Nothing Found

‘When small men begin to cast big shadows’, wrote the Chinese intellectual Lin Yutang, ‘it means the sun is about to set.’ It is a dictum that, like many, functions neatly in reverse. When small countries stand up to the great, it might well be a sign of a new day.

The small nation of Czechia brought us Swarovski crystal, Sigmund Freud, Skoda cars, Pilsener and Kafka’s Josef K. Now add Pavel Novotny, poker player, satirist and the mayor of Reporyje, one of 22 Prague districts and home to around 5,000 people, who wrote an obscenity-rich letter to the Chinese foreign minister some weeks ago demanding an apology for his attack on Czech Senate president Milos Vystrcil.

Monty Python’s Michael Palin says that the Czechs are among the world’s funniest people. Novotny’s abrupt démarche is worthy of a far longer disquisition on a Czech cultural DNA of defiant social humour, usually brewed alongside earnest beer consumption. However, this amusing verbal mooning flags some serious considerations for Australia as it gauges the dregs of its own China relationship. Are we reading it right?

Novotny’s screed is a rude aside in a post–Velvet Revolution history of values-based Czech foreign policy. It came hard on the heels of an 89-strong delegation led by Vystrcil to Taiwan. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, rebuked Vystrcil with the threat that he would ‘pay a heavy price’. A few days later Vystrcil, channelling John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 Berlin declaration against the Soviet menace, responded in Taiwan’s parliament, ‘I am Taiwanese.’

The Czechs don’t just think in decades but, like the Chinese, in centuries and the sweep of great tides of power. Few countries have suffered the hostile buffeting and inversion of national realities of the Czech lands in so short a time. Imagine if between the return of ANZAC forces in 1918 and the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Australia’s borders had been redrawn four times, and we had experienced six different political systems?

My grandmother was born in an Austro-Hungarian empire and buried in the sixth version of a Czech republic. In between, her country encountered two world wars, Nazi invasion, Russian liberation and Russian invasion, a coup d’état, a people’s revolution, democratic and totalitarian governments, protectorate status, and at least four geographic iterations of the nation.

Such an embarrassment of big ideas in so little time.

Between 1918 and the Nazi invasion in 1938 Czechoslovakia was Central Europe’s only democracy, with a cosmopolitan mix of Germans, Slavs, Jews and Roma. It was an industrial powerhouse with one of the best-equipped armies and highest standards of living in Europe. And then, in a political poker game played between Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler, it was lost. Czech political instinct is keened to threats that turn national fortune on a dime, and twist lives forever.

Moreover, the Czechs are savvy to the force of ideas. Ideology spawned the tyrannies that swamped that small nation, and ideas insistently imbued with the dignity of the individual at their core eventually drove them off. Vaclav Havel, the dissident jailbird and playwright and first president of a post-communist and ‘open society’ Czechoslovakia, once wrote, ‘Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.’

Humour was central to Havel’s sensibility as an element of moral resistance. Ridicule leavened the humourless and homicidal obscenity of police states with their drumbeats of empty rhetoric, social dehumanisation, and institutionalised cruelty. The urge to ridicule the seemingly colossal throws up characters with the chutzpah of a Good Soldier Svejk or a Pavel Novotny, the small guy thumbing his nose at emperors and dictators.

Havel’s major work was The power of the powerless, written in 1978 in the grinding depths of communism’s chokehold on Eastern Europe. The essence of his resistance manifesto was a description of the collective potential power of disparate individual acts against what was then one of the most unbending of Eastern Bloc nations. People critique democracy as chaotic and slow to act, but, in its single-mindedness and intolerance for dissent, totalitarianism is often slower to think.

That’s why the Czechs are worth observing, as small states contemplate the depth of their exposure to the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘hidden hand’, detailed in the new book of the same name. If you instinctively react against conspiracy theories, or neat linear explanations of causality, or the capacity of any large and complex state to organise covertly and consistently to a given end, then you ought to be suspicious of claims that the CCP is intent on weakening a variety of target states through a broad spectrum of organised, ideologically driven, and novel forms of subversion.

