Banking on Beijing: the aims and impacts of China's overseas development program.

This is a review of "Banking on Beijing: the Aims and Impacts of China's Overseas Development Program" by Axel Dreher et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2022). There is growing concern over China's overseas lending and grant-giving activities. Journalists and policymakers always assume that Beijing uses aid to prop up rogue regimes, or debt to entangle and subjugate other countries. Nonetheless, most of these assumptions are based on opinions, hypotheses or research with an inadequate evidential basis. This is because the lack of information regarding China's lending and grant-giving activities is dispersed over hundreds of thousands of sources and more than a dozen languages. In fact, China does not reveal information about its aid projects via international reporting systems (such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's creditor reporting system), nor does it publish information on its commercial lending activities. It also employs rigorous secrecy regulations to conceal its lending and grant-giving activities from public view. The reviewed book empirically examines the conventional wisdom about China's overseas development initiative