Obscure origins: Like so many things pertaining to the dark realms of antiquity it can’t be said definitively when the crossbow came into existence…at some point between the 7th to 5th centuries BC, the consensus of opinion says. What is pretty much settled is that it first appeared as a combat weapon in China. The Chinese employed it to good effect during the Warring States period (c.475 – 221 BC). Crossbowmen of this period comprised between 30 to 50 per cent of standing Chinese armies. The weapon was still popular during the Han Dynasty (late 3rd century BC to AD 220) but it’s popularity diminished after the Hans lost power, possibly due to the introduction of more resilient heavy cavalry under the succeeding Six Dynasties.
Crossbow from China’s Qin Dynasty, early 3rd century BC. Ancient Chinese crossbows were made from wood, sinew, bronze and bamboo.
The crossbow in Europe, decline and reemergence: From ancient China the crossbow spread to Europe’s early civilisations. Its use was recorded in a battle at Syracuse (Sicily) as early as 397BC. The ancient Greeks were responsible for several early iterations of the crossbow namely the gastraphetes, a hand-held crossbow invented before 400BC, and the ballista, a small assault weapon capable of firing both stones and bolts, which the Romans copied and modified as a composite catapult-crossbow called a scorpio. The scorpio was lethally effective, offering marksman-like precision of its projectiles. The cheiroballistra or maniballista was another Roman variant on the crossbow with specific application as a siege engine. After the fall of Rome the crossbow fell out of use in the West until the 10th to 11th centuries AD when it was revived. The French used crossbows in siege warfare and they were in use during the epochal Battle of Hastings in England in 1066. France’s iconic heroine Joan of Arc was wounded by an English crossbowman in an attempted siege and the famous Plantagenet warrior-king of England, Richard the Lionheart, was killed by a bolt from a crossbow. The crossbow attached considerable prestige especially in England, so much so that only knights were permitted to own and use the weapon in war.
Crossbowman in an AD 1225–1250 English manuscript. BL Royal 12 F XIII The Rochester Bestiary (source: British Library and Manuscript Miniatures)
Crossbow or siege engine? As iron-based crossbows were improved and made more powerful and elaborate, the concept of the crossbow starts to merge with that of the torsion-powered siege engine (the former requiring only one man to work it while the latter needed several men). Certainly medieval sources seem to have conflated the two…different authors writing on the Crusader wars for instance have described the ballista alternately as a crossbow or a siege engine [Stuart Ellis-Gorman, The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King (2022)].
The Ballista: crossbow–cum–catapult
Evolution of medieval crossbows: In the Middle Ages the arbalest was popular in Europe. This was a decided technical advance in crossbows, improved by having a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string. Arbalests were larger and heavier weapons with metal-tipped bolts replacing the earlier wood-bolted crossbows, thus achieving devastating impact against the armour of the enemy. By the 13th century further technological improvements in the use of crossbows came with the advent of winches and various spanning mechanisms such as winch pulleys, cord pulleys, gaffles, cranequins, and screws [‘Medieval Crossbow’, Medieval Britain, http://medievalbritain.com]. The crossbow increasingly evolved into a defensive weapon, a composite crossbow–catapult of sorts, used to defend castles during sieges and favoured for its longer range capacity.
Leonardo Da Vinci, design for a crossbow, ca1500 (made of wood and iron)
Crossbow versus longbow? Which weapon was more effective in medieval warfare situations? There is not a straightforward answer to this question because the two lethal projectiles had different strengths and advantages over each other. The (English) longbow had a flexibility and portability edge over the more clunky crossbow which need time (and sometimes assistance) to load. The crossbow however was more accurate including at distances in honing in on the intended target (with a range of up to 300m). The longbow having simpler parts was cheaper to manufacture and where it had clear advantage over the crossbow was in its frequency of shots. In the time it took the crossbowman to launch two or at most three bolts at the enemy, the longbowman could propel 10 to 12 arrows. The crossbow though perceptibly slower to load and much heavier to carry, required appreciably less strength to operate…it’s locking mechanism allowed the crossbowman to handle stronger draw weight so able to hold the bolt for longer with significantly less physical strain, which translated into better precision (‘Medieval Crossbow’). Another plus for the crossbow was ease of use, it required minimal training cf. the traditional bow which took years of training to master. The downside for the longbow in battle was that it couldn’t penetrate medieval armour as the heavier bolts could do. This didn’t seem to be a problem in the two most famous battles of the 100 Years War—Crecy and Agincourt—where the English bowmen triumphed completely over the numerically superior French and mercenary crossbowmen (and cavalry) [‘A quick history of the English longbow’, Notes from the U.K., 17-Jan-2025, www.notesfromtheuk.com].
