President’s China visit: Neutrality the golden thread

The President flies to an important and long overdue destination next week – Beijing, China. It is not a state visit, but a working visit to participate in China’s flagship ‘Belt and Road’ Forum where he is also to meet with the high and mighty, the movers of China and the shakers of world affairs.

In what appears to be a harbinger of good tidings prior to the visit, the Chinese surprised everyone by announcing this week that they had reached a ‘tentative’ agreement on Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring efforts. This, however, did not go down well with the rest of the Paris Club creditors who question if Sri Lanka is negotiating with China differently. The timing of China’s announcement on the eve of the IMF/World Bank meeting in Morocco could not be a coincidence either.

China – as a major creditor of debt-ridden Sri Lanka – had to be virtually dragged to the table over Sri Lanka’s desperate moves to get out of its bankruptcy. It argued that any bilateral agreement would create a precedent vis-a-vis other debtor nations, especially countries in Africa.

Widely accused by the West of indulging in a systematic policy of extracting concessions after submerging poor countries in a ‘debt trap’ with development loans that could not be repaid, especially after a worldwide pandemic that also started in that country, China, naturally, has strenuously denied that that is the case.

Sri Lanka will surely continue seeking Chinese assistance to escape from the debt trap it has fallen into.

Unsolicited projects in Sri Lanka with grease all over were dangled in front of politicians of yesteryear with their senior officials in cahoots. The country received a port, an airport and many other things without a local plan to sustain them. The port at Hambantota only served China’s longterm strategic interests and the way they secured the deal was a national disaster.

One fact that cannot and must not, however, be forgotten is China’s steadfast support to Sri Lanka to end the scourge of an armed separatist insurgency that dragged on for 30 years due to active support from India and passive support from the West for the terrorists.

It may have been due to China’s own interest to help Sri Lanka against an Indian and West backed insurrection in Sri Lanka, but it is vulgar in the extreme to question such motives of a friend who answered Lanka’s desperate call for arms at the time when others refused.

While China has unreservedly backed Sri Lanka in international forums like the UNHRC, it is not that Sri Lanka has not reciprocated. It has backed China at every turn. It has even gone the extra mile, being a Buddhist-majority country, to refuse a longstanding request by the Dalai Lama of Tibet to pay homage at the Temple of the Tooth due to Chinese opposition to the visit.

China is now a global economic powerhouse and has been a longstanding friend of Lanka. Its octopus-like tentacles are spreading far and wide. It is testing the waters of the Indian Ocean with an expanding blue water navy to ensure any possible future Western sanctions will not throttle its lifeline to the rest of the world. Its latest forays into Sri Lankan ports of call have pitted this country against China’s enemy states as a result.

Sri Lanka is key to keeping the Indian Ocean a relative zone of peace amid the warring parties vying for supremacy, with the latest in this direction being the India-Middle EastEurope Corridor (IMEC) launched during the recent G20 summit in New Delhi in what some analysts see as a move to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Sri Lanka is being buffeted by the ‘big boys’, but it must navigate the ship of state between a rock and a hard place in these stormy seas for what is best for the country under the circumstances.

It must stick to its neutrality as a friend of all and an enemy of none. That must be the golden thread that runs through the fabric of its foreign policy.