…while SS Malaiyoos thunder patriotism from school roofs and hunt Chinese teachers to lynch. And the well spring of unity? Well? What well, they ask.
只许州官放火，不许百姓点灯: The mighty are free to set fires while commoners are forbidden to light lamps.
*****
One generation plants the trees, the next generation gets the shade. – Najib Razak in Qinzhou, China, April 2012, cited in 前人栽树，后人乘凉
For Najib, in return: 水能载舟，亦能覆舟 In translation: (beware,) water that raises the boat is the same that swallows it.
*****
中马钦州产业园区
The China-Malaysia Well Spring Project: What’s the Deal
On April 1, before going to Cambodia for the Asean and Asean+China summits, Najib Razak flew into China’s Guangxi province 广西 .
Mid spring Guangxi averages 15 to 20 degrees C, much colder than Cameron Highlands at night, so the weather would have been pleasant for Najib. Guangxi borders north of Vietnam. Najib, arriving first in Nanning 南宁, the provincial capital and largest city (pop 6.7 million), would have had to backtrack south, going over Laos and/or Viet airspace to arrive in Phnom Penh 2.5 hours by plane.
Predictably, the western media, plus their Malaysian media hacks, completely missed the significance. Najib and Wen Jiabao had met last year and then five months earlier. Why was it necessary for them to be present over an ‘industrial park’ that is as common as Malaiyoo mosquitoes? Selangor, Johore and Penang have such parks and so too China, by the hundreds.
Daily, Air Asia flies planeloads of Chinese Malaysians into Guangxi but its aircraft bypasses Nanning, heading north and inland instead and taking them into Guilin 桂林, its lakes, rivers and rice hills. About 150 km south of Nanning, Qinzhou 钦州, one of 14 Guangxi prefectures and is as large as Johore, sits at a river mouth facing the Beibu Gulf (anglicised, Tonkin).
Within Qinzhou is its administrative subdistrict with its namesake river Jingu. (China is so physically large and highly populated that the multi-tiered administrative structure tends to follow the geography.) It is here, along the river banks, that the chauvinist Chinese, or commies according to Anglophiles, has literally handed over 15 sq km of land to Malaysia for another kind of ‘industrial park’. This, in China, is a euphemism-designate for a set of tax and customs regulations separate from the rest of the country. Malaysia has the option to expand this property tract, taking it to 55 sq km, an area running roughly from PJ to Shah Alam.
Only two places – Suzhou and Tianjin – in China have so far any semblance of this quasi extra-territorial jurisdiction. It means not only a separate financial system but especially the right to sell or lease landed property to foreign passport holders un-subjected to domestic procedures.
In spite of their Anglophile belligerence and their hosting of American military expansion, Singaporeans were the first to benefit from this sort of extra-territoriality. In the early days, China had badly needed financing. It gave to the Lee Kuan Yew clique of Anglophiles a part of Suzhou while Tianjin was jointly taken up with Taiwanese.
(Historical note: China has a memory horror of extra-territoriality because of, first, the Brits seizing Hong Kong and Kowloon; followed by the Portuguese in Macau; next French and Germans in Tianjin; then the Americans in Shanghai, all of who cordoned off chunks of city and suburb land to place them under their individual national jurisdictions. This won’t happen again. Never.)
Against this background, Qinzhou suggests an extraordinary development in Malaysia-China relationship. Of more than 200 countries in the world, Singapore excepting, Malaysia has this high honour among the Chinese.
The Qinzhou project suggests therefore a relationship of land, people, products, services, a market of 1,300 million, in effect, an exchange of lives and livelihoods. It is to get rich together, never mind who is giving more or taking less. The point was to get the exchange going, without strings attached, not even Gebeng, Kuantan, that Najib has reciprocated. (This explains why the project, in Chinese parlance, has “national” status – in effect to be directed by Beijing and not the province nor the prefecture.)
This can’t be an accident of fate. Wen Jiabao and Najib Razak lending their personal authorities to the project underlies a premise that says friendship is a process, not something that is proclaimed and it’s there.
In the Malaysian context and in Sino-Melayu relationship, unity is also a process. It is not an end state that’s being pictured by Anglophiles including the Mahathir legacy boys, in essence forked tongue Malaiyoos preaching western liberalism from one corner of their mouths and then, from the other corner, threatening jail to Chinese.
The divisions of languages, cultures and skin are natural, of course, but how is unity served by their subjugation or the obliteration of what’s natural?
There is unity of livelihoods and the unity in the purpose of livelihoods and these are greater than the unity of one school, one language subjugation – which is so much like American Yankee imperialists combing the South China Sea preaching a one system democracy but ending up looking for enemies behind every island coconut tree and looking to fight.
