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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the sanity-takes-flight dept.

The four-lane highway leading out of the Sri Lankan town of Hambantota gets so little traffic that it sometimes attracts more wild elephants than automobiles. The pachyderms are intelligent — they seem to use the road as a jungle shortcut — but not intelligent enough, alas, to appreciate the pun their course embodies: It links together a series of white elephants, i.e. boondoggles, built and financed by the Chinese. Beyond the lonely highway itself, there is a 35,000-seat cricket stadium, an almost vacant $1.5 billion deepwater port and, 16 miles inland, a $209 million jewel known as "the world's emptiest international airport."

Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, the second-largest in Sri Lanka, is designed to handle a million passengers per year. It currently receives about a dozen passengers per day. Business is so slow that the airport has made more money from renting out the unused cargo terminals for rice storage than from flight-related activities. In one burst of activity last year, 350 security personnel armed with firecrackers were deployed to scare off wild animals, the airport's most common visitors.

Projects like Mattala are not driven by local economic needs but by remote stratagems. When Sri Lanka's 27-year civil war ended in 2009, the president at the time, Mahinda Rajapaksa, fixated on the idea of turning his poor home district into a world-class business and tourism hub to help its moribund economy. China, with a dream of its own, was happy to oblige. Hambantota sits in a very strategic location, just a few miles north of the vital Indian Ocean shipping lane over which more than 80 percent of China's imported oil travels. A port added luster to the "string of pearls" that China was starting to assemble all along the so-called Maritime Silk Road.

Sadly, no travelers came, only the bills. The Mattala airport has annual revenues of roughly $300,000, but now it must repay China $23.6 million a year for the next eight years, according to Sri Lanka's Transport and Civil Aviation Ministry. Over all, around 90 percent of the country's revenues goes to servicing debt. Even a new president who took office in 2015 on a promise to curb Chinese influence succumbed to financial reality.

Empire building is expensive, even when you're Chinese, and is especially expensive for the junior partners in the process.


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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by DannyB on Tuesday September 19 2017, @01:01PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 19 2017, @01:01PM (#570167) Journal

    That ain't nuthin'. If ya wanna see the biggest, most bestest fatal attraction with empty rodes and desserted parkin' lots, then see Noah's Ark [arkencounter.com]. Bye you're tickets now! [youtube.com] It's the best attraction ever. Trust me! Beautiful classy stuff. And believe me, I know my confusement parks! I promise. The Chinese ain't got nuthin' on our methods of brainwashin' learnin' the childrens.

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:02PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:02PM (#570286)

    So DannyB is "therealdonaldtrump" eh? Forgot to use your troll account? :P

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:19PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:19PM (#570606) Journal

      No, I didn't forget, obviously.

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      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.