The President's China visit

CONSIDERING the fruitful and vibrant centuries-long ties Sri Lanka has been enjoying with the People's Republic of China, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga's current visit to that country should be considered to be of special significance.

This is a timely initiative by the Lankan President which underscores the importance the State of Sri Lanka places on not only continuing but also on upgrading our relations with China, the fastest-growing and most dynamic economy in the world.

However, pragmatic economic considerations apart, China and Sri Lanka have been enjoying a traditional friendship spanning the millennia and it is vital that such ties characterised by common cultural and spiritual interests are strongly sustained and perpetuated into the future.

It is customary for observers to dwell on the centuries-ago visits to this country by great Buddhist personages from China, such as Fa Hsien, who served to emphasise the religious commonalities our two great civilisations in the East have been enjoying but it is important to specify that the golden threads which helped to consolidate Sino-Lanka unity was Buddhism and its profound message of compassion and understanding among humans.

More dimensions were added to these relations with time and the watershed Rubber-Rice Pact between China and Sri Lanka in the early 1950s proved very emphatically that China was a great friend in need.

That mutually-beneficial agreement came at a time when Sri Lanka very badly needed to shore-up her rubber exports in the pace of adverse global economic trends and the unity between our countries which was thus sealed has only been vibrantly sustained in the decades which followed.

Today, China's economic assistance to Sri Lanka and her development cooperation with us have reached unprecedented heights with China's material inputs figuring very prominently in several vital development projects this Government, under the direction of President Kumaratunga, has launched.

These are: the Norochcholai power project, the Hambantota oil tanks project, phosphate mining, the Colombo-Katunayake expressway and the Kotte sewerage project, to name a few.

Of particular political significance will be President Kumaratunga's meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Great Hall of the People.

As should be already known, China is soaring ahead as not only a foremost economic power but also a global heavyweight in the military and science and technology spheres.

Even the West attaches tremendous importance to thriving ties with China on account of her multi-faceted strengths, particularly her growing economic importance.

Some principal Western powers have, nevertheless, been having an uneasy working relationship with China on account of global political and military rivalries but not so Sri Lanka which under the inspirational principle of Non-Alignment, has been enjoying warm, fraternal ties with China over the decades, particularly under administrations headed by members of the Bandaranaike family.

It is relevant to recall that Non-Alignment is a brainchild of Lanka's one-time Premier S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike. It was his administration which in the mid Fifties supported China's membership of the UN.

Sino-Lanka unity flourished steadily under subsequent governments headed by Sirimavo Bandaranaike - the world's first woman Prime Minister - and this warm tradition is being sustained today by President Kumaratunga.

It is not without significance that she will be delivering the keynote address at the 10th Anniversary Commemoration Meeting of the Beijing Women's Conference, while in China. It firmly underlines Lanka's commitment to the well-being of women, a goal China firmly backs.