How China got Lanka to cough up Hambantota
PTI: Times of India: June 27, 2018
NEW YORK: China’s acquisition of the strategic Hambantota port from Sri Lanka has given it “control of a territory” just a few 100 miles off the shores of India, highlighting its “debt trap” and ambitious use of loans to gain influence around the world, a media report has said.
An investigation by New York Times about Sri Lanka’s handover of the Hambantota Port to China in December 2017 illustrates how China turned an ally’s struggles to its strategic advantage. The report says feasibility studies had found that the port would not work and “frequent lenders” like India had refused to provide loans or assistance for the port, developed during Sri Lanka’s president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule. “However, every time Rajapaksa turned to his Chinese allies for loans and assistance with the ambitious port project, the answer was yes,” it says.
Over years of construction and renegotiation with China Harbor Engineering Company, one of Beijing’s largest state-owned enterprises, the Hambantota Port Development Project distinguished itself mostly by failing, as predicted, it says. At a time when tens of thousands of ships were passing by along one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the port drew only 34 ships in 2012, it said.
With Rajapaksa — whose campaign aides received direct payments from the Chinese port construction fund — being voted out of office in 2015, the new government struggled to make payments on the debt he had taken on for the port development. “Under heavy pressure... the government handed over the port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years in December last year,” it says.
The debt deal which led Lanka to hand over a strategic port to China also put focus on some of the “harshest accusations” about President Xi’s signature OBOR drive: that the global programme amounts to a debt trap for vulnerable countries around the world, fueling corruption and autocratic behaviour in struggling democracies.
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