Beyond the Debt Trap Narrative: Structural Risks and Strategic Choices in Africa–China Infrastructure Partnerships

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – one of China’s key foreign strategy of expansion and integration continues to be applauded as well as criticized for a number of reasons including debt-trap diplomacy. Notwithstanding the accusations that China provides loans to developing countries under opaque loan terms intentionally to leverage the strategic national assets or political favours when the debtor country defaults on a loan, African countries continue to turn to China for financial resources. Thus, it is within the lines of reason to not only recognize the agency of African countries who willingly look to China to provide finances for infrastructural development but also evaluate relevant dynamics at play that shape a country’s susceptibility to debt-trap diplomacy in order to best understand how to mutually benefit from African-China relations. We analyze factors like level of economic development, Infrastructure quality, quality of political institutions, debt risk, number of troubled transactions, volume of BRI operations, value of construction contracts, and gross revenue of construction contracts that may indicate the likelihood of a country’s ability to offset its debts to China in order to not fall prey to the alleged “debt-trap diplomacy”. To do this, we study cases of debt-trap diplomacy in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. We also evaluate the positions of eight African countries with elevated levels of borrowing from China with respect to the factors that indicate their chances of being prone to falling into the debt trap. After multiple in-depth case studies, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is applied as an analytical tool to find a combination of factors like high debt risk, a high volume of troubled transactions, low revenue of infrastructure projects, high levels of corruption and low government accountability that constitute factors impacting the likelihood of a debt trap.