The currency might be the same -- the greenback is the unit used in East Timor -- and the food is generic, but Brothers Burger restaurant in the dusty capital Dili is not just a slavish copy of its US progenitors.

Part of it is set aside for a compact little toy store, stocked to the rafters with games, gadgets and stuffed animals imported, of course, from China.

Against another wall is a selection of plastic, made-in-China jewellery.

And just in case diners need to leave the country after their meals, they can get their passport photos taken at a Chinese-made booth beside the back door.

Manager Priscilla Soh said the restaurant's owners, China-based Brothers Enterprises, specialised in "general supply" so it was only natural to combine the two-year-old eatery with some other sidelines.

"If you dare to come and dare to take the risk then you can earn a profit. I really encourage my Western friends who want to come and invest here," she said.

As for her Chinese fiends, she said: "It's not easy because there are too many Chinese here already."

The burger joints form a meaty new middle layer of Chinese investment in East Timor, a resource-rich country of only around one million people which broke free of Indonesia in 1998 and remains dependent on foreign aid.

At the bottom end of the scale are typical family-run, shophouse-style businesses. At the other is the munificent hand of the Chinese state.

Beijing has lavished millions of dollars on a new presidential palace, a cavernous foreign ministry worthy of a country twice East Timor's size, and a yet-to-be completed military headquarters.

The buildings are the most impressive new structures in Dili, and have raised more than a few eyebrows across the Timor Strait in Australia, which regards East Timor as part of its regional sphere of influence.

Professor Hugh White, of Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, told ABC radio last month that China's interest in East Timor is "something Australia needs to pay attention to".

"Australians have always, going right back into the 18th century, been very sensitive to the idea of major powers projecting force into our part of the world ... " he said.

Sections of the Australian media have made much of East Timor's purchase in 2008 of two 1960s-vintage Shanghai Class patrol vessels for 25 million dollars, with dark mutterings about "growing military links between Beijing and Dili".

East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta is a friend of Australia's, but he openly scoffs at such fears.

"I can assure Australians that the East Timorese and China are not going to set up a navy and airbase to invade Australia," he joked during a recent interview with AFP.

Mocking the "idiots who pass for strategic analysts in Canberra", he said: "Australia can continue to live in peace, they don't have to rush to learn Mandarin."

The Nobel laureate noted that his country's chief military relationship was with Australia, and complained of double standards from those Down Under who worry about China's influence in East Timor.

"Australians never worry too much when they sell everything to the Chinese... yet when we buy a few little things from China they get upset, like they're jealous," he said.

The president added that, if anything, the ledger was in China's favour, after East Timor awarded a large commercial contract to a Chinese company to build an electricity plant outside Dili.

"This is a 400-million-dollar project paid for exclusively by ourselves, so any aid that China has given us in the last 10 years you can multiply by 10 and it wont even reach the business deal that we signed with them," he said.

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