This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on August 20, 2018

BEIJING: Kuala Lumpur will go all out to forge better ties with Beijing as this would bring mutual benefits to both sides, said Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

He said focusing on economic development rather than confrontation should be the way forward in terms of relations between Malaysia and China.

In this regard, Chinese businessmen are welcome to invest in Malaysia, he said, when addressing some 400 top Chinese entrepreneurs and business leaders here yesterday.

Dr Mahathir is on a five-day official visit to China.

The prime minister also made it clear what is the new Malaysian government’s stand on investments from China.

“We are not against any Chinese company but against Malaysians who borrow huge sums of money to carry out unnecessary projects,” he told the China Entrepreneur Club Leaders Forum.

There had been worries that touchy issues concerning some Chinese projects in Malaysia were standing in the way of good relations between the two countries lately.

Dr Mahathir noted that Malaysia had had a relationship with China for almost 2,000 years.

“Today, China’s trade with Malaysia is the biggest, compared with other countries in the region,” he said.

“There was a time when China was very poor, but now China is rich ... even at a time when it was poor, it was a market for Malaysia, but now that it is rich, we feel that China is a big market,” said Dr Mahathir.

He said with China trading and investing in Malaysia, both sides would be able to build a big market for China as well.

“So there are mutual benefits in having good relations with each other, solving problems between us not through confrontation but through negotiation, arbitration and the court of law.

“That is the way we should go,” Dr Mahathir said, adding that confrontation would not help build the economies of the two countries.

The prime minister said both countries could complement each other, especially in the economic field, for the benefits of their people.

Dr Mahathir also touched on how China’s development came about, which led to its emergence as a major producer of goods and services for the world.

Calling on the country’s business community to invest in Malaysia, Dr Mahathir said this would help Malaysia become a producer country from merely a consumer country.

Answering a question from the floor, he underscored that the new government of Malaysia under his leadership would not allow corruption in the Malaysian business environment.

He said this in response to a Chinese businessman’s claim that he previously had to make a certain amount of payment in order to do business in Malaysia.

“I give you assurances that this new government will not allow that [kind of thing to continue] to happen,” he added.

The China Entrepreneur Club, which organised the forum, consists of the republic’s top 60 entrepreneurs whose companies posted revenue totalling US$600 billion last year.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd co-founder Jack Ma, who is the club’s chairman, moderated the forum. — Bernama