If we haven’t yet become too drugged to sense the fatality of China’s embrace, listen to this cautionary tale. It features Kenya and Sri Lanka, easy prey to China being – like ourselves in prospect – debtors misled by their deluded or self-interested regimes. A bridge built in Kenya by Chinese engineers and funded with a Chinese loan collapsed even before it could be opened to traffic. Sri Lanka, for its part, had to “cough up” (the phrase is The New York Times’) an entire port. “The case,” says the Times, “is one of the most vivid examples of China’s ambitious use of loans and aid to gain influence around the world – and of its willingness to play hardball to collect.”