
What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence - dmmalam
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/magazine/what-the-worlds-emptiest-international-airport-says-about-chinas-influence.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
======
princeb
A number of Chinese businesses are setting up 100%-Chinese factory compounds
overseas. These compounds are located in a foreign country, but they are fully
financed by Chinese, built by Chinese, employ only Chinese, have accommodation
for the Chinese employees, have a completely sustaining internal economy where
employees can buy food and entertainment and send mail, posts, banking,
remittance, insurance, through Chinese companies etc. so that the Chinese
never leave the compound and no-one else ever enters.

The reason for these factory-compounds is because China has challenging export
quotas to places like the US and EU. But concentration of manufacturing know-
how remains in China. The only way for these businesses to keep selling to
high-value markets is to move manufacturing to another country where there is
available quota. Although the goods are 100% made by Chinese, they are 0% made
in China.

The Chinese government encourages business in this area because it is good
employment for the Chinese. In turn, these businesses need better
infrastructure in the countries they operate in. The infrastructural
investment in these other countries is a wonderful side-effect that the
government is happily playing up as part of its diplomatic strategy. When the
textiles and the shoes and the fabrication factories are no longer making
money, hopefully the ports, the trains, the roads, the power grid will
continue generating interest income for the Chinese banks. And the recipient
countries of these gifts, as it were, may extract benefit from this
arrangement, eventually.

~~~
hyperdunc
China does a similar thing with agriculture. Huge plots of land in Australia
and New Zealand are controlled by Chinese farming companies and staffed by
Chinese. All the food they produce goes back to China.

~~~
robbiep
It is not true that they mainly (or even significantly) employ chinese on
Australian Farms - these farms are generally managed by the previous owners or
managers and staffed by Australians, with australian Agronomists. In actual
fact, very little changes on a day to day basis, except there is more funds
available for infrastructure and capital goods purchase (and property values
are driven up).

Which, when you think about it, makes the best managerial sense - What the
hell is a chinese person going to do coming to australia and farming - they
don't know the conditions, they don't know the land - that's a quick way to
destroy all the value they hope to create. Local know-how is essential in
agriculture. + they wouldn't be able to get enough on 457's to come in and run
it even if they wanted to import all their workers.

Source: Australian, from a farm, neighbouring farms have been purchased by
chinese buyers

~~~
iamshs
Well Shepparton and Mooroopna has quite a substantial number if Chinese farm
workers. In Safeway, nearly whole Saturday is busy with Chinese farm workers
shopping. I haven't really enquired on which specific farm they work, because
they generally shun interaction and also due to language barrier.

Also, Shepparton has a substantial Punjabi farming population and I can tell
you from experience that the farmers do take inputs from Tatura Agricultural
institute but the management to production to packing is all Punjabis. Your
comment is significantly false information. Shepparton is filled with people
who don't have local know-how, but have developed it.

~~~
pm90
Punjabis are from India and Pakistan, not from China, if that wasn't clear to
you.

They have a reputation as good workers in agri businesses. See this article
about how they invigorated Italy's cheese business:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/world/europe/08iht-
italy08...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/world/europe/08iht-
italy08.html?mcubz=0)

(The article references most workers as being Sikhs. Sikhs are adherents of
the religion of Sikhism, but I believe nearly all of them are ethnically
Punjabis)

------
tuna-piano
I assume another close contender is the Nay Pyi Taw airport in Myanmar.

[https://www.instagram.com/p/BXvqis0htxH/?taken-
at=277450644](https://www.instagram.com/p/BXvqis0htxH/?taken-at=277450644)

[https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/277450644/naypyi...](https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/277450644/naypyidaw-
airport/)

The city was built as a showcase capital for Myanmar's military government,
and has crazy sights like a 20 lane highway (with almost no cars):

[https://www.go-myanmar.com/sites/go-
myanmar.com/files/upload...](https://www.go-myanmar.com/sites/go-
myanmar.com/files/uploads/npt1.jpg)

More pictures:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-304350...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3043503/Inside-
Myanmar-s-haunting-capital-city.html)

The craziest part of the city to me was the amusement park. It was open, but
only half complete. Ride operators would follow us around to turn on the rides
we wanted to ride. One of the rides didn't have the female side of the seat
belt buckle, so I just had to tie the straps together.

Very sad how much money was spent on this city, especially considering how
poor the country is.

~~~
ars
> the female side of the seat belt buckle

The what? Are rides segregated or is there some kind of female buckle I have
not heard of?

