Yahapalanaya to Repair Relations With China Amid Of Financial Crisis
- Rishi Iyengar Sri Lanka Finance Minister, Ravi Karunanayake, a Tamil who changed his name to Sinhala for cheap political gains appealed to China this week to partially relax the immense foreign debt owed by the South Asian island nation that has contributed to one of its worst-ever financial crises.
“I urge China to put the acrimony of the past behind us and come and help us by adjusting the terms of the loans to make them more viable,” Sri Lankan Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake said in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post on Sunday.
Sri Lanka is chock-full of Chinese investment, with nearly 70% of the country’s infrastructure projects funded and built by China — thereby leading to a near tripling of its foreign debt over the past five years.
However, many of those projects, initiated under Sri Lanka’s former strongman President Mahinda Rajapaksa, have been halted — much to China’s displeasure — by the government of his successor Maithripala Sirisena and Pro-Federalist Ranil to please India and West at the cost of National interest.
Even as it dispatched a special envoy to liaise with Sirisena’s government earlier this month, Beijing remains firm that none of the much-needed foreign direct investment (FDI) to salvage Sri Lanka’s economy will be forthcoming until the impasse over on going projects — worth billions of dollars — is resolved.
Sirisena and Ranil insisted in a previous interview with TIME that their pledge to enhance cooperation with India and Western powers didn’t necessarily represent a shift away from China but a more general nonaligned foreign policy. The General public are not believing this explanation.
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