A new report has been released which, although not its primary intent, serves to document the sheer scope of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) outreach program since 2000. Produced by AIDData — a collaboration between the geopoliticians at the USAID and number-crunchers at Virginia’s William and Mary College — the 165-page report provides an exhaustive documentation of 13,427 Chinese development projects across 165 countries, valued at $843 billion, in every major world region over an 18-year period.
Reduced to five bullet points, the researchers “document an extraordinary expansion in China’s overseas development program during the first two decades of the 21st century ... with annual development finance commitments hovering around $85 billion a year. China now outspends the U.S. and other major powers on a 2-to-1 basis or more.”
As with most of these reports, the (often clearly stated) intent is to divine “just how does China do it,” with the subtext: They must be cheating, somehow. In this case, AIDData researchers claim that the years around 2000, “marked an important transition in how China bankrolls infrastructure projects,” shifting away from central government institutions, toward “state-owned companies,” and other institutions whose debts were not carried on the national budget. Implying a nefarious motive behind this change, the authors claim that the full burden of debt is “approximately” $385 billion greater than what is officially on the books, or 5.8% of lesser-developed countries’ GDP.