~~~
allenz
The phrase refers to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_faste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners)

~~~
ars
Thanks. I've heard of pipes being referred to that way, but not buckles.

------
scandox
Found this quote from Ai Weiwei in yesterday's Guardian very interesting:

“Can China be a global power? I don’t think so. It can gain an advantage,
that’s true. But it doesn’t have soul. It doesn’t have heart. It doesn’t trust
its own people. So it has no self-identity in the sense that it has never
accepted human rights as common values. No freedom of speech, no independent
judicial system. If those don’t exist, how can you have creativity? How can
you be a country? So forget about China. China is an illusion. It’s there,
it’s large. But nobody can tell you what it is.”

[https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/ai-weiwei-
witho...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/ai-weiwei-without-the-
prison-the-beatings-what-would-i-be)

~~~
fatman13gg
Why having freedom of speech, independent judicial system and accepting human
rights as common values has to be the prerequisites of being a global power?
Technically if you are rich and powerful then you are a global power.

Edit: sensing lots of incoming downvotes. Point is that democracy may not be
the only way to global power.

~~~
scandox
I think he's making a deeper point. China can be a global power in the sense
that you mean: like just wielding influence in the crudest sense - "an
advantage" as he puts it.

He's questioning what the meaning of that is without a real Chinese identity
expressed via the people. It's more like the power a business exercises which
ultimately may be broken up, bought or which is assimilated into the culture
it seeks to alter. Chinese power in this concept would be a superstructure
over the world, not a force within it.

By contrast, American influence over time (love it or loathe it) has been
culturally formidable because it has a very powerful grassroots (for want of a
better word) identity. It is something which has taken possession of the world
from the ground up.

~~~
pm90
This is a relatively recent thing, for sure. For most of human history,
powerful nations exercised their influence mostly via military power and
trade, not through soft power such as promoting a better quality of living
(middle class itself is pretty recent, a product of industrial revolutions).

I think its disingenuous to dismiss the very real progress that China has made
in industry and military as inessential just because they haven't had the same
cultural impact as the US. Prosperity, strong and healthy middle class and
political stability are what is necessary for the development of a strong,
lasting culture.

There is also the often overlooked fact that the US, being an English speaking
country, got to ride the cultural train for free since the British Empire had
already established English as the lingua franca of the world. I'm sure there
is a lot of stuff going on in Chinese culture which we aren't aware of since
its mostly in Chinese.

~~~
soundwave106
As a side note, my impression is that cultural exports from Hong Kong have
declined a fair bit since China took over the island. (Japan and (especially)
South Korea seem to dominate Asian cultural exports at the moment).

I think a big issue regarding China and culture is that, with their need for
"great firewalls" and the like, they've effectively removed a huge channel for
people to communicate their ideas and culture outside the nation. I'm sure
there is a lot of stuff going on in Chinese culture that we don't know about;
the problem is, with many Western social media channels blocked inside the
country, it is probably much more difficult for Chinese to obtain a non-
Chinese audience online even if they wanted to.

------
Dravidian
China's investment in Pakistan, Srilanka, Myanmar is clearly aimed to impose
strategic advantage over India.

Especially in Srilanka, apart from economic activities; they funded & trained
Srilankan army to conduct one of the worst genocide on their ethnic tamil
population in 4th elam war. Sadly neither the international community nor the
Indian government did nothing to prevent it from happening on the contrary
they even helped the then Srilankan government with their war along with China
in a rare display of cooperation for worst crimes against humanity.

~~~
selimthegrim
Indian government is probably still mad abut IPKF and Rajiv Gandhi

~~~
Dravidian
The then govt run by widow of Rajiv probably yes.

------
pravinva
The slippery slope towards empire for the east India company didn't start by
protecting dams and dredging or performing economic activities. It began by
superior ammunition and military services that they provided to the various
kings and nawabs who were warring with each other.taking sides, and extracting
political power in return. Equity ownership means nothing if it's a business
that has zero market value. Political power OTOH is what leverage is all
about. Arm's exporters have more leverage than ownership in useless ports or
airports.

~~~
crdb
I wouldn't call it a slippery slope so much as events precipitating the
situation. The revolt in 1857 led to the dissolution of the East India Company
and a formal takeover of India by the British government [1]. The British Raj
lasted almost a century and could have lasted longer had the British Army and
economy not been so weakened by WWII.

