BEIJING: China is owed more than a trillion dollars through its Belt and Road project, making it the biggest debt collector in the world, a report said this week, with an estimated 80 per cent of the loans supporting countries in financial distress.
Beijing says upwards of 150 countries stretching from Uruguay to Sri Lanka have signed up to the BRI, a vast global infrastructure push unveiled by President Xi Jinping a decade ago.
The first decade of the initiative saw China distribute huge loans to fund the construction of bridges, ports and highways in low and middle-income countries.
But much more than half of those loans have now entered their principal repayment period, said a report released on Monday (Nov 6) by AidData, a research institute tracking development finance at Virginia’s College of William and Mary.
That figure is set to hit 75 per cent by the end of the decade, it added.
Crunching data compiled on Chinese financing of almost 21,000 projects across 165 countries, AidData said Beijing had now committed aid and credit “hovering around US$80 billion a year” to low and middle-income nations.
The United States, in contrast, has provided US$60 billion to such countries a year.
“Beijing is navigating an unfamiliar and uncomfortable role – as the world’s largest official debt collector,” the report said.
“Total outstanding debt – including principal but excluding interest – from borrowers in the developing world to China is at least US$1.1 trillion,” AidData said.
AidData, it added, “estimates that 80 per cent of China’s overseas lending portfolio in the developing world is currently supporting countries in financial distress”.
Proponents of the BRI praise it for bringing resources and economic growth to the Global South.
Source: CNA