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Genoese crossbowmen
The crossbow reaches its obsolescence point: By the 16th century the crossbow had seen its best days and was being supplanted by gunpowder weaponry – muskets, cannons, guns. Firearms had greater range, faster reload times and an overall firepower that crossbows could not begin to match. The final fling for the crossbow as a weapon of choice in war occurred in 1644 at the Battle of Tippermuir in Scotland (English Civil War).
ITV television adventure series of William Tell (late 1950s)
Endnote: Crossbow sellers’ greatest marketeer: Hovering at the intersection of history, myth and popular culture is the heroic legendary figure most popularly associated with deadeye expertise in the crossbow caper and a talent for shooting apples off his own son’s head, William Tell. Elevated by Swiss folklore as a symbol of the struggle for liberation from the tyrannical Austrians, baby boomers—opera buffs aside—will associate the mythical hero William Tell with the 1958–59 British television series The Adventures of William Tell in which Tell (played by Conrad Phillips) is portrayed as a sort of Robin Hood clone but with a different kind of bow and the Swiss Alps rather than Sherwood Forest for backdrop𖤓.
William Tell splitting the apple
𖤓 a nexus not coincidental, ‘William Tell’ was created to exploit the success of another highly popular ITV show of the Fifties The Adventures of Robin Hood. ‘Tell’ followed the earlier series’ familiar formula: a brave citizen turned outsider valiantly leading the resistance on behalf of the oppressed masses against a unredeemable evil tyrant
Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (GLF) in 1958—communist China’s bold venture to transform the nation’s economy from agrarian to industrial—necessitated some drastic social engineering, and more than a little tinkering with nature. The “Paramount Leader”, repudiating the advice of state economists, consistently advocated the efficacy of population growth for China (Ren Duo, Liliang Da – “With Many People, Strength is Great”) …he stated that “even if China’s population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution, the solution is production” (‘The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History’, (1949)). One strategy of Mao’s for protecting the imperative of national productivity and boosting output involved an extreme “solution” in itself.
Four Evils Campaign poster (source: chineseposters.net)
Pest controllers: As a plank of the GLF Mao spearheaded the “Four Evils Campaign”, four “pests” of the natural world were targeted for elimination – rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows…the first three especially concentrated in large numbers certainly could pose a threat to public health and hygiene, but why sparrows? Mao singled out the sparrow because it consumed the grain seed and rice from agricultural fields. What followed was a government propaganda campaign exhorting the people to fulfil their patriotic duty and zealously hunt down these proscribed “enemies of the state”. The regime enlisted the civilian population in a military-like operation, a coordinated mass mobilisation, dedicated to this singular task. The mass participation event included the very young, armies of children aged five and older were despatched from their homes armed with slingshot and stones, to formicate all over the countryside and wipe out vast numbers of sparrows often with frightening effectiveness.
“Patriotic duty” of young Chinese (source: chineseposters.net)
Mao v Nature: Mao’s war on passerine birds was part of a wider war on nature. Mao encapsulated the objective for China in one of his oft-repeated slogans: Ren Ding Sheng Tian (“Man must conquer nature”). Mao’s modernist conception of the world saw humans as fundamentally distinct and separate from nature, so in order to fashion the world’s most populous republic into the socialist utopia that he envisioned, nature, this external thing, had to be harnessed and defeated (Zhansheng ziran). The result was a drastic reshaping of China’s physical landscape, the over-extraction of resources, intensive farming schemes, massive deforestation, riverine pollution, over-hunting and over-fishing [Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature (2001)]
Eurasian Tree Sparrow: top of Mao’s nature hit-list
A monstrous ecological imbalance and a species endangered: The nationally coordinated campaign against the four pests proceeded with phenomenal speed and ruthless efficiency. By early 1960 an estimated one billion sparrows had been destroyed🄰, nearly wiping out the species altogether in China…a fateful consequence that was to prove catastrophic for the country’s food production. The authorities had not heeded the expert advice from Chinese scientists🄱 that sparrows fulfilled a vital function in feeding off not just crops but off insects including locusts. With the removal of this natural predator, locusts in plague quantities were free to ravage the nation’s fields of grain and rice, and ravage they did, in Nanjiang 60% of the produce fields were ruined [‘Mao and the Sparrows: A Communist State’s War Against Nature’, Agata Kasprolewicz, Przekroj, 22-Mar-2019, www.przekroj.org] .
The Great (man-made) Famine, 1959–1961: The resulting Great Famine in the PRC caused up to 30 million deaths and an estimated similar figure or more in lost or postponed births, making it the worstfamine in human history judged by population loss [‘Berkeley study: Historic famineleavesmultiplegenerationsvulnerable to infectiousdisease’, Berkeley Public Health, www.publichealth.berkeley.edu]. The plunge in agricultural output linked to the sparrow decimation project was further exacerbated by other factors such as Peking’s procurements policy, increase in grain exports from 1957 (redirecting grain away from domestic consumption which otherwise could have allowed millions of Chinese to survive the famine); the priority on industrialisation diverting huge numbers of agriculturalworkers into industrial sectors adversely affected the food scarcity crisis.
