Chinese Finance Minister Liu Kun provided a robust defense of Beijing’s participation in the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative and said his government is doing more than any other in the group in providing billions of dollars of debt relief to the world’s poorest countries.
“China is the country with the largest amount of debt relief among the G20 members,” said Liu in an interview published on Friday on the Ministry of Finance’s official site in the run-up to this weekend’s G20 summit. In total, the finance minister claimed total debt relief totaled $2.1 billion, but he didn’t give a precise breakdown of which countries were aided and what the terms of those settlements were.