In yet another Trump Administration move to attempt to curtail China’s development, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to take concrete steps toward ending loans to China, according to the Global Times. This led ADB President Masato Kanda to say that the ADB Asian Development Bank (ADB) was trying “very hard” to accommodate the concerns of the US over lending to China, including by slashing loans to it, according to an AFP report on Monday, as covered in the Global Times.
China challenged this statement from Kanda, blaming it on pressure from the U.S., while insisting that the ADB was established in 1966 to address poverty reduction as its primary goal, “striving to promote economic development and social progress in the Asia-Pacific region. Any attempt to align development financing with narrow geopolitical interests clearly deviates from the ADB’s fundamental purpose,” Global Times notes.