Fujian province propaganda poster, 1960 (image: US National Library of Medicine)
Postscript: Reprising the eradication campaign In 1960 the Chinese government upon realising the folly of its sparrow offensive, overturned its proscription of the birds, declaring war on bed bugs in their place. The disastrous sparrow mega-kill episode however didn’t bury the Four Evils campaign forever. The Chinese government in 1998 launched a new version of the movement, posters were seen in Beijing and Chongqing urging citizens to kill the four pests…the first three were the usual suspects as in 1958, but this time cockroaches were substituted for sparrows. Unlike the original sparrow campaign the 1998 version was not successful [‘The Four Pests Campaign: Objectives, Execution, Failure, And Consequences, World Atlas, www.worldatlas.com].
🄰 along with 1.5 billion rats, over 220 million pounds of flies and over 24 million pounds of mosquitoes
🄱 there were doubters within the hierarchy of the Communist Party who had misgivings about the wisdom of the Paramount Leader’s policy, but most found it expedient to remain silent for fear of the personal consequences of incurring the wrath of Mao
The lethal force of the Covid-19 outbreak unleashed on the world in 2020 has killed to date in excess of seven million people globally (worldometers.info). In addition to this great toll of human life the pandemic and the ensuing commercial lockdown had a deadly effect on struggling businesses. One such victim is Debenhams plc, a retailing national institution with a continuous history centuries old. The British high street retailer went into liquidation and irrevocably out of business in May 2021, drawing the curtains on a trading lifespan extending back nearly 243 years.
Debenhams: Oxford Street (London) flagship store (photo: Debenhams plc)
Debenhams, the world’s oldest department store, was an iconic brand with a trusted reputation, a staple for household goods, beauty brands and clothing. The department store titan was bought out of administration by online fashion retailer Boohoo for £55m with the purpose of its famous brand being reinvented as an online bazaar – which is an ironic outcome given that Debenhams’ reluctance to refocus its sales strategies around the online platform (see below ).
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Debenhams stores across the UK
Debenhams was founded by William Clark in 1778 as a drapers’ store in Wigmore Street, London. In 1813 Clark partnered with investor William Debenham, trading as Clark and Debenham in London and Cheltenham. After Clark retired Debenham partnered with Clement Freebody in 1851 (under the name Debenham and Freebody). Into the 20th century the company was still in the hands of William Debenham’s descendants and in 1920 acquired upmarket Knightsbridge department store Harvey Nichols. Debenhams experienced a business crisis in the late 1920s involving its subsidiary Drapery Trust, the fallout of which forced then owner Ernest Debenham to sever his family’s connections with the retail chain that still bears his name…as a result the company went public.
Era of expansion: The 1930s and 40s saw considerable expansion for Debenhams, becoming the biggest department store chain in the UK by 1948, with takeovers in several British cities (in 1950 there were 110 stores in the UK). In the 1970s Debenhams found itself in more volatile waters, having to fight off takeover attempts, culminating in it being acquired by the Burton Group in 1985 (subsequently the two demerged in 1998). From the 1990s the retail company took on an international profile with stores opening in 18 countries. Debenhams stores spread to Ireland as well as acquiring the Danish department store chain Magasin du Nord, plus a raft of widespread franchises encompassing the Middle East, Asia, Malta, Russia, Australia and elsewhere.
Debenhams’ Belfast (NI) store: closing sale (photo: news.com.au)
Profits decline while debts inflate: The Covid pandemic put the shutters on Debenhams’ retail existence but the decline of the household name in British retailing can be traced to business failures and wrong strategies over the preceding two decades. The decline had been precipitous, in 2016 the 166–store strong chain had been worth £900m, just three years on, this had plummeted to £20m. Retail analysts attribute Debenhams’ demise in part to its failure to read the future, to embrace change in consumer preferences resulting from the advent of the iPhone and online shopping. Simon Reynolds, a branding consultant, skewers management for neglect of the company’s historic brand – missing in Debenhams was a “clear brand proposition for its customers…it couldn’t demonstrate what made it different to its competitors and it lacked relevance to younger customers”. Debenhams’ expansion plans in 2006, its stated intention to double the then 120 stores it operated𖤓, added an additional cost burden§ which failed to be offset by a sales revenue boost (sales remained static in fact). This down-spiralling trend, according to retail consultant Richard Hyman, demonstrated that Debenhams had lost its relevance in the competitive retail environment (‘Debenhams: Three things that went wrong’, Rebecca Marston, BBC News, 09-April-2019, www.bbc.com). The end was nigh.
