Category: Debt Trap

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken resuscitated widely debunked theories about debt traps and imported labor to warn African countries about the dangers of working too closely with Beijing. His comments on Tuesday provide the most detailed ...

It's not surprising that a lot of people, including the U.S. Secretary of State, remain mistaken in their belief that the Chinese seize physical assets in the event of a loan default, given that it continues to appear in news reports -- including ...

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed yesterday that when it comes to understanding the dynamics of China's engagement in Africa, he really doesn't know very much. When a young person floated him a softball question about how the U.S. plans ...

WAZAM OBANOR: Considering the growth of the Chinese in Africa, will the U.S. be competing with China in Africa -- especially as it pertains to Africa's growth over the next few years? U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: Thank you Wazam, ...

Kenya's Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yattani denied, again, on Monday that the Port of Mombasa could be handed over to China in the event that Kenya Railways is unable to repay its SGR debt. Yattani responded to a front-page story in The Star ...

Recent reports of the debt trap’s death might have been exaggerated. Like a vampire that just won’t die, we keep burying it, but it keeps rising from the coffin. This week we saw reports that Kenyan politicians had to clarify again that the Mombasa port itself ...

Four years after Indian academic Brahma Chellaney first introduced the concept of Chinese "debt-trap diplomacy," the now widely-debunked theory appears to be flaming out.   But it had quite a run. Chellaney's idea was that ...

Gyude Moore, the former Liberian public works minister and now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development joined prominent China scholar Damien Ma, director and co-founder of MacroPolo, the in-house think tank of the Paulson Institute in Chicago, for an online discussion that ...

Acclaimed China-Africa scholar Deborah Bräutigam together with Harvard Business School professor Meg Rithmire published a detailed takedown in The Atlantic magazine of the U.S.-led "debt trap" narrative that remains a bedrock belief among large swathes of official Washington. The two ...

Critics of China's lending practices in Africa and much of the developing world have gone suspiciously quiet over the past 6-7 months. A year or so ago, Kenyans were up in arms over erroneous reports that China was going to seize the Port of Mombasa. A few months ...

China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) blamed heightened nationalism, protectionism and populism among U.S. and European governments for the growing lack of trust among Africa's international creditors.  "While China is actively promoting the implementation of the G20 "debt relief initiative," Western countries ...

The China Development Bank's (CDB) announcement yesterday that it will allow Zambia to push back an interest payment that was due last Sunday to next April was an unexpected development. After all, we haven't seen China's powerful policy banks publicly demonstrate ...