Category: Africa

On July 9, 2022, hundreds of thousands of anti-government protesters came out on the streets of Colombo and occupied the official residence and offices of Sri Lanka’s then president, who tendered his resignation before fleeing overseas. Two things are closely associated in my mind with the current political turmoil in Sri Lanka: the Chinese debt trap and green agriculture. Many of the Chinese-language reporting outside of mainland China and its state-controlled media blame the Chinese debt trap, while English-language media consistently lay the blame with green agriculture. According to data from the Ministry of External Resources of Sri Lanka, as of April 21, 2021 , Sri Lanka’s foreign debt totaled U.S.$ 57 billion, 47 percent of which was international capital market borrowings, 13 percent of which is owed to the Asian Development Bank, 10 percent to China, another 10 percent to Japan, nine percent to the World Bank, two percent to India and the remaining nine percent to other creditors. Sri Lanka’s GDP ranks between 60th and 70th in the world, but it gets more international media coverage than a lot of higher-ranking countries simply because of its geographical location as the “Pearl of the Indian Ocean.” It is also a key site of China’s global infrastructure and supply-chain initiative, known as Belt and Road. At the end of 2017, the Sri Lankan government announced it would formally transfer a 70 percent stake in Hambantota Port to the China Merchants Group, as well as allowing China to lease the port and its surrounding land for 99 years. This is where the idea that Sri Lanka is in a Chinese debt trap originates from. The deal was widely reported by Western mainstream media. A July 29, 2017 report from the Associated Press reflects the Western media’s take nicely. “Sri Lanka’s government on Saturday signed a long-delayed agreement to sell a 70 percent stake in a $1.5 billion port to China in a bid to recover from the heavy burden of repaying a Chinese loan obtained to build the facility,” the report reads. “The document was signed between the government-run Sri Lanka Ports Authority and the state-run China Merchants Port Holding Co. in the capital, Colombo, in the presence of senior government officials from Sri Lanka and China. According to the agreement, the Chinese company will invest $1.12 billion in the port, which sits close to busy east-west shipping lanes,” it says. “Two local companies whose shares will be split between the Chinese enterprise and the Sri Lanka Ports Authority will be set up to handle the port’s operations, security and services. The Chinese company will be responsible for commercial operations while the Sri Lanka Ports Authority will handle security. The lease period is 99 years.” A container ship arrives at a port in Colombo on July 16, 2022. Credit: AFP ‘String of pearls’ Two things are important in this report. The first is that the equity transferred in the deal was actually a debt-to-equity swap, as Rajapaksa built the Hambantota port with a loan from China. The port opened in 2011 and was criticized by opposition parties during 2015 presidential election campaign. Soon after, Sri Lankan authorities sought help from China because the port had lost U.S.$304 million by 2016, and Sri Lanka couldn’t afford the heavy burden of loan repayments of … U.S.$59 million annually. The second is that the port was funded by Beijing as part of its “string of pearls” projects in the Indian Ocean. The phrase was coined by Indian politicians to describe concerns over China’s potential plans to wield influence in the region via a slew of civil and military infrastructure projects from Port Sudan in the Horn of Africa through Sri Lanka, along the coasts of Pakistan, Bangladesh, to the Maldives and the Straits of Malacca, Hormuz and Lombok. Many Indian commentators believe that both the ‘string of pearls’ strategy and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor will threaten India’s national security. Beijing was able to include Sri Lanka in this plan because Rajapaksa relied heavily on Chinese infrastructure projects. China made massive investments in Sri Lanka’s ports, airports, highways and power plants during his time in office, becoming largest foreign investor in the country. On June 27, 2018, The New York Times published an article titled “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port,” which argued that the Chinese government knew all along that the port could never turn a profit. The whole purpose [of funding it] was to take the port for China when Sri Lanka came to the point of not being able to repay the debt. By 2022, China had been laying the groundwork, seeding global public opinion, to counter the Western media narrative of a Chinese debt trap. Now, influential foreign affairs think pieces in the United States are barely mentioning it at all. Instead, articles about Sri Lanka’s green farming crisis have been on display since last year, including a Dec. 7, 2021 piece in The New York Times titled “Sri Lanka’s Plunge Into Organic Farming Brings Disaster.” A July 2019 survey by Colombo-based analytics firm Verité Research found that three-quarters of Sri Lankan farmers rely heavily on fertilizers, while only 10 percent do not. For important cash crops like rice, rubber and tea, the dependence is 90 percent or more. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in white, walks with Chinese President Xi Jinping after officially launching a project to build a $1.4 billion port city on an artificial island off Colombo, Sri Lanka, Sept. 17, 2014. Credit: AP Organic farming push Both the Sri Lankan government and environmental groups believe the excessive use of fertilizers will cause growing problems with water pollution, and scientists have found that excessive exposure to nitrates increases the risk of colon, kidney and stomach cancers. So Rajapaksa pledged in his 2019 election campaign to convert the country’s farming industry to organic farming within 10 years, rushing to deliver on the plan by banning imports of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides … prompting soaring…

