ABSTRACT
Ann, Polly, and Lillian are fictionalized personas. Ann had read reports about protests in Beragama in 2017, and had vowed to go back and carry out more fieldwork into the relationship between law and economic development. Previously, when Ann had carried out research into development policy and practice in southern Sri Lanka, the funding for infrastructure projects had come from major international development banks that had had their own political ambitions, and which had used their lending as leverage to effect legal and political change within the country. China, by contrast, demanded no such obligations from borrowers. Instead, should the borrower default, they would relinquish ownership of the territory or piece of infrastructure. For leaders around the world with ambitions to leave some sort of legacy, this opened up doors for rampant development, along with some vanity projects, all charged to the Chinese credit card.
