July 2019

In May 2018, President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi met in Wuhan for an informal summit that many say helped reset the relationship following the Doklam crisis. In this podcast, Paul Haenle spoke with Rudra Chaudhuri, Director of Carnegie India, and Srinath Raghavan, Senior Fellow at Carnegie India, about the state of China-India relations one year after Wuhan, as well as the implications of Trump’s America First policies on New Delhi-Beijing relations.

On June 22, in Sihanoukville, a port city in southwest Cambodia, a Chinese-owned building under construction collapsed, killing at least 28 people, all Cambodians. The owner had undertaken the construction without the required permit, and defied orders to cease work. But given the breakneck pace of Chinese-backed construction in the city, and the lack of oversight and standards, tragedies like this seemed inevitable. China is now Cambodia’s largest source of foreign direct investment, foreign aid, and tourists. As part of the trillion-dollar global infrastructure and investment program the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has poured billions of dollars into Cambodia, much of it in the form of infrastructure projects such as bridges, highways, railways, and ports. In 2018, two million Chinese tourists visited the kingdom of 16 million people.

To discuss accusations that China engages in so-called “debt trap diplomacy,” Eric and Cobus spoke with Deborah Brautigam, a Johns Hopkins University Professor and Director of the China-Africa Research Initiative in Washington, D.C. The “debt trap” narrative, also commonly referred to as “predatory lending,” states that China uses excessive lending to developing countries knowing full well these countries will not have the means to repay these loans. In turn, these countries, many of them very poor, will then be forced to default on the loans and hand over key strategic assets to China or be forced to otherwise compromise their sovereignty to satisfy Beijing. China’s critics in the U.S. and Europe are misguided when they focus on Beijing’s massive lending as some kind of political conspiracy, explains Brautigam. Instead, she contends, China’s exporting of corruption and crony capitalism are much more worrisome.