In ‘debt bondage’ to China

In what he describes as a “predatory approach,” Indian author and scholar Brahma Chellany says China has been turning its ability to lend money to smaller nations to secure highly favorable deals, using the recent 99-year lease for Sri Lanka’s Hambantota as a prime example.

• While China seeks to portray its role in international development as creating win-win partnerships, Chellany explains, “Chinese loans are collateralized by strategically important natural assets with high long-term value (even if they lack short-term commercial viability)… In exchange for financing and building the infrastructure that poorer countries need, China demands favorable access to their natural assets, from mineral resources to ports.”
• Similar tactics have been used to open China’s first overseas military base, in Djbouti, and Kenya’s port of Mombasa may soon share a similar fate as Hambantota.
• Chellany notes the irony inherent in these relationships. “China is replicating the practices used against it in the European-colonial period, which began with the 1839–1860 Opium Wars and ended with the 1949 communist takeover — a period that China bitterly refers to as its ‘century of humiliation,’” he writes.

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• Overseas scrutiny of Chinese firms
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  Germany launches probe of Chinese bid for aerospace supplier Cotesa / Reuters