President Rajapakse on left, Premier Wen Jiabao on right.

Sometimes the ripple effects of China’s rise are felt far from its shores.

Take, for example, Sri Lanka, the island nation off of southeastern India. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse was in Beijing a few days ago. Turns out, it was quite a successful trip. He won pledges for China to finance a huge portion of a $1 billion port project in Hambantota along the southern coast.

The news caught my eye because I traveled through Hambantota quite a bit while covering the 2004 tsunami that walloped Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand.

Doesn’t seem like big news, right? Well, look a little harder. India has its knickers in a knot over the deal. This interesting story carries the headline, China moves into India’s backyard.

Regional strategists have long been concerned about China’s “string of pearls” strategy to set up important bases extending from the Persian Gulf region, source of much of their imported oil, to their own shores. China has largely financed and built the Gwadar deep-water port in Pakistan. It’s also working hard on ports in Bangladesh. It’s said to have a listening post on an island of Myanmar. And just two months ago, it began shipping oil up the Mekong River to Yunnan Province to fuel growth there. Already, China had blasted away the riverbed to remove rapids at a site that made shipping difficult.

From a Chinese perspective, all of this is natural. It needs to nurture and protect relations with countries from the Persian Gulf region to its own shores. After all, it doesn’t yet have a solid blue water navy, or even a single aircraft carrier, to protect those routes.

But as China strengthens relations along its key sea route, like with this Hambantota port, it sets off some waves.