𖤓 in 2017 when it should have been closing underperforming stores, and just one year before a record loss toppled Debenhams into administration, the company inexplicably was still opening new stores! Poor store placement was a negating factor as well, opening new stores in small population areas like Stevenage or too close to existing Debenham stores was symptomatic of the injudicious path taken by the retailer (‘One ‘reckless’ decision that killed UK retail giant Debenhams’, Benedict Brook, News.com.au, 21-May-2021, www.news.com.au)
§ a combination of prime-site large properties, big rents and long leases, high rates and large staffing needs
We all know of the great empires of history, the names roll off the tongue easily—Roman, Byzantine, British, Spanish, Chinese, Mongol, Persian, Alexander the Great, Ottoman, etc—we’ve read the history texts at school and seen countless historically bastardised film interpretations, but what of the myriad of little and little known and often ephemeral (small “e”) empires of the distant past? Not so familiar. I’ve always marvelled at the idea of these lesser, obscure imperial entities and been intrigued by how they managed to exist (and persist) at all side by side with the aforementioned “big boys”, the powerful and by definition expansive empires🄰.
Regional map, 1265: Byzantine, Eurasia, Black Sea (image: University of Texas Libraries (U Texas at Austin))
Byzantine’s successor states: Take for instance the Trapezuntine Empire, more commonly called the Empire of Trebizond…who outside of the learned medievalist has ever heard of it, let alone be confident of pinpointing its location on any world atlas? Time to fill in a few gaps in the general knowledge caper. Imperial Trebizond consisted mainly of several small portions of land in the region known as the Pontus on the southern shores of the Black Sea🄱. The “empire” had its origins in the sack of Constantinople and dissolution of the Byzantine Empire by crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Byzantine’s eclipse provided the opportunity for the creation of five new rump states from its existing territory – what became the empires of Trebizond, Nicaea and Thessalonica and the despotates of Morea and Epirus.
Trebizond imperial flag: Double-headed eagle (associated with ports and harbours)
This didn’t happen by osmosis, in the case of Trebizond the empire came about when the Komnenos brothers (Alexios and David), descended royally from Komnenian Byzantine emperors, seized Trebizond and the surrounding province of Chaldia with the military support of their formidible relative, Queen Tamar of Georgia. The elder brother had himself crowned emperor of Trebizond (Alexios I)🄲. Emperor Alexios, styling himself Megas Komnenos🄳, also laid claim to the Byzantine throne however the Trebizond rulers lost out to the more militarily accomplished Nicene Empire in that contest. Michael VIII Palaiologos of Nicaea became emperor of the restored Byzantine Empire (aka Latin Empire) in 1261 and the Palaiologan Dynasty ran the empire right up to Constantinople’ fall to the Ottomans in 1453.
A nominal “empire”: Trebizond was something of an outlier when it comes to classic empire material…for a start, aside from acquiring Erzurum to its south in the early 14th century and the coastal enclave of Sinope in eastern Anatolia🄴, there was no expansive growth as we saw with ancient Rome and Great Britain, the Pontus-based “empire” failed abjectly to expand its borders in any lasting way. Nor was it an empire with a conglomerate structure (or if you like, the necessary political configuration), ie, a situation where a dominant central power controls peripheral (outer) client states or colonies, Trebizond acquired no vassal states to speak of subordinate to its power [“A Glossary of Political Economy Terms: Empire”, (Auburn University), www.auburn.edu/]. It lacked the military force to realise these goals by conquest. In short the Trapezuntine Empire was an empire in name only🄵.
Alexios I of Trebizond and his army (depicted by an unknown artist)
Last Greek empire standing:The only really stand-out achievement of the Trebizond Empire was its staying power. Despite its disadvantages —positioned within the sphere of influence of more powerful states such as the Seljuk Turks; the destabilising roles of Genoa and Venice; the decimation of the Black Death; the instability of civil war (which allowed the Genoese and Turks to further encroach territorially on a weakened Trebizond)—the empire survived for so long, from its founding in 1204 to its ultimate conquest by the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet II in 1461—257 years, 22 emperors (including two empresses)—even outlasting the supposedly impregnable Constantinople which fell in 1453, as well as outliving the other Byzantine successor states in the region🄶. For this reason imperial Trebizond is sometimes called the last “Greek empire”.
Scholars point to a number of factors contributing to the empire’s surprising longevity. One is a favourable geographical location, the Pontiac Mountains behind Trebizond provide an advantageous natural barrier to invaders with designs on the mini-state. The capital city of Trebizond, built to resemble a kind of “mini-Constantinople” complete with imitation Hagia Sophia church, was further protected by the erection of impressively strong walls and fortifications [‘Trebizond’, The Byzantine Legacy, www.thebyzantinelegacy.com].
