Lending from China posed a dilemma to leaders in cash-strapped poor countries. In the 2010s, as the Belt and Road Initiative (bri) got going, China began to invest vast sums in overseas infrastructure. All told, throughout the initiative’s first decade, officials disbursed hundreds of billions of dollars to 150-odd countries. They helped build pipelines, ports, railways and much else, aiming to expand the country’s influence over trade. But emerging-market officials and Western foreign-policy hawks feared something darker was going on: that the initiative was deliberately saddling poor countries with too much debt. Once they inevitably defaulted, China would seize assets and enjoy not just influence over trade, but a chokehold.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Strings attached”