China and Brunei will jointly develop oil and gas deposits within the disputed South China Sea, their leaders said on Monday (November 19), the South China Morning Post reported.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah have agreed to link the 2 countries’ development plans – Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative” and Brunei’s “Vision 2035”.
Meanwhile, news channel NewsAsia reported that Xi, who arrived from a tense summit in Papua New Guinea that saw a confrontation between China and the US, was officially welcomed on the vast golden-domed palace of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah.
As in lots of parts of Asia, Chinese corporations are investing huge sums in an absolute monarchy on the island of Borneo, a part of an infrastructure-building drive aimed toward expanding Beijing’s economic and geopolitical influence.
Initiatives include a multi-billion dollar oil refinery (the most important foreign investment project in Brunei’s history), a dam and a highway.
The wealthy former British protectorate, surrounded by Malaysia, had long relied on abundant oil reserves but fell into recession when prices collapsed a couple of years ago, and its oil reserves have also been declining.
Brunei, whose hydrocarbon revenues are expected to say no in the approaching years, is trying to China to assist it develop economic alternatives, Murray Hiebert, a Southeast Asia expert on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, told AFP.
Following talks between the sultan and the primary Chinese president to go to the country in 13 years, a joint statement said Brunei “will proceed to support and jointly promote cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative,” China’s infrastructure program, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Brunei, a conservative Muslim-majority nation of about 400,000, is a rival state to China over a piece of the South China Sea that Beijing claims almost entirely. But criticism from the country has been muted.
So far, there have been no outward signs of concern about China’s growing influence in tightly controlled Brunei, where GDP per capita is amongst the very best on this planet.
But concerns about aggressive Chinese investment are growing across the region, especially as poorer countries may struggle to repay debts.
Ahead of the APEC meeting in Papua New Guinea this weekend, US Vice President Mike Pence warned countries to not be seduced by China’s infrastructure program, saying Beijing was offering “opaque” loans that were resulting in “massive debt”.
In his earlier speech, Xi stressed that the initiative was not a “trap.”
Source : News ChannelAsia, South China Morning Post
