Sri Lanka is concerned with the roughly $5 billion in Chinese loans it has and will send its finance minister to Beijing to discuss the issue, the foreign minister said on Saturday, as he also ruled out future Chinese submarine visits to the country.

New Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena has unnerved China with his re-examination of certain projects that China has invested in, including a $1.5 billion "port city" project in the capital Colombo.

India, which lost out to China in infrastructure development on the Indian Ocean island, was in particular concerned about the security threat posed by Chinese ownership of land, aggravated by the docking of Chinese submarines in Colombo last year.