BEIJING (Reuters) – Malaysia’s Sultan Ibrahim will visit China for a four-day visit, China’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday, with the ceremonial ruler from the southern state of Johor likely to seek support to revive projects boosting its connectivity to neighbouring Singapore.
Sultan Ibrahim was installed as the country’s 17th king in January, under a unique system of monarchy where the heads of Malaysia’s nine royal families take turns to be the king every five years, and are supposed to stay above politics.
But the 65 year-old has indicated he intends to weigh in on the country’s political issues, and proposed Malaysia’s state oil firm Petroliam Nasional and the country’s anti-corruption agency report directly to the king during an interview with Singapore’s Strait Times newspaper ahead of his installation.
He has been invited by President Xi Jinping and will visit China from Sept. 19-22, the foreign ministry said in a statement, giving no further details.
China’s second-ranking official, Premier Li Qiang, visited Kuala Lumpur in June and backed Malaysian plans to develop its connectivity through a $10-billion East Cost Rail link to other China-backed railways projects in Laos and Thailand.
Li said that the proposal would realise plans for a proposed Pan-Asia Railway running from Kunming in China to Singapore, presumably through Johor, which is where Ibrahim wants to develop a rail link, too.
Ibrahim has spoken of plans to revive a stalled high-speed rail project between Malaysia and Singapore, with a border crossing in Forest City, a $100-billion China-backed land reclamation and development project off Johor that he has a stake in.
(Reporting by Joe Cash; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Kim Coghill)
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