Sri Lanka was doing very well before they borrowed Chinese money to hire Chinese to build the country.
Sri Lanka trumpets oversubscription for bonds - 2007
https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/sri-lanka-trumpets-oversubscription-bonds
Global interest in Sri Lanka's sovereign bonds suggests growing investor confidence -2017
https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/ana...gn-bonds-suggests-growing-investor-confidence
Then..........
Sri Lanka meltdown exposes China loan policy
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/S...wn-exposes-China-loan-policy-5-things-to-know
How do Chinese loans compare with others?
By 2020, Sri Lanka's inability to honor maturing external debts was looming. The International Monetary Fund put the island's foreign debt at $38.6 billion, or 47.6% of the central government's total debt. China's slice was 10%, as was Japan's, placing the leading bilateral lenders after the main foreign creditors, international sovereign bondholders and the Asian Development Bank.
But the cost of borrowing from China set that debt apart. Numbers crunched by Verite Research, a Colombo-based think tank, show that the interest rates on Chinese loans averaged 3.3%, versus 0.7% for Japan's. And the maturity period averaged 18 years for Chinese debt, shorter than India's 24 years and Japan's 34 years.
None of this hindered the Rajapaksas' appetite for Chinese credit, opening the door for the Asian powerhouse to fund over a third of 313 debt-funded projects in post-conflict Sri Lanka.
How did China become Sri Lanka's go-to bank?
China's deep pockets enabled it to come to Sri Lanka's rescue when Colombo needed to raise commercial loans, pushing aside the IMF as the traditional lender of last resort. By 2018, the Chinese cash flow was even tapped by the pro-Western coalition government that succeeded Mahinda's second term as president, with Wickremesinghe as premier. The China Development Bank offered a $1 billion syndicated loan on terms that Colombo found more attractive than competing bids from Western-leaning international banks: an eight-year maturity period, with a three-year grace period, at 5.25% interest.
Thereafter, China wanted to tip the scales further with an offer to buy an entire $1 billion sovereign bond issue. But the Sri Lankan government declined, preferring to go to the international capital markets "in the interest of diversity" to limit the country's exposure to Chinese creditors, a commercial banking source revealed to Nikkei Asia.
Yet the impact of COVID-19 in 2020 saw the Rajapaksas, back in power, turn to Chinese creditors for more syndicated loans. In April 2021, the China Development Bank approved a $500 million loan, the second tranche of a $1 billion bailout that Colombo had sought from Beijing in early 2020, as the economic pain from the pandemic spread.
The second tranche came with a maturity period of 10 years and a grace period of three.
How has Beijing responded to Sri Lanka's crisis?
Earlier this year, with Sri Lanka having to pay off foreign debt of $6.9 billion, President Gotabaya and Prime Minister Mahinda sought financial relief from Beijing, asking that the debt payments maturing in 2022 be restructured. The amounts owed to Chinese creditors included $119 million to the China Development Bank Corporation, $232 million to the China Development Bank and $232 million to the Export-Import Bank of China, according to estimates by the Advocata Institute, another Colombo-based think tank.
But Beijing responded with a dose of tough love to its pro-China Sri Lankan allies. In April, after Sri Lanka decided to default on its foreign payments -- a first for the country -- and seek an IMF bailout, Beijing grumbled.