DECEMBER 2017 FORBES ASIA | 19

SEBASTIAN STRANGIO

The sales office for Forest City, one of Malaysia’s largest residential prop-

erty developments, looks less like an office than an airport hangar or a museum atrium: a

futuristic dome flooded with noise and light. At the entrances white-gloved guards offer a

crisp salute. Nearby a band breezes through a set of pop standards. Prospective buyers—

many of them from mainland China—lounge on couches sipping complimentary soft

drinks while diddling on their cellphones.

Sprawling in the middle of the hall is the main attraction: a giant scale model depict-

ing the initial phase of the $100 billion project. Large groups of Chinese and Malaysian

visitors snap photos of this vast field of roads, lakes, beaches, hotels, shopping malls and

illuminated towers, some with miniature “SOLD OUT” labels attached.

The eye-catching model represents just one small part of the Forest City development,

which is currently sprouting from the coast of Johor State at the southernmost point of

peninsular Malaysia. “The whole scale model of this is Island One. We have four islands in

total,” says Yu Ting, an English-speaking sales representative from Guangdong, the home

province of the project’s Chinese developer, Country Garden Holdings. When completed

in 2035, Forest City’s four islands will house an estimated 700,000 people in the Johor

Strait, across from Singapore.

Describing the project as a “future city” and “a magnet for global elites,” Country

Garden, which has partnered with a firm controlled by the Sultan of Johor to form the

Malaysia-domiciled Country Garden Pacificview, is directing its main sales pitch at over-

seas buyers, particularly those from mainland China. Marketing materials focus on the

project’s proximity to Singapore and the fact that its units cost around a quarter of what

they do on the other side of the Johor Strait. Yu Ting tells me that in the year after sales

began in March 2016, Country Garden sold some 16,000 units.

However, Forest City’s selling points—its massive scale and its targeting of affluent

foreigners—has made it a lightning rod for political controversies about the growing

extent of Chinese influence in Malaysia. In particular, critics have charged that Forest

City will eventually become an enclave for rich mainland Chinese, cut off from the

rest of the country.

Carrying the furthest is the singular voice of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s no-

nagenarian former prime minister, who ruled the country in energetic and authoritarian

style from 1981 to 2003. In a stream of public comments and posts on his popular blog, he

has repeatedly assailed Country Garden Pacificview and Johor’s powerful Sultan Ibrahim

Ismail, accusing them of selling off the country’s “most valuable land” to foreigners.

In an interview with this reporter, Mahathir says he sees a historical warning in the

Chinese-majority city-state of Singapore, which was expelled from newly independent

Malaysia in 1965. “A country is created by the population,” he says, “and if the population

is overwhelmingly of one particular race or another, then we will see that the country is

no longer a part of the original owners of the land.”

To attract foreign buyers, Forest City will eventually feature its own customs and im-

“A magnet for global elites”: Forest City’s scale model of Island One, the first of four islands

sprouting from the Johor Strait that will cost $100 billion and house 700,000 people by 2035.

There’s political

fallout as the

nation wrestles

with Beijing’s

Belt & Road

bonanza.

BY SEBASTIAN STRANGIO