Only last year, Chinese president Xi Jinping said relations between Malaysia and China had never been better. Ten months before that, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong posted a picture on Facebook showing then Malaysian premier Najib Razak playfully offering him some durian, the giant, pungent fruit popular in east Asia.
But since a shock general election result in May, Malaysia has dramatically reset its foreign policy and revised its attitude to infrastructure projects.
After ousting his former protégé Mr Najib, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad suspended $23bn in Chinese-backed projects. He also pledged to scrap a high-speed rail link with Singapore and renegotiate their five-decades long water supply contract.
Revisiting these projects may help Malaysia claw back some much-needed cash — up to RM10bn ($2.5bn), according to Lim Guan Eng, the finance minister — just as the country reintroduces fuel subsidies and scraps an unpopular goods and services tax that will leave a RM20.7bn hole in government revenue this year.
Mr Lim said the suspension would allow the government to decide if it could proceed under current contracts, which Malaysia found “completely lopsided”. He added: “Whilst you are reviewing [a] project you wouldn’t want payments to keep on rolling. You don’t want the clock to keep on ticking.”