Likewise, spurred by their hatred of Najib, Umno, China and the Chinese, the editors of Malaysiakini and Malaysian Insider can be counted on to campaign against the project instead of seeing it as a way to lift the material lives of Guangxi and Malaysian peoples (at less than 3,000 ringgit a year in per head income, Guangxi is poorer than Malaysia, even Kelantan or Sabah).
After these editors, come Peter Petra the Piper, Reuters and Bloomberg, then to be joined by Haris Ibrahim, all waiting in queue to poison the well. They’d prefer to see common people continue in their misery, people who have so little, than to see Umno cronies get rich. Such is the moral dilemma sprung from their imports of liberation theology politics that America had financed against the governments of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.
Already, Malaysiakini‘s Steven Gan is itching to pour his bangsarized Anglo spittle into the Qinzhou project. Here he is for starters:
If 1,500-acre joint industrial park is finally successful, we must stop and prevent from consuming the products produced from the park!
In the face of these coming assaults – these absurdities – the Ahi’s SS Malaiyoos won’t stand up to Steven Gan and have nothing for a rebuttal. It’s in contrast to their daily volume of spit directed at dongjiaozong. Nominally Umno and nominally pro-Najib, but consumed by their detest for all things and anything Chinese, their anti-Sino racism is greater than their hatred for Anwar Ibrahim and Pakatan. At least Anwar is Malay, one of their kind they’d think.
Malaiyoo hatred for the DAP and the Chinese simultaneously makes for a powerful two-in-one reason why dongjiaozong continues to be attacked. While shouting unity and continue the lynching work of Mahathir Mohamad, they won’t have to – and they rather not - see the Qinzhou work as a well spring of inter-ethnic friendship. As it is with Steven Gan, such is their moral dilemma as well.
明人不用细说，响鼓不用重锤 A person of good sense needs no convincing, a resonant drum needs no heavy beating.
*****
Hun Sen: ‘Chinese Don’t Order People, Do This or Do That’
Remarks by Cambodia’s Hun Sen is pertinent (it also illustrates how the Ahi, Malaysiakini reporters, so Anglophile, so western in their ideologies, always get it wrong):
PHNOM PENH, April 4 (Xinhua) — Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, chair of 2012 ASEAN, said Wednesday China is a major strategic partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ( ASEAN) and Cambodia.
Answering reporter’s questions about the relations between ASEAN and China, the premier criticized some analysts who alleged that China and some ASEAN countries are preparing for a possible war.
“That is a completely wrong understanding; in contrast, the ASEAN leaders or ASEAN are all prepared to strengthen strategic partnership of ASEAN and China,” he told a press conference after the conclusion of the 20th ASEAN Summit. …
China has substantially helped ASEAN, he said, adding that annually China provides credit to ASEAN member states. …
On some media reports that Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Cambodia ahead of the ASEAN Summit was aimed to put pressure on Cambodia on the issue of South China Sea, the premier said that President Hu’s visit was to further enhance Cambodia-China ties, not pertinent to the ASEAN Summit.
“During his visit here, Hu Jintao did not tell me that I have to do this or that; it is not in the practice of Chinese policy. I have been working with China for more than 20 years, I have never faced, never heard that any Chinese leaders ordered Cambodia to do this or that.”
Terming as “silly” media speculation that China had made Cambodia keep the South China Sea issue off the summit’s agenda, Sen criticized those analysts, saying that they were “unaware of the procedures of ASEAN.”
“There is no hindrance from China to work with ASEAN to solve the South China Sea issue. It cannot be solved with an outside country and Cambodia will resist any attempt by such a nation as well,” he said, adding that economic ties between the two countries showed China’s non-conditional nature in handling international relations.
He said China is a big country, but always respects the decision of other countries unlike some countries which cut assistance when Cambodia did not do as they wish. “Cambodia is a small country, but it is welcomed by China, it is a great honor for us,” he said.
Related reports:
Footnote on Guangxi (广西 ‘western expanse’): pop 46 million, 62pct Han, 32pct Zhuang. The size of peninsula Malaya and Sarawak combined, it was placed under central rule around 200 BC. Today, however, it has semi-autonomous status and this means flexibility in managing local affairs, taxation, 1-child policy, housing, education, etc. Guangxi is also mountainous, with rice as the main crop in spite of the terrain. If Najib had gone into the rural regions, he would have seen remarkable similarities in the dress and customs of the Miao and Zhuang peoples to the peoples of Sabah and other parts of Kalimantan.
Guangxi poverty above; Yangshou river town below; rice fields; and Zhuang Chinese (who the Malaiyoo mongrels constantly malign with the insinuation, ‘China dolls’) doing the bamboo dance, also found in Taiwan. The occasion for celebration was the sanyuesan, Zhuang version of the lunar new year.