Trebizond’s Hagia Sophia
The inestimable value of Mongol patronage and strategic alliances: But above all else what permitted Trezibond to continue to survive in such a turbulent world was its commercial importance, and what permitted its commerce to thrive was the expansion west and southwards of the all-conquering Mongol Empire. The Mongols’ capture of Baghdad and the eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 resulted in the terminus of the lucrative Silk Road being diverted to Trebizond, making the city-state a funnel between east and west trade and enriching the small empire [Michael Goodyear, ‘Empire of Trebizond’, 21-May-2019, World History Encyclopedia, www.worldhistory.org]. The other critical practice to preserve Trebizond’s independence was marriage diplomacy, of which the Komnenian rulers were very adept. Trebizond rulers formed alliances with rivals, defusing potential threats to the empire by arranging the marriage of many of its (beautiful) princesses to the Byzantine royalty and to Black Sheep and White Sheep Turkomen (nomadic Turkish confederations) (Goodyear).
Trebizond continued to pay tribute to the Mongols as a vassal state which guaranteed its continued protection under the all-powerful Turco-Mongol warlord Tamerlane (or Timur), but once he departed the scene (beginning of the 15th century) and Mongol power waned, the Ottoman Turks re-emerged as the greatest danger to the tiny empire’s survival.
Map of city citadel, Trebizond (source: armenica.org)
Endgame for Megas Komnenos: The tipping point for the Ottomans to decisively move on Trebizond seems to be Emperor David Komnenos’ intrigues with European powers with the purpose of launching a new crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet II laid seize to Trebizond in 1461 and after a concerted sea and land blockage, it compelled David, bereft of any sign of relief from his Christian allies, to surrender the citadel-city almost without a single sword needing to be drawn in anger. The fall of Trebizond, the final Greek outpost, as one historian noted, also extinguished the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, nearly 1,500 years after its beginnings [Donald M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453, (1993, 2nd edition].
‘Conquest of Trebizond’ (Cassone work 1461, by Apollonio di Giovanni di Tommaso)
Postscript: Trebizond under the Ottomans became the modern city of Trabzon, which during WWI was captured by the Russians. Interestingly, following the war a proposition was made at the Paris Peace Conference for an independent Pontiac Greek state (the would-be “Republic of Pontus”) including Trabzon and most of the post-Trebizond space. While the key figure at the talks US President Wilson supported its creation, the Greek prime minster didn’t, fearing the mini-state would be too vulnerable to withstand any Turkish attempt to absorb it, and the proposition was lost.
🄰 of course the reality was that most of them didn’t persist for long
🄱 plus several even smaller enclaves on the Crimean Peninsula
🄲 his brother, David, became commander of the state’s imperial army
🄳 Megas means “great” or “grand”. After 1282 Komnenian emperors added basileus and autokrator to their list of royal titles
🄴 the Komnenos emperors managed to lose Sinope twice, the first time to the Nicene Empire and the second time for keeps, to the Sultanate of Rum
🄵 although it did meet some of the criteria for an empire, it had a flourishing commerce and wealth (mainly from its silver mines) and it possessed an entrenched ruling class
🄶 the fate of Theodoro (it’s Crimean enclaves) managed to be postponed even longer than that of Trebizond, they were not absorbed into the Ottoman Empire until 1475
Rusted-onaficionados of the unerringly “on the ball” 1980s BBC political satire Yes Minister will no doubt have total recall of the classic episode where Sir Humphrey Appleby defends the existence of a brand spanking new, impeccably clean and spotless hospital which remains resolutely and defiantly free of patients. Well, Sri Lanka has it’s own non-fictional version of this writ large with the Mattala Airport.
Source: BBC
This real life ”Yes Ministeresque” moment has been acted out in Hambantota on Sri Lanka’s southeastern tip. Over a decade ago the government decided to build a no-expenses-spared showcase city with state-of-the-art facilities. The commercial venture was nothing if not ambitious…the focal point being a new international ‘greenfield’ airport, Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (මත්තල රාජපක්ෂ ජාත්යන්තර ගුවන්තොටුපළ), pride of place in “a multi-billion dollar city in the middle of the jungle”. The plan included a swish, diversified facility deep sea port, an industrial zone and a test-standard cricket stadium [‘Sri Lanka’s Debt Crisis Is So Bad The Government Doesn’t Know How Much Money It Owes’, Wade Shepard, Forbes, 30-Sep-2016, www.forbes.com;]. ‘The Story Behind the World’s Emptiest International Airport’, Wade Shepard, Forbes, 28-May-2016, www.forbes.com].
