The prime minister’s long-time confidante Daim Zainuddin, acting as special envoy to the leader, was in Beijing to conclude negotiations.

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In a press conference after the government announcement, Daim said the rail link’s length would be reduced by 40km to 648km. The cost of building each kilometre of the line would drop to 68 million ringgit from 98 million ringgit, the former finance minister said.

The 21.5 billion ringgit hair cut on the original deal was “enough to build two more Petronas Twin Towers,” he quipped, referring to the towers in Kuala Lumpur.

The 65.5 billion ringgit figure cited by Daim as the original cost of the project differs from the 55 billion ringgit price tag touted by Mahathir’s predecessor Najib Razak, who signed the original deal in 2016. Najib’s long-ruling coalition was defeated by Mahathir in elections last May.

Daim said further details on interest payments and financing would be released by Mahathir on Monday.

Long time Malaysian politics observer Oh Ei Sun said the deal had to be welcomed as the country was “in dire need” of fresh foreign direct investment. “In that sense, China is probably the only game in town in terms of future investments as the US increasingly is looking inward while Japan and Europe are yet to pick up their own slack,” said Oh, a senior fellow of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.

Soon after ousting Najib, Mahathir suspended work on the project citing an urgent need to renegotiate “unfair” terms his predecessor had agreed with the main contractor China Communication Construction Company (CCCC).

The government later veered towards cancelling the project but balked when it was faced with a huge cancellation fee.

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“The East Coast Rail Link is so important in China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” said Cheng Xiaohe, associate professor of international studies at China’s Renmin University.

“If it had been cancelled, the relations between China and Malaysia would have been downgraded significantly,” Cheng said. The professor said he believed Mahathir never intended to cancel the project, and instead had been seeking “a better deal from China”.

“I believe Mahathir at least partially got what he wanted,” he said. The prime minister is among dozens of high-profile world leaders who will attend the second Belt and Road Forum later this month.

Friday’s agreement follows months of “government-to-government” talks, with Daim helming Malaysia’s team of negotiators. Malaysia Rail Link, the Malaysian holding company that owns the project, is a wholly owned entity of the country’s finance ministry, and CCCC too is a state-owned firm.

Malaysian officials have given out mixed signals regarding the protracted negotiations since the elections last May.

At one point, Mahathir’s economic affairs minister Azmin Ali said the project had been cancelled outright. The government later issued a “gag order” on officials, authorising only Mahathir to comment on negotiations.

The ECRL is the biggest of the China-backed infrastructure projects to have been cast into doubt by Mahathir, who questions the need for the rail link as well as its cost, and claims his scandal-haunted predecessor signed up in a blasé fashion.

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Najib, who denies wrongdoing, claims to have endorsed the ECRL deal solely because it made good economic sense.

Apart from the ECRL, Mahathir’s government last year cancelled two China-backed pipelines costing 9.3 billion ringgit after it discovered that, while 90 per cent of the project’s costs had been paid, only 13 per cent of it had been completed.

Oh said the deal showed Beijing was “very keen” on the rail link as it was an opportunity to show its rail technology can be used outside the mainland. “Hopefully it will bring the two coasts of peninsular Malaysia closer,” Oh said. “It would be even better if it could engender the kind of economic stimulus rail links have had in China,” he said.