But if you believe also that ideology is a force that must be reckoned with; and if you sniff the absolutist instincts of President Xi Jinping which are imbedded in a veneration of Maoism; and if you note the mass persecution of China’s minorities and surveillance of her people as China reorganises socially and politically; and if you absorb publicly available CCP warfare doctrines that openly proclaim the kinds of networked ‘multi-vector’ subterfuge now under scrutiny in Western and Asian countries; and if you agree that acts that have ‘no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance’, then you might be concerned.

In a world where openness is being retooled and turned against open societies, what can we glean from the Czechs?

First, the Czechs get the value of values. The values-led foreign policy proclaimed by Havel that has almost entirely dominated their post-communist era is a product of a society that suffered at close quarters a surveillance state that trashed individual rights and discounted moral worth. The rule of law, human rights, individual liberty and a regard for civic participation, self-determination and minority rights are values now deeply embedded in the Czech polity. In short, values are interests in the foreign policy battle of ideas, both a bellwether of malign intent and a first line of defence.

Second, the Czechs get the methods of totalitarianism and the intentions that lie behind them. Like all former Eastern Bloc allies, they know most of the covert modus operandi of entities like Russia and other former totalitarian states that promote social discord, doubt and mistrust in adversary nations through misinformation and influence operations that lay down the trackwork for long-term infiltration. In 2018, the Czechs were among the first to warn of the dangers of Huawei’s pursuit of premier provider status in the EU’s rollout of 5G technology. Other countries have since followed suit.

Third, the Czechs get that size matters. In its last public annual report, Czechia’s premier intelligence agency, the Security Information Service (BiS) named the two principal threats. Russia could never be a surprise. Mention of the behemoth China as a principal equal challenge, however, is more unexpected. Despite Czechia’s negligible resident Chinese population, obvious geographic separation, and very limited economic exposure compared with Australia or the EU as a whole, the BiS flagged the presence in the republic of a full spectrum of active Chinese intelligence organisations.

These state and CCP agents are intent on prosecuting what the Australian military academic David Kilkullen calls ‘liminal warfare’. The broad spectrum of activities (tracked by the Czech Map!nfluence group) might individually seem benign and distinct from one another but, when interpreted as an organised and protracted campaign, reveal a design to gradually enervate effective national responses to political influence by the CCP.

When Vystrcil addressed the Taiwanese parliament, he was addressing a kindred nation, and harkening well beyond J.F.K.’s Berlin speech. He was reflecting a stark Czech realism of the late 1930s when a menacing Germany threatened the adolescent Czechoslovak state on its doorstep. Imbued with the ideology of the Nazi party, Germany claimed the Czechoslovak territory by virtue of geography, history, race and evolutionary right.

Stoked by religious ideology, the Thirty Years War that killed as many as 8 million Europeans in the early 17th century began and finished in the Czech lands. Today, the Czechs are among the world’s most irreligious (and skeptical) people. ‘Keep the company of those who seek the truth’, wrote Havel, ‘run from those who have found it.’ In the looming battle of political ideas that are shaping our century, Pavel Novotny’s letter is a notable small act of resistance in a high-stakes game.

After declaring a resounding victory against the Covid-19 pandemic, a newly confident China so far this year has tested new ballistic missiles, threatened Taiwan by ignoring the median line in the Taiwan Strait, expanded its erasure of Muslim Uyghur culture in Xinjiang, and extended its evisceration of Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms.

At the same time, China has shown a new aggressiveness in trying to curtail the activities of the foreign reporters in the country, and to quash any unfavourable coverage of the Chinese Communist Party or its leader, General Secretary Xi Jinping.

Where China once tolerated, even courted, the international media as a sign of the country’s re-emergence in the world, its leaders today see foreign correspondents as a meddlesome presence they can easily do without.

China has long been one of the world’s most restrictive countries for journalists, local and foreign. Reporters Without Borders lists China at number 177 out of 180 countries for its repression of the press, down just a few notches from 171st place a decade ago.

