A China Communications Construction Co. flag flies at the site of Port City Colombo in Sri Lanka on March 30, 2018.
Photographer: Atul Loke/Bloomberg
A Chinese Company Reshaping the World Leaves a Troubled Trail
CCCC, Belt and Road’s biggest builder, is besieged by allegations of fraud, corruption, and environmental damage.
Christopher Fernando knows the price of rapacious development. It has eaten his kitchen.
Only the sink remains along what was once an outer wall of Fernando’s seafront home on the west coast of Sri Lanka, about 20 miles north of Colombo. Part of his thatched-roof house where the 55-year-old fisherman has lived for three decades suddenly washed away last year. The dredger he blames, like a mythological sea monster ceaselessly sucking the sea bed, is visible in the distance as he speaks. Waves used to wash sand in, he says, but now they only wash it out, tearing away the shoreline—a charge government officials deny. “From the taking of sand,” Fernando says, “everything is being destroyed.”