Sinophobia is a distraction: Here’s why

Over the last few weeks, a tsunami of Sinophobia in the mainstream media and social media has turned the world’s next superpower into its next colonial power. While the pro-Opposition lobby has been fuelling much hysteria over China’s intentions in the country, a section of the nationalist lobby has joined the battle as well.

This hysteria has been facilitated by the government’s failure to address such concerns as the choice of language on certain sign boards. The official response to these concerns has been too little, too late. In fact, it’s hard to say there’s been any response at all, apart from a few tweets by MPs that have fanned the flames more than they have snuffed them out.

The result of all this is that today, sections of Sri Lanka’s middle-class perceive China as an imperialist superpower engaged in pulling the country into its sphere of influence. Whether it’s Chinese women talking in Sinhala or a 19th generation Chinese descendant of a 15th century Sinhala prince attending a Vesak festival in Beijing, this middle-class tends to demonise China as a colonial behemoth entrapping the Third World through investment projects.

While government apathy must take the blame for letting criticism of such projects become a cover for Sinophobic agitprop, these fears remain unfounded at best and unwarranted at worst. It is certainly ironic that liberals who rail against xenophobia echo xenophobic rhetoric vis-à-vis China. But that is what they, and their left-liberal counterparts, do.

Such rhetoric often distracts from more pertinent matters. Take the Port City. The moment the regime announced its intention to go ahead with it, the Opposition jumped on the bandwagon, accusing the government of selling the country’s sovereignty. Despite several officials, including Justice Minister Ali Sabri, pointing out that the legal framework governing the Port City wouldn’t permit foreign interests to prevail over national sovereignty, the SJB and the JVP denounced the SLPP for bartering the country to China. Even when the Supreme Court determined that certain amendments needed to be incorporated, and that after incorporating them a simple majority in parliament was all it would take to pass the Bill, Opposition MPs continued to attack it, alleging that the President would fill the Commission with Chinese officials.

Of course, this is not what the President did: in place of seven Chinese satraps, he appointed seven locals from the private sector and legal profession. With that the Opposition’s grumbling died down, though echoes remain; the problem now is not the nationality of those officials, but their competence: “uninspired” is what Harsha de Silva calls them.

What problems does the Port City represent? For that matter, what benefits? Pro-government forces paint it as our next big hub, a mega-Free Trade Zone that will turn us into a Singapore. Such optimism seems misplaced, because Singapore’s rise to what it is now took place against a certain backdrop, and the conditions that facilitated its growth are hard to obtain here.

This, of course, is not to prick at balloons. But any rhetoric in support of the Port City must of necessity begin from the premise that, while ambitious in scope, it is not the only or even the ideal way through which Sri Lanka can fast-track development. Trade and investment are fine, certainly. But it has to be buttressed by industry, production; whether we like it or not, in that scheme Singapore should not, and cannot, be our model.

As for problems, it’s not that the Port City is Chinese funded, but that it aims at channelling foreign capital over the backs of workers’ rights, as is the case with every Free Trade Zone we have seen here since 1977. It would be foolhardy to expect the government to talk about this elephant in the room, yet when the Opposition seemingly skirts the issue, one wonders whether it has given up on the working class; as Pradeep Ramanayake (“Sri Lankan opposition mounts anti-China campaign over Colombo Port City bill”, wsws.org) argues, “the so-called campaign to protect Sri Lanka’s sovereignty against China is based principally on the fact that Beijing funded the Port City project and has indicated its readiness to invest more.” If that is what criticism of “Chinese projects” amounts to, well, it’s less a critique than it is a distraction.

That brings me to another concern: the future course of our foreign relations.

Let me be very clear here. Sri Lanka must do anything and everything it can to avoid getting entangled in confrontations between India, China, and the US. Perceptions of the Rajapaksas getting the country closer to China have not gone down well with Indian security officials, nor should we expect them to anytime soon. That is, to be sure, worrying.

On the other hand, not all such officials voice the fears our MPs trot out. To give one example, R. Hariharan in the Daily O (“Why China’s Colombo Port City project in Sri Lanka is unsettling for India”) notes that, despite its challenge to India’s regional interests, the Colombo Port City can “if imaginatively packaged… add a competitive edge to maritime trade.”

While US-funded think-tanks and Indian academics attached to them continue to echo the US line, advocating deeper ties with Washington, officials closer to home, whose experience with China goes back decades, have been more nuanced in their assessments of Sri Lanka-Beijing relations. This does not make their assessments of those relations more optimistic, but it does make them less cynical than the prognostications of think-tank academics. That the latter do not cut China much slack should worry us for sure, but not excessively.

Sri Lankan academics don’t cut China much slack either. Two articles written 10 years apart, however, offer an alternative viewpoint: Nilanthi Samaranayake’s “Are Sri Lanka’s Relations with China Deepening? An Analysis of Economic, Military, and Diplomatic Data” (2011) and Bhagya Senaratne’s “Chinese Financing in South Asia: The Story of Sri Lanka” (2021).

Samaranayake’s essay, the more incisive of the two, doesn’t just counter conventional myths about the China-Sri Lanka nexus, but questions conventional international relations paradigms generally used by China’s critics to scrutinise its presence in countries like ours: its conclusion is that Sri Lanka is neither “bandwagoning with” nor “balancing” China, as traditional IR theory would suggest. Senaratne does not go this far, but she reaches just about the same conclusion: that most estimates of Chinese influence in Sri Lanka ignore domestic pressures, and that it is these pressures, rather than exogenous factors, that have compelled the country, even when the party in power projected an anti-China line, to seek China. This was as true of the 1965-1970 UNP regime as it was of the 2015-2019 UNP-led yahapalana regime.

The UNP, of course, is the last party to get advice for this issue from. Shelton Kodikara’s study of Indo-Lanka relations (Domestic Politics and Diplomacy: A Study of Linkage Politics in Indo-Sri Lanka Relations) points at how successive UNP regimes vacillated between anti-Indian and anti-Chinese sentiment, siding with the one or the other or pushing against both when it suited their interests. Owing to that myopic (and obtuse) approach, in its first decade of independence Sri Lanka managed to exclude not just India and China, two key and influential global players, but also the Soviet Union. The UNP’s tilt to India in the face of Sirima Bandaranaike’s involvement in the 1962 Sino-India War, in that sense, was more a distraction than a coherently articulated position, as its volte-face over China after 1965 showed. Indeed, if there’s a thread binding the UNP then to the UNP now, it’s this persistently one-sided view of the world that places the West at the centre of the universe to the exclusion of all other players.

But that’s the UNP. The SJB is not the UNP. Nor should it try to be a UNP. Critics of the SJB, on social media particularly, wonder whether the SJB is turning into an SLPP Lite. I rather think the bigger worry is if it turns into a UNP Lite. The SJB should possess what the parent party did not, namely a healthy dose of realism. Realism should, in fact, dictate its engagements with the rest of the world. Regarding China, it should persevere in critiquing the likes of Port City and foreign investments in the country without demonising the countries funding them. This is not because China deserves blank cheques from our Opposition, but because our Opposition should not echo xenophobic agitprop passing for criticism of foreign policy that its parent party engaged in over our relations with India, the Soviet Union, and China.

Sinophobia in the present conjuncture is a distraction. In fact it has little to no impact on the consciousness of the many. The SJB must evolve a comprehensive critique of our foreign policy blunders which avoids demonising particular countries. The latter, of course, was the approach the UNP opted for, back then. The SJB cannot afford to emulate the UNP, right now.

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