Foreign journalists in China have for decades faced restrictive visa procedures and expulsions, control of their movements, constant surveillance and physical threats. News assistants, the Chinese nationals who work as researchers and translators in foreign news bureaus, have routinely faced threats to themselves and their family members, invitations—or instructions—to spy on their employers, and warnings to ‘remember you are Chinese’. The situation for the overseas press corps in Beijing worsened dramatically after Xi came to power at the end of 2012, according to annual surveys by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.

But even by China’s dismal standards, this year has seen a marked deterioration.

At least 17 foreign reporters have been forced to leave China since the start of the year, an unprecedented mass expulsion and roughly double the number expelled in the first seven years of Xi’s rule. Even after the tumultuous events of 1989 with the Tiananmen Square massacre, only two American journalists, for the Associated Press and Voice of America, were immediately expelled.

Several other Western journalists now remaining in China have not had their press credentials renewed and are allowed to continue working only with short-term letters issued by the foreign ministry, meaning they can be expelled at any time. They are from CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and Getty Images.

For the first time since the 1970s, Australian media outlets have no correspondents based in China. The Washington Post has had no correspondent in China since the last bureau chief left to take a new job in New Zealand and no visa has been granted for a replacement. The New York Times, which once had one of the largest and most prolific bureaus in China, now has a single foreign correspondent covering the vast country of 1.4 billion people.

Chinese officials have defended their actions as mere tit-for-tat retaliation for the treatment of its journalists overseas.

An earlier wave of expulsions of American journalists from China in May came after the Trump administration restricted the number of non-American journalists allowed to work for five Chinese state-run media outlets in the US to 100. Earlier this year, three Wall Street Journal reporters were forced out of China due to Beijing’s ire over an opinion piece that ran in the paper at the height of the coronavirus pandemic with a headline, ‘China is the real sick man of Asia’, that some Chinese considered offensive. The latest freeze on press credentials came after Trump signed an order restricting all Chinese journalists in the US to 90-day work visas, instead of the normal open-ended, single-entry visas they were accustomed to.

The last Australian journalists left China in dramatic fashion. After being visited by Chinese public security agents, Bill Birtles of the ABC in Beijing and Michael Smith of the Australian Financial Review in Shanghai first sought refuge in Australian diplomatic compounds and then flew out on 7 September. The visits seemed in retaliation for the June raids by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation on the homes of four Chinese journalists based in Australia. Those four Chinese reporters later fled back to mainland China. Later, Australia was told that Cheng Lei, a Chinese-born Australian citizen working for the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN) had been detained in a national security case.

But beyond China’s expressed need for a retaliatory show of force in the world, its treatment of foreign reporters underscores an essential shift in the ruling communist party’s attitude over the past three decades; China feels it simply doesn’t need foreign journalists any more.

That is a marked change from the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Following the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, China was anxious to end its global isolation, move on from the stain and demonstrate to the world its return to normalcy. Foreign journalists—while still subject to surveillance and heavy restrictions—were seen as conferring a kind of legitimacy on the regime. I travelled frequently to China from Hong Kong between 1995 and 1997, and many longtime reporters remember that as a ‘golden age’ of reporting, because of the relative openness. Foreign ministry officials regularly implored me to convince my bosses at the Washington Post to please add more correspondents to cover China.

Another period of relative openness for foreign reporters came in the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when China’s leaders were anxious to showcase their country to the world. Many of the restrictions on foreign journalists’ ability to travel were lifted. Foreign correspondents could hire whomever they wanted as news assistants and researchers, instead of being assigned approved assistants from the foreign ministry. Foreign journalists were told they could interview anyone they wanted without seeking permission in advance. And internet censorship was relaxed, with many previously banned websites unblocked.

