Inside Asian Gaming

December 2014 inside asian gaming 7 Cover Story “The government wants to convert Sri Lanka into a maritime center,” he explains. “We can give some competition to Singapore and Dubai, which are running out of capacity.” As part of the deal China will gain ownership of one-third of the reclamation area. At the unveiling, Mr Wickrama diplomatically underplayed the threat to India’s ports, asserting that Indian exporters could in fact benefit from the project. “Earlier, Indians along the east coast had to send their cargo to Singapore if they wanted to catch a mega-ship going West. Now these mega-ships will be going through Colombo and picking up Indian cargo,” he said. “That saves time and a lot of money.” COMMITTED SUITORS For 26 years, the Sri Lankan government was largely consumed with putting down an armed rebellion by ethnic Hindu Tamils in the north of the country. It was a time “when many other countries were reluctant to invest,” as Deputy Minister for Economic Development Lakshman Yapa Abeywardene recalls. But China not only continued pouring money into the country, it insured its investment in the regime by supplying it arms and aid to eventually prevail against the insurgents, which it finally did in the spring of 2009. Standing United With Beijing China’s new Silk Road is a boon to Sri Lanka’s tourism and casino development In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined his “Silk Road” initiatives aimed at promoting economic connectivity between East and West and securing access for China to Central Asia’s rich energy resources. President Xi proposed the first pillar of that effort, the Silk Road Economic Belt, on a visit to Central Asia in September 2013. He called for the construction of a transport corridor connecting the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea and linking East Asia to South Asia and the Middle East to serve a combined market of some 3 billion people. On that trip he oversaw the signing of deals in Kazakhstan valued at US$30 billion, including oil and gas projects, and agreed to pump $3 billion into loans and infrastructure in Kyrgyzstan During a trip to Indonesia the following month he put forward another pillar, a maritime trade corridor he called the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road. This entails building or expanding ports and industrial parks across Southeast Asia, and in nations including Sri Lanka, Kenya and Greece, along with the goal of expanding bilateral trade with Southeast Asia to $1 trillion by 2020—more than double its level last year. The Silk Road initiatives hold the promise of billions in investment in the nations concerned, but there’s an unmistakable agenda to position Beijing at the center of a new Asian order. From Sri Lanka’s point of view, though, it’s been an undeniable boon to the country’s development, and the new infrastructure will provide major support to the new casino resorts set to open in Colombo. There’s no indication relations between China and Sri Lanka could sour anytime soon, so Beijing’s continued financial support seems assured. If anything, Sri Lanka stands to experience a further investment windfall as India attempts to vie with China to re-establish its influence over the island neighbor skirting its southeastern coast. No such luck for the Philippines, which has provoked China’s ire by asking a United Nations arbitration panel in The Hague to rule on the legality of China’s “nine-dash line” that marks its claim to almost the entire South China Sea. The line loops down like a lolling cow’s tongue from the Chinese coast all the way to Indonesia. Along the way, it cuts through the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone as mandated under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Notably, no other country has joined the Philippines’ legal action, even though Chinese territorial claims in the area also conflict with those of Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei. For a while, the Philippines had hoped Vietnam might come on board, but that prospect now looks remote as China and Vietnam patch up relations. These days, opposing mighty Beijing on foreign policy matters is often a decidedly solitary undertaking. The Colombo Port City is being built next to the $500 million Colombo International Container Terminal, opened in August 2013 and 85% owned by state-run China Merchant Holdings International. CICT is South Asia’s first mega- port, able to handle container ships with capacity of more than 8,000 20-foot equivalent units. It can even handle the largest mega- container ships currently in operation with capacity of 18,000 TEUs.