The Chinese Playbook: Infrastructural Revolution Gives Way to New Global Power

Abstract

At this moment, every child born in Angola owes money to the Chinese government. Angola, Africa’s second-largest oil exporter owes more than $20 billion to a number of Chinese entities as listed debt. But Angolans aren’t the only ones reeling under a foreign debt, they share this crisis with many of their African comrades. Quite simply, Beijing, as we are told, coaxes underdeveloped nations into taking loan after loan to build infrastructure that they simply cannot afford otherwise, and will almost certainly not yield any proportionate economic benefits from. At the end of this dysfunctional cycle, the ultimate objective is for China to take control of these assets. This concept has been defined as ’debt-trap-diplomacy’, an overly hackneyed term introduced in 2017 and quickly oversold by the Western world, especially in the context of the much-touted Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).