The explosion of the internet and popular Twitter-like Weibo blogs, beginning in around 2009, heralded another brief flourishing of media openness, and was a boon to foreign media coverage. Monitoring China’s unfettered online conversation became a key way for foreign correspondents to track public sentiment across the country, and served as an early warning system to reporters about pockets of unrest—farmers protesting against land seizures, villagers angry about polluting factories, and citizen journalists exposing local corruption.

Foreign reporters were not only tolerated—we also became part of the show. During the largely ceremonial annual ‘two meetings’ of China’s National People’s Congress, the rubber-stamp legislature and the advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the local television cameras invariably swung to take images of foreign correspondents in attendance. Reporters on China Central Television always made note of how ‘even foreign correspondents’ covered the sessions.

China’s leaders always bristled at unfavourable or critical coverage. But in those days they looked to the presence of foreign correspondents for affirmation that China was getting the attention and respect it was due as a rising power.

China’s self-assured rulers now believe they no longer need the international media to promote China as a financial and investment powerhouse and to tell China’s story to the world. Its own global media reach has expanded, with the state-run news agency Xinhua now joined by China Daily, CGTN and others with bureaus and correspondents around the world producing Chinese propaganda in English. Chinese media outlets and institutions are active on Twitter (which is blocked in China) to disseminate the official line, directly bypassing foreign media gatekeepers.

In some ways, foreign media coverage of China appears to be reverting back to the days of the Cultural Revolution and before, when many Western journalists, collectively known as ‘China watchers’, were barred from the country and forced to monitor events from afar, from Hong Kong or Taiwan, by parsing Xinhua dispatches and interviewing fleeing refugees.

But China-watching today is different, and much more thorough. Even journalists banned from China can monitor Chinese media and the online space. Much of the reporting on the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang was done from outside China, using satellite imagery and other computer-generated sources. Sources in Wuhan at the height of the pandemic posted videos of overcrowded hospitals and bodies unburied in the street. Outlets like Radio Free Asia and others do a commendable job of covering China by conducting telephone interviews with sources inside.

China may now want to expel foreign correspondents to control its own narrative and stem negative coverage. But its connectedness to the world means the country can no longer be isolated and escape critical coverage, no matter how much it tries.

For the first time since 1973, the Australian media has no foreign correspondents in China—a consequence of the Chinese government’s decision to drown out all critical voices, foreign or domestic. Allowing the deterioration of media freedom in China to translate into a poorer understanding of Chinese politics is a goal of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping. But, for journalists and media organisations, this remains an entirely avoidable outcome.

You don’t need to be in China to understand Chinese politics. Chinese government and military websites offer a treasure trove of information for anyone armed with Mandarin and a willingness to dig. Mike Forsyth, whose reporting on the wealth of Xi’s family meant that he could no longer get a visa for China, has continued publishing hard-hitting pieces in the New York Times on the nexus between Chinese politics and money. ASPI, for its part, employs a cadre of Mandarin-speaking analysts who have produced numerous reports and databases looking at institutions engaged in defence research, forced labour and gulags in Xinjiang, and censorship on Chinese social media.

On-the-ground reporting has certainly improved our understanding of China. For young correspondents or scholars, time in China offers an opportunity to improve their Mandarin and provides unique insights into how the CCP operates. That said, Bill Birtles, Mike Smith, Phillip Wen and Chris Buckley haven’t lost their Mandarin skills or their knowledge of Chinese domestic politics. Nor have the scores of other foreign reporters who have been forced to leave China. The task for media organisations will be to find new ways of redeploying the expertise of these journalists to ensure that the world’s understanding of China won’t suffer.

There are numerous ways to achieve this goal. Media outlets like the ABC or the Australian Financial Review could move journalists who worked in China to desks reporting on Beijing’s diplomacy or on the CCP’s overseas influence activities.

With its strengthened united front apparatus and taste for ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy under Xi, the Chinese government’s presence overseas is just as important to report on as developments within China. Birtles and Smith, with years of experience within China, are well qualified to explain Beijing’s diplomacy or the activities of its united front in a culturally knowledgeable and analytically incisive way.

Media organisations could consider moving their China bureaus elsewhere. The obvious candidate would have been Hong Kong, but the new national security law makes the risk of arbitrary detention there nearly as high as it is on the mainland.

With Hong Kong’s press freedom in tatters, the New York Times has temporarily moved part of its Hong Kong bureau to Seoul, and the Washington Post has shifted one of its China correspondents to Seoul and the other elsewhere in Asia. Though South Korea might have an interesting relationship with China, the two countries are profoundly different—linguistically, culturally, politically and historically. Aside from South Korea’s tradition of press freedom and its one-hour time difference from Beijing, it’s hard to see what value there is in housing a China bureau in Seoul.

The most obvious location for any new China bureau would be Taipei. Like Korea, Taiwan boasts a free press, an independent judiciary and a vibrant democracy. Taiwan, more importantly, is a Mandarin-speaking nation with close cultural links to mainland China. The linguistic and cultural skills needed to report on China successfully are also needed to report on Taiwan effectively. Financial Times reporter Kathrin Hille, for instance, files insightful stories from Taipei on the CCP, the People’s Liberation Army and Taiwanese domestic politics.

As Hille’s example demonstrates, stationing correspondents in Taipei would have the dual benefit of allowing reporters to continue filing stories on China while improving the world’s understanding of Taiwan—a country on the front lines of Beijing’s push for global influence. It would also play a small but useful role in combating Beijing’s attempts to squeeze Taiwan’s international space.

Media executives might argue that moving a China bureau to Taiwan would make it impossible for their journalists to re-enter China, due to Chinese government policy. There’s some truth in that, but it’s worth questioning the notion that foreign media will be able to return to China in a way that makes valuable reporting realistic while Xi remains president.

Since taking office in 2012, Xi has strengthened the CCP’s grip on just about every part of Chinese life and suffocated all forms of civil society. That trend is unlikely to change. And, with presidential term limits no longer in place, Xi is free to continue purging Chinese society of ‘hostile foreign forces’ such as the foreign media until he either dies or is purged himself. Betting on either event taking place in the near to medium term seems like a long shot for foreign media organisations planning their future China operations.

Given that worthwhile reporting on China from within China doesn’t seem tenable for the foreseeable future, journalists, scholars and analysts might do well to relearn some of the old skills of China watching.

As former CIA analyst Alice Miller noted in her final piece for China Leadership Monitor, the intercultural exchanges that came with Washington’s diplomatic recognition of Beijing provided new avenues of research on current trends in Chinese politics and foreign policy. This on-the-ground style of reporting and scholarship has offered the world much insight into how the CCP interacts with the society it governs.

But, as Miller notes later in the same piece, this relatively new style of reporting has ‘come at the opportunity cost of declining interest in elite politics and an unwillingness to expend the tedious labors required to study it’. With Xi tightening the screws on Beijing’s political and propaganda apparatus, now is a perfect time for journalists and scholars to relearn the skills of reading the tea leaves in People’s Daily editorials or assessing personnel movements in the CCP and PLA.

The world’s understanding of China doesn’t have to suffer just because Xi has decided to force foreign journalists out. The proliferation of Chinese government information online, along with satellite imagery and a host of other datasets, has allowed journalists, scholars and analysts to explain aspects of Chinese politics that were once exclusively available to government intelligence analysts. Xi’s crackdown on dissent has also increased the analytic value of Beijing’s traditional propaganda outlets.

Students of Chinese politics have long shown a willingness to adapt their analytic skills as events in China demand. The media can do that too.

Autonomous Kurdistan is a federal administrative unit of Iraq in the northern part of the country and is controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government. It hosts foreign investors from many countries and entities, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia and Turkey.

The region is also an attraction point for the People’s Republic of China and Chinese state-owned and -controlled companies. Chinese companies that operate in the oil and petroleum, infrastructure, construction, engineering, telecommunications and cement-production industries have been investing heavily in the region, undertaking multimillion-dollar projects and signing lucrative contracts with the government in Erbil (the de facto capital) and local Kurdish enterprises since the KRG’s re-establishment in 2005.

