Despite China’s economic woes and a debt overhang, Beijing has decided to step up its large-scale infrastructure connectivity project, the Belt and Road Initiative in Sri Lanka.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said on September 23, that he hoped to broaden cooperation with Sri Lanka as he acknowledged the incoming of the island nation’s new leader Anura Kumara Dissanayaka. The BRI is China’s bid to expand its clout overseas and flex its muscles in other countries. However, the mega projects coordinated under the BRI have pushed several third-world countries into high debt, with Sri Lanka being one of them, still struggling from a years-long economic collapse.
Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a statement in which he said he wished to bolster the existing friendship between Beijing and Colombo and hoped that bilateral cooperation under his flagship BRI would “bear more fruit.” Furthermore, he said, Beijing would, “promote the steady progress of sincere mutual assistance between China and Sri Lanka as well as our age-old strategic cooperative partnership, and create more benefits for the peoples of both countries”.
The Belt and Road Initiative touted as the ‘project of the century’ by Chinese President Xi Jinping was introduced a decade ago. With 150 member nations, it envisions a maritime road and a new silk route belt (One Belt One Road) that would connect different regions of the world to Beijing.
According to a report published in the Financial Times, the B-R-I’s lending figure is at $1 trillion figure over the past decade. Data released by Rhodium group in March of this year highlighted how China has had to renegotiate or even write off debts to the tune of US$76.8 billion of the debt-burdened nations marred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chinese investments in the neighboring nations have been termed ‘debt trap diplomacy’, where China would initially lure countries into taking Chinese money, pushing them into debt, which many of them have been unable to service such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan and even African countries.
Unable to pay a huge Chinese loan, the Sri Lankan government was forced to hand over its Hambantota port in the south of the island to a company from Beijing on a 99-year lease for $1.12 billion, in December 2017.