It will be interesting to see what happens should a country attempt to seize
Chinese assets en masse. The PRC is not known for its lack of ability in the
Great Game. We are still decades away from the circumstances that allowed for
decolonisation movements in the mid-20th century to be successful.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India_Act_1858](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India_Act_1858)

~~~
danmaz74
Things could be more similar to what happened with US investments in South
America. See for example what happened in Chile when Allende nationalized US
owned copper mines...

------
jpatokal
One thing worth noting is that, with a theoretical max capacity on only 1
million, this airport would actually be pretty tiny by world standards. (The
largest do >100m, and even Colombo Airport pulls in nearly 10m.)

By comparison, another famous white elephant airport, Ciudad Real in Spain,
was built for 10m and currently serves precisely zero.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Real_Central_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Real_Central_Airport)

~~~
puranjay
I was in Sri Lanka in summer this year. Outside of international tourist
arrivals (all at Colombo, which itself is a tiny airport), there is
practically zero internal air travel. The country is so tiny that you can go
across the breadth of the country (Colombo to Trincomalee) in 4-5 hours by
bus. Or you can take a helicopter/private plane (which are pretty cheap) and
do the same distance in like 45 minutes.

I can't even imagine any situation where an airport serving a million people
outside of Colombo would even be remotely feasible.

~~~
jpatokal
Easy: Direct international flights, particularly for tourism. For example, in
Thailand, the airports of Phuket and Krabi are only ~2 hours apart by car, yet
cater to 15m and 5m pax/year respectively.

Now I'm sure it made no sense to build the airport at Sri Lanka's current
stage of development, but as the country gets richer, it's almost certainly
going to become useful sooner or later.

------
nl
_Pushing countries deeper into debt, even inadvertently, may give China
leverage in the short run, but it risks losing the good will essential to
OBOR’s long-term success. For all the big projects China is engaged in around
the world — high-speed rail in Laos, a military base in Djibouti, highways in
Kenya — arguably its most perilous step so far may be taking control of the
foundering Hambantota port._

This is a good point to make, but sadly one that isn't being made by the US
atm.

It's pretty clear what's going to happen with this airport: _To relieve its
debt crisis, Sri Lanka has put its white elephants up for sale. In late July,
the government agreed to give China control of the deepwater port — a 70
percent equity stake over 99 years — in exchange for writing off $1.1 billion
of the island’s debt_

Just imagine what China will give for an Indian-ocean airbase in Sri Lanka to
go with the base they have in Djibouti[1]. Sri Lanka will keep trying to play
China, India and the US off against each other[2], but it's pretty clear to
everyone that the "string of pearls" strategy is working well for China at the
moment.

[1] [https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/chinas-military-base-in-
dj...](https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/chinas-military-base-in-djibouti-
strategic-implications-for-india/)

[2] [https://warontherocks.com/2017/03/sri-lanka-is-not-chinas-
pe...](https://warontherocks.com/2017/03/sri-lanka-is-not-chinas-pearl-in-the-
indian-ocean/)

~~~
navinsylvester
Srilanka is stone throw away from India. I don't think Srilanka will ever
allow a military base for China and antagonize India.

When Chinese submarines were allowed to dock twice in Srilankan port that was
the last straw. Indian secret service RAW allegedly played an important role
in toppling the oppressive, corrupt and Chinese leaning Rajapakse
government[1]. I guess that is one serious warning to ignore.

[1]
[https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/21/sril-j21.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/21/sril-j21.html)

~~~
nl
Indeed, India is very concerned. I believe the current port leasing conditions
say it isn't to be used as a military base.

But things change. China spends a lot of money and it isn't clear how this
will play out.

Five years ago people thought it was impossible they would control the South
China Sea. Now the it's close to the de-facto position, and the US only
conducts an occasional freedom of navigation operation to pretend otherwise.

------
throwaway178614
It's very striking, how China's endeavors mimic those from the US's past and
ongoing geopolitical stratagems.

US's game so far has been to sell overpriced white elephants to countries in
the Middle East, East Asia and South America. This has benefited in the
process, a few "bent" middle men, resulted in a massive transfer of wealth
from the US Fed to a few select infrastructure/defense firms in the US, all
while indebting generations of impoverished people to the whims of the
American retainers in WTO/IMF etc.

Inevitably, these countries become the hubs for slave labor under US based
corporations, which reap massive profits while paying pennies on the dollar.

... and they say slavery is dead.

It's a pity that China appears determined to follow a similar policy. I find
it amusing that the article almost seems to gloat "China is following the
Great Britain model. These outdated chinks have no idea how to run an empire
in the modern era!".

The world is a very depressing place. Welcome to the Borg.

------
airbookie2
It says nothing about China's influence. It just means China likes to throw
good money after the bad. Just look at the loans it made to Cambodia, Nigeria,
Iran, etc

[http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/21P46wlPXj00K8VUKMu9oN/China...](http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/21P46wlPXj00K8VUKMu9oN/Chinas-
debttrap-diplomacy.html)

~~~
nl
It's not good money after bad if China isn't in it for making a monetary
profit.

~~~
adventured
Sure it is. If you keep subsidizing a nation perpetually in a money-losing
approach to buying favor like that, your favor loses value as they take your
largesse for granted (guaranteed to happen across all of human nature), yet
you keep bleeding large sums of capital forever for no further gain.

Buying favor that way for China will cost trillions of dollars over time and
gain them little. China will realize that if they don't already and will
switch to the US system of military partnerships and distribution (it's
cheaper, it builds up your nation's global military capabilities, you turn
around and sell military hardware to the nations you're dealing with, and your
partners become over-dependent on you for their security which completes the
lock-in). You can already see some early efforts in that direction from China.
Going forward, most of their foreign capital adventurism will likely redirect
back toward practical investments, eg in natural resources.

~~~
nl
This is true, but it's worth noting the US also loans money for arms sales.

China has strong and influential alliances all over Africa and the Pacific,
partly because of their aid and loans program. There's a reason they sell the
Asian Development Bank as an alternative to the US dominated World Bank. It's
also instructive how quickly close US allies (including the UK and Australia)
expressed interest in working with China on it.

------
forapurpose
> China promotes itself as a new, gentler kind of power, but it’s worth
> remembering that dredging deepwater ports and laying down railroad ties to
> secure new trade routes — and then having to defend them from angry locals —
> was precisely how Britain started down the slippery slope to empire.

China should be deterred by the prospect of following the footsteps of the
most powerful empire in history?

~~~
puranjay
To add: an empire they also hated for what it did to China.

One of my oldest friends went to China to study medicine. He's now a doctor in
Shanghai. I visited him a while back and spent a lot of time with his Chinese
colleagues.

The overwhelming sense I got was that China believes it is their destiny to be
the supreme power in the world, that western dominance is an aberration of
history, and that it is China's _right_ to that status.

~~~
ionised
How original of them.

~~~
forapurpose
I agree with what you seem to imply: The attitudes of nationalism - and the
evils it leads to - are well known, but hardly talked about these days. How
could we have forgotten?

~~~
puranjay
Poverty and humiliation are powerful catalysts.

If you want to place blame, place it on the bankers who tanked the economy in
2008. We've never really recovered.

When you attack people's livelihoods, they get desperate. And in desperation,
they choose despots who promise them their livelihoods, and more.

------
virtuabhi
"Over all, around 90 percent of the country’s revenues goes to servicing debt.
Even a new president who took office in 2015 on a promise to curb Chinese
influence succumbed to financial reality."

90% of Sri Lanka's revenues goes to servicing Chinese debt? I find this hard
to believe. Any references?

~~~
crishoj
The quote doesn’t imply that all the debt is Chinese.

------
teh_klev
Discussion about Mattala Rajapaksa International from a year or so ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797585)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/05/28/the-
stor...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/05/28/the-story-behind-
the-worlds-emptiest-international-airport-sri-lankas-mattala-
rajapaksa/#76d51cb17cea)

The Forbes article has a few photos of the airport inline.

------
mamon
This reminds me of an airport in Radom (Poland). It was built few years ago,
because it was an opportunity to get some money from EU (and for local
politicians to get some bribes :) ).

For the first two years airport was unused - the only airline that signet
contract got bankrupt. Currently it has another airline operating and serves
10k passengers per year.

That's what happens when EU starts giving away money.

~~~
tempay
> That's what happens when EU starts giving away money.

I'm unconvinced how bad this actually is.

An organisation with a ~150 billion euro budget in going to inevitably have
some abuse/waste of it's resources but equally I can think of dozens of
projects that have positive outcomes. Sure, it's still not okay for the ones
like the airport to exist but I think focusing on them undermines the good
that can be done by having a source of cash that can be used to improve the
world.

~~~
Boothroid
I guess you would similarly dismiss the corruption etc that has led to
auditors refusing to sign off on EU accounts for years? And as if the EU has
morality at its core.. I don't see much of that when it comes to EU policies
that impoverish farmers in developing countries.

~~~
tempay
> you would similarly dismiss the corruption etc that has led to auditors
> refusing to sign off on EU accounts for years?

So far as I can tell this is incorrect[1].