Chinese investment and economic cooperation are strengthening political relations between Beijing and Erbil, but it’s not yet possible to speak of a diplomatic alliance between them.

One of the basic elements of the PRC’s foreign policy is opposing acts of separatism or secession all over the world and supporting countries’ integrity. For that reason, Beijing gave no support to Erbil’s push for Kurdish independence, even though they have stable political relations.

However, changing power balances in the region make it more likely that the PRC will change its traditional approach to separatist and secessionist movements in the case of Kurdistan and support the KRG in its struggle for independence. Mordechai Chaziza lists the factors that might change Beijing’s Kurdistan policy. An independent Kurdish state—particularly one that the PRC helped to create—could give Beijing a new and friendly ally in the Middle East and a great security advantage in protecting its regional interests against groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda. It would also help China to diversify its oil supplies, satisfy its need for oil for many decades, and be a political card that it could use against Turkey and other countries that support Muslim Uyghur Turks, who are being systematically persecuted by the Beijing government.

Chinese support for Kurdish independence and strengthened Chinese–Kurdish relations are likely to create enormous risks and endanger regional stability.

Under its Belt and Road Initiative, the PRC government is breaking new diplomatic ground by using a debt-based foreign policy and bilateral agreements to realise its economic and political objectives in underdeveloped and developing countries.

When we take into account recent examples of unorthodox Chinese actions in East Africa and Southeast Asia, the future of Kurdish–Chinese relations becomes much more significant. In the past three years, as reported by Andre Wheeler and Hellenic Shipping News, the governments of Zambia and Sri Lanka have lost control of their major airports and marine ports to the PRC over debt repayments worth billions of dollars.

Those who would like to see the KRG waive its idea of independence for the sake of regional peace and stability might fear the same result in Kurdistan if China is able to help bring about that independence.

The US, the UK, the EU, Australia and Turkey—prominent international and regional actors that have practical experience and deep roots in the Middle East and North Africa, and that respect international legal regulations and diplomatic customs—should take a more proactive and courageous approach to Chinese expansion.

In this context, to shape the political and economic environment of the region according to international values and to limit Chinese expansion in the region, the American, British, European, Australian and Turkish governments should collectively promote commercial and economic relations with both Erbil and Baghdad and offer transparent and fair business contracts to both governments. To prevent Chinese debt diplomacy, they should help to build strong, fully functioning and democratic institutions in the KRG and advocate for democracy, the rule of law and transparency throughout the region.

For its part, the KRG needs to deeply cooperate with states that respect the rule of law and pursue its relationship with Beijing in a transparent way with extreme caution.

If international and regional actors take these steps, the northern part of Iraq and the rest of the country will be more secure, settled, ordered and prosperous.

After the outbreak of Covid-19 earlier this year, some predicted that the pandemic’s economic reverberations in Sri Lanka would lead China to increase its already considerable funding to the island state. Indeed, as early as mid-March 2020, the China Development Bank agreed to lend Sri Lanka US$500 million when it upsized an existing facility signed in 2018. More recently, the CDB agreed to lend a further US$140 million to the state-owned Bank of Ceylon.

Predictions of Sri Lanka’s closer ties with China have redoubled since the sweeping electoral victory of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna—the party of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa—in the country’s legislative elections on 5 August.

Several factors could propel Sri Lanka and China to forge closer relations, but there are also some countervailing pull factors that may limit the extent of China’s funding and influence. An underappreciated pull factor is the contribution of multilateral development banks (MDBs) to alleviating the country’s economic burdens. During the Covid-19 pandemic, MDBs like the Asian Development Bank have contributed far less to Sri Lanka than they have to other South Asian countries. This in turn has amplified China’s bilateral role in the country. Increased funding from MDBs could reduce the depth of China’s future footprint in Sri Lanka.

