China's global infrastructure and investment programme, established in 2013 by Xi Jinping. Some 130 developing countries have signed up. The initiative offers loans and construction contracts—typically awarded to Chinese state firms—to countries around the world, with a particular focus on the global south. Since 2013 the BRI has involved more than $1.3trn of Chinese investments and contracts in 150 countries.
BRI engagement—investments and construction contracts tracked by Christoph Nedopil of Griffith University, working with the Green Finance and Development Centre at Fudan University—totalled $96.3bn in 2023, the first full year after the end of zero-covid. In 2024 it surged by 27% to $122bn, one of the largest single-year increases in the scheme's history. In the first half of 2025 the record was broken again: more than $124bn, more than double the same period of 2024.
Large projects still dominate: of $40bn directed to Africa in the first half of 2025, a single $20bn contract for oil and gas facilities in Nigeria accounted for nearly half; construction deals in Kazakhstan worth nearly $20bn, tied to copper and aluminium, made up another big slice.
BRI lending peaked around 2015 and debts are now coming due across the developing world. A report in May 2025 by the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney, said China had "transitioned from capital provider to net financial drain" on developing-country budgets, as debt-servicing costs on belt-and-road projects in the 2010s now "far outstrip new loan disbursements".
A November 2025 report by AidData, a research centre at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, catalogued more than 30,000 projects from 2000 to 2023, totalling $2.17trn (inflation-adjusted) in financial commitments from more than 1,100 state-owned Chinese lenders and donors. BRI infrastructure loans accounted for only 20% of total Chinese credit in the decade after the initiative's 2013 launch. The BRI was spearheaded by state-directed "policy banks" such as China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China, but they have become less prominent: China's commercial banks (such as ICBC and Bank of China) were responsible for about 60% of all lending by state-owned creditors from 2019 to 2023, and more than 80% of such lending in high-income countries. Of the $2.17trn total, only 6% qualified as aid; 47% went to poor countries; 43% went to high-income countries. America was the biggest single borrower, receiving $202bn.
As he rolled out the BRI, Xi Jinping promised Chinese support for health projects. China does not publish annual figures for health-aid spending; data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington suggest it runs to a few hundred million dollars a year after a surge during covid-19. China's covid-related donations were worth more than $4.6bn between 2020 and 2022, according to AidData, surpassing those of America ($4.1bn) and Germany ($3.6bn). In sub-Saharan Africa, 36% of government, civil-society and private-sector leaders surveyed by AidData said they viewed China much more positively as a development partner as a result.
At the May 2025 World Health Assembly, China's delegation was nearly twice as big as in 2019. It pledged $500m over the next five years to WHO funds—in line with what it would be expected to pay given its economic size. The Gates Foundation supplies nearly 11% of the WHO budget, compared with China's 2.8%. China's aid efforts have suffered from a lack of co-ordination among ministries; the China International Development Co-operation Agency, set up in 2018, is small and lacks bureaucratic clout.
Chinese finance is making progress alongside BRI lending. Kenya plans to convert dollar-denominated Chinese loans into yuan; Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa have signed swap agreements with China.
In 2021 Xi called for a "small but beautiful" approach to the BRI—less splurging on concrete-consuming infrastructure, more spending on health care, green energy and telecommunications—and pledged no new Chinese investment abroad in coal-fired power. China did not, in fact, abjure further coal investments, and it has continued many other fossil-fuel projects abroad. Green-energy-related BRI investments, loans and construction contracts reached $11.8bn in 2024, according to scholars at Griffith University and Fudan University, 60% more than in 2023. Another $8.9bn followed in the first half of 2025. By value, however, fossil-fuel projects still lead BRI-related energy ventures. Since 2022 Chinese green-tech companies have promised to invest $200bn in other countries, roughly half in South-East Asia, partly to circumvent tariff barriers erected by developed countries.
America's share of Chinese exports has fallen from nearly 20% in the first nine months of 2018 to less than 12% in the same period of 2025. The global south is taking up the slack: according to S&P Global, it took 44% of China's exports in 2024, up from 35% in 2015, and accounts for more than half of China's global trade surplus.
China hopes that BRI money will encourage governments to back it in multinational forums. About 70 countries have adopted language promoted by China declaring that "all efforts" should be made to achieve unification with Taiwan—implying that military force is acceptable. Most are BRI signatories. Protectionist mutterings are growing louder in both Africa and South-East Asia as trade deficits with China widen.
The Budapest-Belgrade line (BuBe) is the first railway built with Chinese help to enter use in the European Union. The 350km link between the Hungarian and Serbian capitals was announced in 2013 and opened in full on February 27th 2026, after years of delay. Hungary took a 20-year loan of about $1.9bn from China for its section; it classified details as secret. Serbia borrowed about $1.3bn. The Serbian stretch opened in 2022, cutting the Belgrade–Novi Sad journey from about 90 minutes to under 40; the Hungarian side has dozens of level crossings, ruling out speeds above 160kph versus 200kph in Serbia. The line was touted as a corridor between the Greek port of Piraeus (controlled by COSCO since 2016) and markets in Europe, but rail connections between Piraeus and Belgrade remain poor.
China's effort to use eastern and central European post-communist countries as a springboard into the continent took the form of a "16 plus one" group (later 17, when Greece joined), holding annual summits with China. The group ceased holding summits around 2021 as European Union members grew concerned it undermined bloc unity. Baltic countries left. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further soured the atmosphere, given China's support for the aggressor.
China is moving production inside ASEAN, including to Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, to satisfy the bloc's rules of origin, embedding Chinese firms in regional supply chains even as America attempts to isolate them.
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.