China’s Africa lending model has a split personality

Support us China takes a commercial approach to infrastructure lending in Africa. Image: X Screengrab Over the past two decades, China’s rise as the world’s largest bilateral creditor has profoundly altered the global development finance landscape. Yet international scholarship on Chinese sovereign lending — especially to Africa — remains trapped in a binary: Western-centric “debt-trap diplomacy” narratives versus Beijing’s “South-South cooperative altruism” rhetoric. Understanding this requires moving beyond these ideological framings to analyze the macroeconomic externalities of China’s internal economic architecture — specifically, a “dual system” China has employed in its overseas financing over the past 30 years: internal Keynesianism paired with external neoliberalism. In other words, China’s overseas sovereign credit acts internally as a macroeconomic vent for domestic state-Keynesian industrial overcapacity, while its external execution relies on pragmatic, depoliticized and commercialized market mechanisms that mirror neoliberal risk-mitigation frameworks.

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