Three Sri Lankan economists have written about their country’s experience with Chinese loans, and all concluded that China was not specifically to blame for the country’s debt problems.

One economic researcher, Umesh Moramudali, wrote in The Diplomat, “It is true…the project certainly was not an economically sensible decision at the time given the fiscal constraints of the economy.” But he argues that it was those overall financial constraints, rather than any specific arm-twisting from China, that led to the port lease. He calculates that “debt repayments for the loans obtained for Hambantota port amount to only around 5 percent of Sri Lanka’s total annual foreign debt payments… By the end of 2017, only little over 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt was owed to China and most of that was in the form of concessionary loans.” He writes that this is the true reason Sri Lanka chose to give away the port:

The economic reality is that Sri Lanka leased out Hambantota port to China largely due to a persistent balance of payment (BOP) crisis resulting from the reduction of trade over the years even while external debt servicing costs have been soaring. Sri Lanka faced a severe shortage of foreign reserves in light of the upcoming debt servicing payments, due to the maturity of international sovereign bonds. Therefore, the country had to look for various avenues to obtain foreign currency inflows. Leasing out Hambantota port was one of the ways to increase the country’s foreign reserves.

Dushni Weerakoon and Sisira Jayasuriya added in an analysis in East Asia Forum that “Sri Lanka’s debt repayment problems had very little to do with Chinese loans,” and that the real issue was Sri Lanka “meeting its obligations to international investors and commercial lenders.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that other political concessions haven’t been pried from Sri Lanka and other governments by Beijing in exchange for loans. A New York Times investigation of the Sri Lanka negotiations in June 2018 alleged that “intelligence sharing was an integral, if not public, part of the deal.” (The Chinese Foreign Ministry dismissed this as “fake news.”)

That is also not to say Sri Lanka hasn’t had a rocky trade and investment relationship with China in recent years. For example, the country angered China in June 2018 by requesting to review their free trade agreement after 10 years, but China did not want to renegotiate. SupChina published a detailed review of Chinese investments into the country since 2007, and the numerous related controversies, on SupChina Access (paywall).

The Rhodium Group reviewed a number of debt renegotiations, and found that “actual asset seizures are a very rare occurrence. Apart from Sri Lanka, the only other example we could find of an outright asset seizure was in Tajikistan, where the government reportedly ceded 1,158 square km of land to China in 2011. However, the limited information available, and the opacity of the process makes it difficult to determine whether this specific land transfer case was in exchange for Chinese debt forgiveness, or (as some observers argue) part of a historical dispute settlement between the two countries.”