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M Rajapaksa with Indian PM Modi (Source: the week.in)
Rajapaksa, eponymity in overdrive What made Hambantota, a small, backwater fishing town (population even now no more than about 56,000) four-and-a-half hours drive from the capital Colombo a candidate for such a major economic development? It owed its meteoric elevation in part to a genuine need for (overdue) reconstruction after the destruction wreaked by a 2004 tsunami, but another significant factor is that Hambantota is the home region of Sri Lankan strongman and former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa (Mahinda’s younger brother Gotabaya is currently the country’s president). Hambantota bore all the hallmarks of a massive vanity project – in an initiative that would have satisfied Alexander the Great’s lust for eponymous self-glorification, the airport, the sea port, the cricket ground, everything was slated to be named after the senior Rajapaksa! ළ
“White elephant“ of an airport
Image: sundayobserver.lk
The showcase airport in Hambantota (opened in 2013), so far, has been an unmitigated dud! International carriers after sampling the route have given the destination a wide birth (FlyDubai was the last to bail out in 2018), with the airport’s sole remaining activity resting on the wings of the island-state‘s national carrier (Sri Lankan Airlines — SLA). The reality for Mattala Rajapaksa Airport (HRI) is a starkly sober one…its core activity reduced to the farcical situation of just one solitary flight a week with a loss of $US18 million a year (Shepard, ’World’s Emptiest International Airport‘). Industry assessments of HRI as ‘uneconomical’ are commonplace, even insiders have joined the chorus…a former CEO of SLA described the airport as “at best a white elephant with a very small catchment area” [‘Sri Lanka suspends joint venture at the worlds emptiest airport’, CAPA, 24-Jul-2020, www.centreforaviation.com]. Integral to the fiasco has been the authorities’ failure to establish the basic building blocks necessary for international airport success – a sizeable local population; an intrinsic reason for tourists to come(𝒶); and a decent amount of commercial infrastructure to support it (‘Story Behind the World’s Emptiest International Airport’). ළ
Source: scmp.com
International deep-water port blues ළ ළ ළ
The construction of Hambantota’s new deep sea international port—in its a short history following much the same “snowy-coloured pachyderm” trajectory as the Rajapaksa airport—drew a similar level of flak from critics…one described the costly project as a “42 million dollar rock”. Opened in 2010, Rajapaksa’s plan had been “to turn his own sleepy little constituency into a new global shipping hub”. Despite reporting a 2016 operating profit of US$1.81 m, the port has underperformed and its long-term economically viability has big question marks over it. Some Sri Lankans questioned the need for a new port when Colombo’s port already serviced needs adequately well (‘Sri Lanka’s Debt Crisis’). And the signs have not been promising, international shipping companies by and large have spurned the port’s facilities. Government hopes that the new port would develop into an all-purpose hub, attracting the lucrative oil trade business skirting the Indian Ocean rim route and perhaps even rival Singapore in the region, seem to have been consigned to the realm of pipe-dreams. More immediately worrying for Sri Lanka is that it’s incapacity to repay the high-interest Chinese loans forced it into doing a “debt-for-equity swap” leaving the PRC in virtual control of the port [‘Why India is buying the world’s emptiest airport’, David Brewster, The Interpreter, 14-Jul-2018, www.lowyinstitute.org].
Chinese motives in the region The speculation among China-watchers is that Beijing has eyed off the new port as a potential naval base for it in the Indian Ocean region. Co-existing with this conjecture and part of Beijing‘s Belt and Road Initiative is that the view that China wants to build a SEZ(𝒷) around Hambantota. Both of these relate to the “String of Pearls” theory hypothesised by the US that China’s intention is to establish a network of military and commercial posts across the breadth of the Indian Ocean littoral – and extending to connect with the Chinese mainland, the construction of ”various land and maritime trade routes as part of China’s larger military ambition” (this has also been described as China’s “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”)(𝒸) [‘Here is All You Should Know About ‘String Of Pearls’, China’s Policy to Encircle India’, Maninder Dabas, India Times, Upd 23-Jun-2017, www.indiatimes.com. To this end Beijing already has established naval ports in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Malaysia, in addition to Sri Lanka. India recognises such a development as an inherent threat to its security and interests. One scenario postulates that a free trade agreement between China and Sri Lanka with the established foothold in Hambantota could provide a Chinese back door into Indian markets [‘China trick: Unviable port turns strategic asset’, Colonel R Hariharan, The Times of India, 17-Dec-2017, www.timesofindia.com)].
