Over the past two decades, China has become the world’s largest bilateral lender, reshaping the global financial order. Through massive infrastructure financing programs—especially under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—Beijing has extended loans worth hundreds of billions of dollars to developing and emerging economies. For many nations, these loans have fueled rapid infrastructure development: railways, highways, ports, energy plants, telecom networks. Yet they have also created substantial fiscal burdens and new geopolitical dependencies.
