Until now, the only Chinese people I’ve seen around Sri Lanka have been diners, laborers, prostitutes or dignitaries in the papers. Every now and then something will drop from the sky (like the Lotus Theatre) but the Chinese aren’t like Indians. You don’t see them at House Of Fashion or really engage in conversation. Recently, however, some friends (of a friend) came down from Beijing and we got to hang out. They were quite cool.

If I had a blogger idol it would be Han Han – Chinese super-blogger, race car driver, and all around dreamy guy. My friend is down from Beijing and he says China is a land of paradoxes. It’s both more free and restricted than you would imagine. I think Han Han is the riddle within the enigma. He’s recently written three essays, On Revolution, On Democracy, and On Freedom. They’re quite interesting.

Sri Lanka today gets most of its foreign financing as loans from China. This graph shows that China has given 38% of financing this year, overtaking Japan (2012 FMR). Compare that to 2004, when they gave only 0.5% (2006 Annual Report).

There were almost a billion tourists in 2010 (940 million). Where did they go? This infographic shows what it would look like if every tourist took the same plane, seated by destination.

The 2011 Human Development Index is out. What’s interesting is that inequality, especially gender inequality, has dragged India to the bottom of South Asia and the world in general. At the same time, however, “Sri Lanka has overtaken China on human development and with an HDI of 0.691, is now within touching distance of the “high human development” category” (Times Of India).

I remember when the Hambantota Port opened. It was all over the TV. They had dancers symbolizing water coming into the port. I thought it was kinda weird. Turns out the whole thing was symbolic anyways. “Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port needs extra loans of 147.9 million dollars to cover equipment including cranes, cost escalations in building the port, and digging the basin and entrance channel, the island’s state-run ports agency said.” (LBO)

Jack Point has an interesting post on the cost of corruption, namely as related to this apartment building toppling over in China. Sri Lanka has had its own issues with dodgy cement and a lot of our new infrastructure is being built by the Chinese. The Hambantota Port, for example, is not actually usable yet and requires around $150 million USD to fix (LBO). The thing about a giant rock is apparently not true though. It’s a lot of littler rocks. Anyways.

I think the literal answer is so you could carry it on a string. Which gets us to the modern problem. The Chinese aren’t consuming enough to pick up the slack for broke-ass western economies. Hence the NYTimes is saying ‘China, the biggest developing economy, is still more a caboose than a growth engine’ and dark prophet Nouriel Roubini is saying ‘China is part of the problem’.

There was a big hoo-ha about this Chinese military contractor buying land around the Galle Face Green. I, for one, thought that the media kerfuffle had worked and the deal was dead. It’s not. The deal is on and they’re proceeding with business as usual.

China recently experienced a horrific, high-speed train wreck. As China’s infrastructure grows, so has its number of artificial (or artificially compounded) disasters. Part of this is just the numbers (shit happens) but part of it is due to corruption and incompetence.