Sri Lanka, Struggling With Debt, Hands a Major Port to China<br />12, 2017<br />NEW DELHI — Struggling to pay its debt to Chinese firms, the nation of Sri Lanka formally handed over the strategic port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease last week, in a deal<br />that government critics have said threatens the country’s sovereignty.<br />In July, the state-controlled China Merchants Port Holdings Company signed a deal with the Sri Lanka Ports Authority<br />to control a 70 percent stake in the Hambantota port, which lies on the southern coast of the country.<br />Sri Lanka said that The price being paid for reducing the China debt could prove more costly than the debt burden Sri Lanka seeks to reduce,<br />On Saturday, the government completed the handover of the port to two state-controlled entities run through China<br />Merchants Port Holdings, which has already made its first payment of $300 million to the Sri Lankan government.<br />After the original port deal was signed in July, Namal Rajapaksa, a member of Parliament<br />and son of the former president, asked on Twitter whether the government was "playing geopolitics with national assets." Perceiving a threat to its regional hegemony, India has also watched with suspicion as cranes operated by Chinese firms began to dot the skyline in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital.<br />As Western nations accused Mahinda Rajapaksa, the country’s former president, of grievous human rights abuses during the final stages of Sri<br />Lanka’s nearly 26-year civil war, China extended billions of dollars of loans to Mr. Rajapaksa’s government for new infrastructure projects.
