'Malaysia, My Second Home'

There’s political fallout as the nation wrestles with Beijing’s Belt & Road bonanza.

- Sebastian Strangio

The sales office for Forest City, one of Malaysia’s largest residential property 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 depicting 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.