ළ Indian countermove New Delhi took a proactive approach to what it sees as China’s encroachment on its turf by negotiating a joint venture with Colombo concerning the HRI airport, putting up US$300 million to buy out Sri Lanka’s huge debt to China (Brewer). In return India would secure a 40-year lease over the airport. New Delhi’s motives for such a venture were less commercial (eg, a new, handy destination for Indian tourists) than they were geo-strategic, a move to stymie the Chinese incursion in its backyard and growing influence in the region…it would also, it was mooted, ”give India considerable control over how the port is used” (Brewer). Everything looked set to go ahead when the (Gotabaya) Rajapaksa government in 2020 suddenly stepped back from the joint venture with India, indicating instead that private enterprise within Sri Lanka would be offered the chance to invest in the HRI project [‘Sri Lanka, not India, will develop Mattala airport: Gotabaya Rajapaksa‘, Meera Srinivasan, The Hindu, 19-Dec-2019, www.thehindu.com].
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Mattala Rajapaksa Airport
Covid-19 and the loss of tourism revenue has devastated the Sri Lankan economy leaving the country staring at the abyss, but years of bad economic policies by successive governments have led to the present dilemma. A succession of costly government infrastructure projects, as typified by Rajapaksa’s Hambantota project financed by massive domestic and external borrowing, contributed to the national economy’s decline. The upshot? A total debt blow-out between 2009 and 2014 for Sri Lanka, domestic debt tripled while foreign debt doubled…the largest external creditor has been China, which was all too-ready to step in with the money after allegations of Civil War crimes against the Rajapaksa government soured relations with Western regimes(𝒹) [‘There is no money left’: Covid crisis leaves Sri Lanka on brink of bankruptcy’, Minoli Sousa & Hannah Pietersen, The Guardian, 02-Jan-2022, www.theguardian.com].
Image: Lonely Planet
End-note: While Hambantota Port’s backers talk up its prospects (port “fully functional within 12 months”), the deal handing China a 99-year lease on the port in return for the funds needed to pay back loans and investors, has raised concerns that the Rajapaksa government has ensnared Sri Lanka in an ever-spiralling debt trap [‘Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port to be fully functional by 2022’, The New Indian Express, 12-Jul-2021, www.newindianexpress.com].
PostScript: Defacto colony? Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu from the Colombo-based Centre for Policy Alternatives in April 2022 observed that “China is now part of the political architecture of Sri Lanka”.
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(𝒶) the hope had been that the airport would lure tourists to wildlife parks and beaches in the south but this notion hasn’t as yet born any fruit
(𝒷) Special Economic Zone
(𝒸) another part of the ‘String’ is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor
(𝒹) as at 2021 Sri Lanka owed more than US$5 bn to China alone
The latest buzz phrases in economic policy in PRC under Xi Jinping are “common prosperity” and “dual circulation” (see Postscript). Actually, common prosperity (Gongtong fuyu) is not new at all to communist China, there has had two previous iterations, the expression originating with Chairman Mao as far back as 1953. Then in the late 1970s leader Deng Xiaoping co-opted the term, flipping it to help spearhead an economic reorientation from the ideologically adherent socialism of Mao to an opening towards market capitalism and private enterprise. Deng proposed a different route to common prosperity, one that allowed some peasants to get rich, which would provide the catalyst to drag the others towards the stated objective.
(Source: addicted2success.com)
First generation billionaires and millionaires; social cohesion imperilled
Beijing tell us the purpose of the Xi-led common prosperity initiative is to reverse the growing trend of the wealth gap which has dramatically increased since Deng’s day. China’s rapid economic growth made it possible to lift millions of Chinese out of poverty, but has also led to a situation where the top 1% holding 30.6% of the country’s wealth. Estimates put the number of Chinese (USD) billionaires as high as 1.1 million (second to the US) (East Asia Forum 20-Sep-2021)⁼ᵃ⁼. According to Elizabeth Economy, China’s Gini coefficient ranks it in the camp of the world’s most unequal states (quoted in Andrew Collier, ’China’s ‘Common Prosperity Campaign Is Going to Be Tough’, The Diplomat, 18-Sep-2021, www.thediplomat.com). Many middle class Chinese citizens are flaunting thbeir nouvelles richesses with luxury acquisitions, which doesn’t go unnoticed by those lower down the socio-economic strata.
Xi in Mao’s shadow? (Photo: denverpost.com)
A pivot to the left?
The Asia Society’s Kevin Rudd described common prosperity as a strategy to re-establish the prominence of the state and the party over the market. Many China-watchers don’t necessarily attribute the new move by the Xi government to the communist party having suddenly rediscovered its 1949 socialist roots. With the situation calling for change, Xi is acting also with an eye to bolstering up his leadership and legitimacy to secure a third term as president next year.
