A better picture of China’s global lending spree

As one of the world’s most prolific lenders, China has paid out more than a trillion dollars in loans to the developing world to fund roads in Africa, ports in South America and railroads in Central Asia, reports ‘The New York Times’.

But the biggest recipient of its financing over the past two decades has been the United States, where Chinese banks have extended $200 billion in financial support to American companies and projects, according to AidData, a research institute at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

The money poured into the construction of pipelines, data centres and airport terminals, and it helped to grease the wheels of corporate financing for US companies like Tesla, Amazon, Disney and Boeing. By 2017, some of this financing started to raise alarms in Washington, the NYT report said.

In all, Chinese state-owned firms have provided $2.2 trillion in loans and grants around the world since 2000, a figure two to four times larger than previously thought, according to Brad Parks, the lead author of a report that AidData released on Tuesday, which draws on information from more than 30,000 projects in over 100 countries.

Covering the period from 2000 to 2023, the study provides a fuller picture of China’s role as an international creditor. It outlines how Beijing has used its financial resources to position itself in strategic sectors and establish potential supply chain chokeholds. It touches on deals that continue to raise concerns in the West, like the acquisition of Nexperia, a company recently thrust into the middle of a geopolitical battle for control of semiconductor supply chains.

According to NYT, most of China’s financing in the developing world has been loans to governments for big projects, but that has increasingly shifted to emergency lending as the borrowing countries have fallen deep into debt. In the developed world, Beijing’s focus has been more commercial. The AidData figures do not include China’s $730 billion holdings of US Treasury securities.

Since 2000, China has become a financial powerhouse, with deep-pocketed, state-owned financial institutions and policy banks that have a mandate to fulfil Beijing’s political ambitions. Its overseas lending accelerated after 2013 under its top leader, Xi Jinping, who used China’s coffers to shell out more than $1 trillion in loans for infrastructure projects in developing countries through its Belt and Road Initiative.

That sprawling program gave Beijing leverage in parts of the world that had been overlooked by Western powers. The program has been criticised for creating unaffordable levels of debt and for directing contracts to China’s own companies, which, at times, has resulted in problematic projects.

More recently, China has scaled back its lending to poorer countries, while extending more credit to wealthier ones like Australia and the United Kingdom. It now lends just as much to high-income countries as to the developing world — $1 trillion, according to AidData.

China’s loans to developed nations are typically lines of credit to governments and major companies. The lenders are often state-owned institutions, like the Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China. Some of them are publicly listed and rank among the world’s biggest banks, but many experts regard them warily because they are sometimes required to fulfil the Chinese Communist Party’s policy mandates.

Their financing has flowed to sectors like critical minerals, infrastructure and sensitive technology like semiconductors, areas that experts warn could give Beijing an economic hold on strategic commodity reserves, supply chains and maritime choke points.

“These bankers tend to lend to profitable projects, but they are often also forced to pay attention to the diktats of the Communist Party,” said Andrew Collier, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and former president of the Bank of China International in the US.

“The chairmen of the four biggest state-owned banks are all players at the poker table at the highest level of government in China,” Collier said.

Chinese state-owned lenders extended more than $335 billion in credit for mergers and acquisitions in dozens of countries, and three-quarters of the funding went to buyers from China in sectors including robotics, biotechnology and quantum information, according to the AidData research.

Some of these deals have since come undone. In 2019, the Chinese company Wingtech Technology acquired a controlling stake in Nexperia, a chipmaker headquartered in the Netherlands. Earlier this year, the Dutch government took control of Nexperia after Washington introduced regulations that would have imposed strict controls on its operations because its Chinese owner was on a sanctions list.

In the US, Chinese institutions’ funding activities have ranged from day-to-day commercial financing for companies to the bankrolling of construction projects for liquefied natural gas and gas pipelines. They also include financing some of the most scrutinised acquisitions by Chinese companies with close ties to the government.

An attempt by an investor with ties to Beijing to buy the Oregon-based Lattice Semiconductor Corporation was blocked by US President Trump during his first term. Not long after, Congress strengthened its review of Chinese investments. It has since become significantly more difficult for China to finance acquisitions in sensitive sectors in the US.