The only vessels at Sri Lanka’s $1.3bn Hambantota port, opened with fanfare seven years ago, are a handful of idle tugs and a small, half-sunken wreck. At a $209m international airport 20km to the north, two women attend the information desk 10 hours after the day’s second and final flight. Nearby lies a 34,000-seat cricket stadium that has hosted one professional encounter in the past two years.
The grand assets are all named after Mahinda Rajapaksa, the former president who, before his shock 2015 election defeat, borrowed huge sums from Chinese state entities to drive development in his lightly populated southern home district.
But with the flagship port mired in heavy losses, the new government in July ceded a controlling interest to Beijing-controlled China Merchants Port in exchange for a $1.1bn debt write-off. The deal has been denounced by government critics as an erosion of sovereignty — and spurred regional powerhouse India into investments of its own, amid concerns in New Delhi about China’s growing regional clout.