Sri Lanka is often cited as the poster child for the ills of Chinese debt-trap diplomacy. China financed a port in Hambantota; the port incurred losses, making loan-repayment difficult; after the election of a new government in Sri Lanka, 70 percent of the port was sold to a Chinese company, prompting speculation that China had orchestrated the whole fiasco.

Yet the plan to build a port in Hambantota had long been part of Sri Lanka’s broader hopes to compete with Singapore as a regional transport hub. According to a 2006 feasibility study by the Danish company Ramboll, Hambantota would be economically viable in time if it focused on becoming an intermediate stop for the shipment of vehicles and on supplying fuel to ships plying the Indian Ocean. Whereas the transshipment business developed in line with predictions, domestic political infighting stymied the rollout of fuel bunkering. The port struggled for revenues and then so did the port authority to pay back its loans.

But the Hambantota loans accounted for only a tiny share of Sri Lanka’s debt overall. When the sale of the port was negotiated in 2016, Sri Lanka had an external debt of $46.5 billion; according to the I.M.F., only 10 percent of it was owed to China. As the economists Dushni Weerakoon and Sisira Jayasuriya have argued, “Sri Lanka’s debt problem isn’t made in China.”

And B.R.I. can be risky for China, too. Consider China’s largest overseas loan recipient, Venezuela, to which it has lent some $67 billion since 2007. The Chinese government was expecting to be repaid in oil exports. But the global price of oil fell sharply between 2014 and 2016. As Venezuela descended into political chaos, oil production collapsed. For the past few years, the government has paid only interest on its Chinese loans. Matt Ferchen, of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, has argued there is no evidence that Venezuela’s difficulties, including over its repayments, have served China’s geostrategic interests.

There certainly are problems with China’s approach to overseas lending. For one thing, Chinese banks still rely too heavily on Chinese construction companies to find and develop B.R.I. projects. Deals are often struck without any open tenders, creating opportunities for cronyism and kickbacks, and lending credence to accusations that projects bankrolled by China are sometimes overpriced.

But the idea that the Chinese government is doling out debt strategically, for its benefit, isn’t supported by the facts. Many of the would-be borrowers gather ing in Beijing this weekend are likely to carefully scrutinize the costs and benefits of Chinese loans; some may be poor, but that doesn’t make them unaware or unsavvy. China’s B.R.I. isn’t debt-trap diplomacy: It’s just globalization with Chinese characteristics.

Deborah Brautigam is the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University.

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