A new Chinese study on the ancient populations of Xinjiang purports to show modern-day residents descend from a mix of ethnicities, but scientists and experts on the region cautioned the findings are being used to support  China’s forced assimilation policy toward the predominately Muslim Uyghurs. The study from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences is based on 201 ancient human genomes from 39 different archeological sites in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Scientists analyzed the genetic composition, migration and formation of the ancient inhabitants of Xinjiang during the Bronze Age, which lasted from 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, the Iron Age, which lasted between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, and into the Historical Era, which started about 2,000 years ago. They published their findings in the April edition of the journal Science in an article titled “Bronze and Iron Age population movements underlie Xinjiang population history.” The report states that the region’s ancestral population during the Bronze Age was linked to four different major ancestries — those of the Tarim Basin, which includes present-day Xinjian; Central Asia; and the Central and Eastern Eurasian Steppes. “Archaeological and mitochondrial studies have suggested that the BA [Bronze Age] inhabitants and cultures of Xinjiang were not derived from any indigenous Neolithic substrate but rather from a mix of West and East Eurasian people, whereas BA burial traditions suggest links with both North Eurasian Steppe cultures and the Central Asian BMAC civilization,” the report says, referring to the Central Asian Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in the south. Further mixtures between Middle and Late Bronze Age Steppe cultures continued during the late Bronze and Iron Ages, along with an inflow of East and Central Asian ancestry, the report says. “Historical era populations show similar admixed and diverse ancestries as those of present-day Xinjiang populations,” the report says. “These results document the influence that East and West Eurasian populations have had over time in the different regions of Xinjiang.” The study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences comes at a time when the Chinese government has stepped up its assimilation of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs to inculcate a common identity among Uyghurs with other ethnicities in the country. The government rejects claims that the ethnic minority group has its own history, culture, language and way of life. The Beauty of Xiaohe, a mummy discovered in the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, is shown at the ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’ exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Feb. 18, 2011. Credit: Associated Press ‘We have to think carefully’ Following the beginning of the mass internment campaign targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in April 2017, Chinese archaeological and anthropological research in Xinjiang entered a new phase. The XUAR’s Communist Party Committee set a political goal for archaeological research aimed at combating “separatism” and emphasized that cultural relics should serve the concept that Xinjiang has always been an inseparable part of China. On March 22, 2017, then-Party Secretary Chen Quanguo said at an archaeological work conference that “archaeological work is necessary in establishing and advancing socialist values in Xinjiang, in deepening patriotic education, and in the fight against separatist ideas.” But an expert in the genetics of ancient Central Asian populations based in the United States says the report’s findings do not significantly differ from findings on the Bronze Age published recently by a group of international researchers. Vagheesh Narasimhan, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, told RFA that the findings in the Science article are similar to those published late last year by international researchers. “A few months ago there was a report of the sequencing of certain mummies from the Tarim Basin from the Bronze Age,” he said. “In this paper [from April 1], they also added 200 genomes from various time periods from all over Xinjiang. They co-analyzed the data from the previous analysis with the analysis in this paper, and they tried to draw conclusions combining the data from the previous paper by the international team with data from this group.” Narasimhan said that the two studies found a similar genetic ancestry in Xinjiang from the Bronze Age. But he said the findings do not refute the idea that Uyghurs are a distinct ethnicity. “You can’t think two groups are the same just because they have a common ancestry; in that case, every person in the world would have a common ancestry from Africa,” he said. “We have to think carefully about which population they’re actually using as a reference.” In its analysis of the Iron Age population of Xinjiang, the Science article stresses that iron materials found during this era were related to the Saks, or the Scythians, an important nomadic culture at the time. It also notes that many archaeological finds connected to the group have been found in Xinjiang’s Ili River Valley and Tarim Basin, and that a diverse conglomeration of many nomadic tribes, including the Saks, Huns, Paziriks and Taghars, appeared around the region. The Science article also states that from among these groups, the Saks were the descendants of the Andronova, Srubnaya, and Sintashta peoples from the latter periods of the Bronze Age and that the other ancestors of the Saks are connected to the populations of the Bayqal Shamanka and Bactria-Margiana and are related to the language of Hotan, which was part of the Indo-European family. But about 2,200 years prior, the region had become a point of conflict between the Yuezhi (Yawchi or Yurchi), Huns, Hans and Turks. “Thus, Xinjiang represents a key area for studying the past confluence and coexistence of populations with dynamic cultural, linguistic and genetic backgrounds,” the report says. Members of the media view an infant mummy discovered in the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, at the ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’ exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum…