Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa likely to re-boot China ties
Colombo, Sri Lanka - The unfinished, purple-headed Lotus Tower soars uselessly into the Colombo sky, mired in corruption allegations - a project typical of China’s misadventures in Sri Lanka under a political dynasty that has just returned to power.
With the Rajapaksas clan now back, Beijing will likely be too, experts say.
On Monday Gotabaya Rajapaksa was sworn in as President, almost five years after his brother Mahinda’s decade in charge ended in ignominy in 2015 as allegations of corruption and nepotism surfaced.
Under Mahinda, who may become prime minister, Sri Lanka secured almost US$7bn in loans from China, dislodging Japan as Sri Lanka’s main funder of infrastructure.
But many of the projects have proven to be white elephants, including a US$210mn airport that has no commercial flights.
In 2016 troops had to shoo away deer, wild buffalo and elephants from the site.
China also financed a 35,000seat cricket stadium which seldom hosts matches, a performing arts centre in Colombo with few shows and a misfiring power plant.
Some of the money was allocated under Beijing’s gargantuan Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) spanning Asia and beyond and aimed at facilitating trade.
Western countries worry that the BRI conceals China’s efforts to expand its influence by loaning nations money only to acquire the assets when they cannot repay.
Hambantota port in southern Sri Lanka, situated on a key maritime trading route between Europe and Asia, is for critics a prime example.
In December 2017, Sri Lanka was forced to hand the port over to China on a 99-year lease after failing to service a US$1.4bn debt from Beijing to build it.
For the Rajapaksas, who together spearheaded the brutal crushing of Tamil separatists in 2009 - with allegedly 40,000 civilians killed - China also came in handy in other ways.
“What the Chinese offered to a regime that was being chastised for its human rights record... was international diplomatic protection as well the funds for development,” analyst Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu said.
China meanwhile got a potential strategic toehold, right in India’s backyard. In 2014, two Chinese submarines docked at Colombo.
Many of the building projects, like the 350m Lotus Tower, have been accused of facilitating corruption.
One of the two Chinese companies building the huge flowershaped structure vanished with an advance of two billion rupees (US$18mn), according to outgoing president Maithripala Sirisena.
The Rajapaksas say they had to borrow from China because credit was hard to come by elsewhere, and Akhil Bery from thinktank Eurasia said that there is some truth to this.
Nor was it ‘all bad’, Bery said, with the Chinese-funded Colombo International Container Terminal ‘already profitable’.