Jack Ma (Source: las2orillas.co)
Cracking down on Alibaba and Tencent
Xi and the party looked round for targets, pressure has been exerted on China’s high profile business elite, mega-billionaires such as Jack Ma and Pony Ma. In genuflect-like fashion their respective companies Alibaba and Tencent quickly came forward to pledge billions of dollars to charities (‘Chinese tech giants pledge billions to support President Xi Jinping’s ‘ common prosperity goal’, Dong Xing, ABC News, 07-Sep-2021, www.abc.net.au). Others to find themselves in the cross-hairs of the new reform agenda include private tutoring, online gaming and the entertainment industry. Critics say that leaning on big tech companies and taxing high and ‘unreasonable’ incomes won’t fix China’s structural inequality in income. What is required is a fundamental change in tax structure and state system which addresses the core problem of a lack of tax revenue. China’s share of revenue is 28.% of GDP cf. 40.3% for OECD countries, its personal income taxes loiter at just 1.2% of GDP cf. the OECD’s 8.2%. PRC’s “Achilles Heel” in tax is the paucity of its compliance, the present system results in a low number of personal tax payers in China relative to workforce size (Collier).
(Source: Brunswick Group)
No “Robin Hood” scenario at work
The Chinese government has moved quickly to reassure concerned business heavyweights (and international investors) about its motives…senior economic official Han Wenxiu’s pitch: common prosperity was “not about killing the rich to help the poor”, rather, he said, it is geared to “doing a proper job of expanding the pie and dividing the pie” (‘Assessing China’s “common prosperity” campaign’, Ryan Haas, Brookings, 09-Sep-2021, www.brookings.edu).
The outcome of such a transformation as the reforms may bring about, some fear may be a “top down Utopian China” with, as K Rudd suggested earlier, even more power and control devolving to the party (‘Changing China: How Xi’s ‘common prosperity’ may impact the world’, Kaishma Vaswani, BBC News, 07-Oct-2021, www.bbc.com).
Little appetite for property and inheritance taxes
One source of redistributing wealth on a national level is taxation on property and inheritance (and a more progressive income tax). But there appears little enthusiasm to upturn this apple cart as it steps uncomfortably on the toes of communist party elites and their vested interests (Haas).
Image: radiichina.com
Endnote: Millennial “have-nots“, in dire need of a share of the common prosperity
The effects of the free market’s dislocation of Chinese society in the early 21st century falls heaviest on the young. Young Chinese face enormous pressures on the highly competitive road to success, starting with the pressure cooker of trying to excel in the gaokao (higher education entrance exam). Even with tertiary qualifications under their belt, so many find themselves chasing the same plum jobs. with nine million-a-year university graduates, with the exception of a fortunate few “a whole generation” miss out on the Chinese good life promised by the capitalist success story (‘China’s ‘common prosperity’ goal won’t mean Robin Hood style redistribution’, Andrew Leung, South China Morning Post, 23–Sep-2021, www.scmp.com). Signs of growing millennial dissatisfaction with the uber-demanding drudgery of the “996”⁼ᵇ⁼ work culture in large Chinese companies manifest themselves—largely via Weibo the Chinese social media network—in the “lying flat” movement (píng tâng) … more twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings opting to drop-out of the competitive rat race, thus earning the state‘s opprobrium (‘The buzzwords reflecting the frustration of China’s young generation’, Fan Wang & Yitsing Wang, BBC, 14-Jun-2021, www.bbc.com). Then there’s the elusive dream of home ownership, wealthy property investors and speculators have pushed the cost of owning a home out of the reach of many millennials…squeezed out of the property market, feeling burn-out from “996”, more young Chinese are forgoing (or at least postponing) starting a family.
(Photo.thestar.com.my)
Postscript: A new economic model to narrow the income gap
“Dual circulation” dovetails neatly into the objective of common prosperity. Beijing has signalled its intent to re-gig the economic model, moving away from over-dependence on exports and capital investment favouring large enterprises, and tapping into the potential of its huge domestic market. This could lead to a refocus on services, domestic consumption and the environment, and a reliance on “indigenous innovation to fuel growth” (Leung; ‘What is China’s dual circulation economic strategy and why is it important?’, Frank Tang, South China Morning Post, 19-Nov-2020, www.scmp.com).
𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪⁼ᵃ⁼ conversely some 600 million workers live on the equivalent of US$154 or less a month (East Asia Forum)
Chinese motives in the region
Deng prosperity (Wikiwand)
(Source: addicted2success.com)
Xi in Mao’s shadow? (Photo: denverpost.com)
Jack Ma (Source: las2orillas.co)
(Source: Brunswick Group)
The outcome of such a transformation as the reforms may bring about, some fear may be a “top down Utopian China” with, as K Rudd suggested earlier, even more power and control devolving to the party (‘Changing China: How Xi’s ‘common prosperity’ may impact the world’, Kaishma Vaswani, BBC News, 07-Oct-2021, www.bbc.com).
Image: radiichina.com
(Photo.thestar.com.my)