[1] [https://infacts.org/mythbusts/auditors-havent-refused-
sign-o...](https://infacts.org/mythbusts/auditors-havent-refused-sign-off-eu-
accounts/)

------
tryingagainbro
Maybe i missed it in the article, but Sri Lanka shouldn't complain: it was
China that enabled them to crush their separatist movement
[http://thediplomat.com/2016/11/china-and-sri-lanka-
between-a...](http://thediplomat.com/2016/11/china-and-sri-lanka-between-a-
dream-and-a-nightmare/) (right or wrong, Sri Lanka's best interest was to end
the war and stay one country) . It was China that helped them militarily and
politically at the UN. That does have a cost...

------
chiefalchemist
Was it China that encouraged and financed Greece's excessive debt? This
article is interesting, but comes up short on completeness (i.e., lack of
bias).

------
turingbook
The Chinese version: [https://cn.nytimes.com/asia-pacific/20170914/what-the-
worlds...](https://cn.nytimes.com/asia-pacific/20170914/what-the-worlds-
emptiest-international-airport-says-about-chinas-influence/zh-hant/)

------
cheshireoctopus
Reminds me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man)

------
addHocker
Imagine a fully centralized country like china ruled by someone impulsive.
Centralization always relies on a well meaning, benefactorial power center- if
that goes sour- and it always does, there is no plan for deprecation or
recovery.

PS: How can land investment in africa make sense? They are often not
enforceable and do not outlast populist government turnover?

------
1_2__4
I'm surprised nobody's brought up the US real estate market parallels.
Arguably China is already in a position to exert significant influence over
multiple markets in the US with nothing more than threats - real or implied -
of enacting currency controls. Entire markets - if not _the_ entire RE market
in the US - would collapse overnight if China decided to prohibit the free
flow of money into US properties.

~~~
adventured
> if not the entire RE market in the US - would collapse overnight if China
> decided to prohibit the free flow of money into US properties.

That's a comical extreme exaggeration. China has a minuscule share of and
influence on the US real-estate market overall, including all of its metros.
They have a several hundred billion dollar position in a hundred trillion
dollar total market. They've only begun to have big influence in one city -
Seattle (Amazon by itself has several times the real-estate influence that
China does on Seattle). Much like Vancouver's real-estate market didn't
collapse once the Chinese money stopped flowing in so easily, nor would
Seattle's market. Further, most of China's real-estate influence is on a small
segment of the higher end part of the market, from the capital flight of
wealthier Chinese.

All of that Chinese capital flight has already slowed dramatically due to
capital controls. And yet, US real-estate isn't having a problem at all (quite
the opposite).

Japan had a dramatically greater position in US real-estate in the late 1980s.
Guess what didn't happen when Japan started pulling its capital out of US
real-estate? You guessed it, US real-estate didn't collapse at all. In fact,
it did just fine from 1992 to 2000. The huge problems Japan's economy had,
resulted in a small twitch in the US real-estate market, which is exactly what
would happen with China.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
In some RE markets Chinese money is influential, but definitely not in all.

If you don't remember, Japan tanking coincided with the S&L crisis, SF and LA
real estate took almost a decade to recover.

------
themgt
_As the United States beats a haphazard retreat from the world — nixing trade
agreements, eschewing diplomacy, antagonizing allies — China marches on with
its unabashedly ambitious global-expansion program known as One Belt, One
Road._

This constant MSM need to connect everything on earth back to Trump is getting
so fucking tedious. Construction of the airport this article concerns was
finished (edit: begun) in 2009. It's almost as if China has been executing a
long-term plan to build a web of neocolonial economic interests around the
world for a pittance of the money the USA spent wrecking the Middle East &
Afghanistan and killing hundreds of thousands of random people over the last
16 years; except framing the story that way wouldn't reaffirm NYT readers
existing biases.

~~~
hyperbovine
Nothing in your post contradicts the thesis of that sentence.

~~~
tradersam
Yeah, it sounds like someone's just touchy about Trump.

------
exogeny
Author has clearly never been to Pittsburgh's airport.

~~~
azeotropic
PIT was the hub for US Air (originally Allegheny Airlines) back when that
airport was built. It's pretty vacant now that USAir changed its name, moved
the hub to PHI and merged with American, but PIT used to be quite busy.

------
forkLding
Reading the article, I think what I realize is that us readers how no real
sway over either side. If Sri Lanka didnt want an airport, they didnt have to
get it and China didnt need to provide an airport.

Before there was real customers coming in, this was likely just a very good
deal or a new product launch with no demand, I think the writer is
oversimplifying the situation a bit. There are more reasons than maybe
economic neocolonialism.

