. This doesn’t seem to take into account the four naval vessels Malaysia has agreed to buy from China for an undisclosed amount.
This figure of RM143.6 billion does not seem to be one way. It probably represents money going both to and from China.
The thing is, we could very well stand to lose both ways.
The first is the more obvious way, where taxpayer money is used to buy expensive things from China that we may or may not actually need.
It’s a good quid pro quo deal for both China and Najib - China puts in some money to help Najib’s 1MDB problem, and later on gets a lot more money back in deals that don’t cost Najib or 1MDB a single sen.
The second way is that with Chinese investment into Malaysia, comes Chinese leverage. The party controlling the purse strings always calls the shots in the big projects; who to hire, who to procure from, how to spend the money - all this is in the hands of one major foreign entity now.
COMMENT At what price has our country been sold?
The facts suggest a narrative that is as glaring as it is straightforward.
Najib Abdul Razak found himself with a huge mess on his hands with 1MDB’s financial troubles. A US federal agency was certainly not helping, even going so far as to open an official investigation into the troubled firm. Pretty much the entire western world was casting aspersions on Najib, whose alleged corruption had been laid bare for the world to see.
Who should come to his aid in his hour of need, but our friendly superpower to the north. A state that has never been sold on the idea of ‘human rights’, and which seems to only care about corruption within its borders.
China’s aid was certainly more than moral. Late last year, China General Nuclear Power Corp, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, bought 1MDB’s Edra Global Energy Bhd (Malaysia’s second largest power producer) for US$2.3 billion.
Soon after, China Railway Engineering Corporation bought a stake in 1MDB’s Bandar Malaysia development for RM5.28 billion (or RM7.41 billion, depending on who you ask).
This is an enormous injection of funds that saved 1MDB, and by extension Najib, from the brink of destitution.
The bill comes due
Playing in cinemas now is ‘Dr Strange’. A line from the movie goes, “The bill comes due, always.”
In the world of geopolitics, only the naive believe that things come without a price.
Over the last few days, we have learnt that the bill came due to the tune of a staggering RM143.6 billion. This doesn’t seem to take into account the four naval vessels Malaysia has agreed to buy from China for an undisclosed amount.
This figure of RM143.6 billion does not seem to be one way. It probably represents money going both to and from China.
The thing is, we could very well stand to lose both ways.
The first is the more obvious way, where taxpayer money is used to buy expensive things from China that we may or may not actually need.
It’s a good quid pro quo deal for both China and Najib - China puts in some money to help Najib’s 1MDB problem, and later on gets a lot more money back in deals that don’t cost Najib or 1MDB a single sen.
The second way is that with Chinese investment into Malaysia, comes Chinese leverage. The party controlling the purse strings always calls the shots in the big projects; who to hire, who to procure from, how to spend the money - all this is in the hands of one major foreign entity now.
Emulating the Trump of Asia
Najib seems to have found a role model in Rodrigo Duterte, the newly elected President of the Philippines that many have called the Donald Trump of Asia.
Duterte is the guy that joked about raping an Australian missionary, called both Barack Obama and the Pope sons of whores, and is embarking on a campaign of extrajudicial killings against drug users.
Needless to say his behaviour has alienated him from many western powers.
Once again though, there’s a friendly superpower to the north, more than willing to pick up the slack, where friends are concerned.
China’s courting of Duterte seems to have paid off big dividends. A good example of such dividends was when the Philippines recently awarded China Communication Construction Company (CCCC), a state-owned infrastructure group, a contract to conduct a huge land reclamation project in Davao’s harbour.
The irony of this is that Duterte’s predecessor expended great effort fighting to prevent precisely this kind of land reclamation and dredging by China in and around contested islands in the South China Sea, only to have Duterte welcome China to do the exact same thing right off Filipino shores.
Shades of grey
There’s no reason to subscribe to the view that Western superpowers are the good guys, and Eastern superpowers are the bad guys.
Almost all superpowers in history have had at best grey moral souls. Like in Tolkien's allegory, bearing great power always comes at a moral cost.
The US certainly has it’s fair share of abuses, hypocrisy and so on.
The only slight difference is that most Western powers have at least some semblance of a culture of human rights (promoted by citizens, if not governments), a relatively free press, and governments at least slightly constrained by citizens with strong notions that their governments should not be able to do whatever they please.
In countries like China and Russia, such civil liberties are significantly more repressed, and centralisation of authority is the order of the day. Here, (centralised, authoritarian) might tends to make right.
Not that leaders like Najib or Duterte care in the least however. Whether quietly or loudly, these two enjoy doing whatever they please, and are more than happy to cozy up to friends who have the same kind of skeletons in their closet, and have no interest whatsoever in the kind of moral finger wagging perpetrated by Western powers.
Not being spoken down to is nice of course, but what is much, much nicer is the material rewards that come from cozying up with China. Those rewards, especially to the leaders personally, are likely to be truly substantial.
Painful irony
For the rest of us Malaysians, it is important to realise that we have now very much - like the Philippines - entered the Chinese sphere of influence.
Having half of Umno’s leaders go to China to sign most of our country away is of course the kind of irony that is liable to make one’s nose bleed.
After all these years of Umno telling us that Malays need them to fight the Chinese and their control of the economy, we have those same guys literally giving away our country’s economy to China.
In the unlikely event it was ever even true that the Chinese controlled Malaysia’s economy (something I believe has never been substantiated in any scientifically sound way), at least it would have been Malaysian Chinese. Now, in indisputable terms and in broad daylight, we are ceding control of Malaysia’s economy to the China Chinese.
It is unlikely we will feel any major, visible effects of this selling out in the short term, but the way things are shaping up, it does seem likely that the bill will in fact come due - and that we will be the ones to pay.
NATHANIEL TAN understands many of Duterte’s curse words, all thanks to Dota. He should probably brush up on Mandarin instead, in anticipation of our Chinese overlords.
