May 14, 2018
From the article:
AT THE southern end of Laamu atoll in the Maldives, the palm-covered island of Gaadhoo guards the One and a Half Degree Channel, the passage for a good portion of the shipping from Africa to Asia. In 2015 Abdulla Yameen, the president, ordered Gaadhoo’s several hundred villagers to move to the atoll’s main island, Fonadhoo. Today Gaadhoo’s jetty has crumpled into the sea, and copies of the imam’s last sermons flutter about the floor of the abandoned mosque.
It does not look like a fulcrum of world events. Yet Gaadhoo, Maldivian politicians and foreign diplomats contend, will be the scene of the next stage of the Indian Ocean’s great game. They say Mr Yameen has secretly promised the island to China, which will use it as a future military base. Excitable observers note that both India and America appear to be keeping an eye on the island. How else to explain the Indian air force pilots flying helicopters on behalf of the Maldives from the atoll’s airstrip, or the nearby American-owned farm cultivating sea slugs for the Chinese market that is, surely, a CIA outpost?
The Chinese commitment is greatest in Pakistan, an old ally, in the form of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Over $60bn has been promised, mostly for power stations to improve the country’s infamous electricity supply but also for roads, industrial zones, pipelines and a deepwater port at Gwadar.
Yet doubts are growing as fast as debts—China lends to countries rather than makes grants, and rarely at concessional rates. A condition of many loans is that Chinese companies get the business. A new paper by the Centre for Global Development in Washington, DC, identifies eight belt-and-road countries worldwide at “particular risk of debt distress”. They include the Maldives, whose debt is probably over 100% of GDP, and Pakistan. (Other countries on the critical list include Djibouti, where China has its first overseas military base, Laos and Mongolia.)