A recent paper by Chatham House, which I co-authored with other Sri Lankan colleagues, challenged the narrative that Sri Lanka is mired in a Chinese debt trap—noting that debt to China amounted to less than 6% of GDP in 2018. Nevertheless, it also recognised the risk of a debt trap in the future, and critics have pointed out that loans from China come with fewer procedural safeguards than those from MDBs.

The predicted negative economic growth in Sri Lanka this year as a result of the global pandemic will add pressure to the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which stood at 87% last year, and to its ability to service that debt with limited dollar reserves. These concerns are despite Sri Lanka’s success in containing the pandemic due to early and decisive steps like closing its borders in March and an active contact tracing system. At the end of July 2020, there were fewer than 2,900 cases and 11 deaths.

Sri Lanka’s challenging economic reality is among the strongest push factors towards its greater dependence on Chinese bilateral aid. This is particularly because of China’s reliably swift responses—a speed that was also evident after the devastating terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday last year, when China was the first country to relax its travel advisory about Sri Lanka.

Further push factors include the new government’s need to garner global support to defend Sri Lanka’s human rights record in international forums, increase foreign investment, modernise its technological capabilities and meet its significant infrastructure gap (at an estimated cost of US$24 billion based on a 2014 World Bank study) through existing projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and new development projects. An additional push factor is the growth of China’s public diplomacy, including with Sri Lanka’s majority Buddhist community.

On the other hand, the logistical difficulties faced during the pandemic by many construction and other companies in Sri Lanka point to the country’s need to diversify its supply chains from China. Other pull factors that sustain Sri Lanka’s non-China relationships, and can thereby limit China’s influence, include Sri Lanka’s need for economic assistance from diverse sources and its multifaceted security relationships with India and other partners. More generally, pull factors encompass Sri Lanka’s need to give visible contours to a non-aligned foreign policy that it has pledged to continue, particularly in view of spiralling US–China tensions.

One pull factor that warrants special mention is the extent to which international financial institutions are aiding, or could aid, Sri Lanka. After the outbreak of Covid-19, Sri Lanka sought US$300 million from the Asian Development Bank and an additional amount from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and renewed its discussions with the International Monetary Fund. Sri Lanka is yet to receive substantial funding from MDBs, relative to its neighbours. As of the end of July, MDBs had committed US$386 million to Sri Lanka, compared to, for example, the over US$1 billion allocated to Nepal.

Although media reports have highlighted Chinese assistance to Sri Lanka, these reports neglect a comparative perspective. In effect, Chinese loans in this pandemic year are helping Sri Lanka to close its funding gap from MDBs. The role of multilateral aid in shaping China’s post-Covid footprint in Sri Lanka is particularly significant because of opposition in some quarters to bilateral assistance, particularly from the US—which has offered a compelling US$500 million grant for transport and land administration projects—and India, from which Sri Lanka has nevertheless accepted a US$400 million swap facility that contributed markedly to Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves.

In this context, middle powers like Australia—which partnered with the World Health Organization to commit A$600,000 to Sri Lanka’s Covid-19 response—would do well to continue to support MDBs and other multilateral initiatives. Australia should likewise continue to back multilateral institutions like the Indian Ocean Rim Association that help to maintain a rules-based, peaceful Indian Ocean—an objective that Sri Lankan policymakers know is indispensable to the country’s future and will require the cooperation of many nations beyond China.

China has established itself as an enduring partner of Sri Lanka. During the Cold War, Sri Lanka turned alternately to the West and the Soviet Union, depending on its leaders in power. There is little such local vacillation in the ‘new cold war’ between the US and China; even the presumed pro-Western government between 2015 and 2019 relied heavily on Chinese assistance.

That China will solidify its partnership with Sri Lanka appears a given, but the extent to which it does so will depend on multiple factors that link Sri Lanka to its non-Chinese partners. International financial institutions have a key role to play in diversifying Sri Lanka’s international partnerships and engagement, a role that that middle powers can also support in different ways.

This post is part of an ASPI research project on the vulnerability of Indo-Pacific island states in the age of Covid-19 being undertaken with the support of the Embassy of Japan in Australia.