Beijing is spreading its influence across South Asia with huge investments – much to the worry of India and the west, The Guardian has said in a profile of Chinese investment in Sri Lanka and the rest of South Asia.
Describing the Chinese-built airport in Hambantota, the feature’s authors Michael Safi and Amantha Perera write:
“Built to handle one million passengers each year, Mattala Rajapaksa saw just over 50,000 people in 2017. Since it opened four years ago the gleaming facility in Hambantota district, on Sri Lanka’s south coast, has become known as the emptiest international airport in the world.”
“It is a symbol of the promise and peril of a fierce contest under way in south Asia. While most international attention has been focused on the South China Sea, on its western border China has been aggressively expanding its presence in the Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh – rattling the regional kingpin, India, and watched warily by the west.”
“Surrounded by acres of paddy fields and banana trees, between fishing villages and food stalls, enormous pieces of modern infrastructure now line the Hambantota landscape. They are ghostly sites. More cows than cars ply a new expressway. A convention centre that hosted the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in 2013 now offers cheap rates to wedding parties. A newly built hospital has never admitted patients, instead providing accommodation to Chinese migrant workers.”
The article also touches on the growing anti-Chinese sentiment within the Sinhalese population, saying:
“The presence of Chinese workers in Hambantota has particularly galled opponents, on a backdrop of raging Buddhist nationalist sentiment on the island. Thilaka [the chief priest of a Buddhist temple] complains he knows of at least five marriages already between Chinese workers and local women.”
“If they start coming here and have that much of an imprint, we will have a similar problem to what we’ve had with the upcountry Tamils,” he says. “There is no way to send these people back.”
