A report released Tuesday, November 18, 2025, by the AidData research arm of the University of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, comes to the startling conclusion that the United States is the largest recipient of loans from China.
The report, titled “Chasing China: Learning to Play by Beijing’s Global Lending Rules“, found that 1,193 Chinese banks, investment firms, and state-owned agencies lent $2.2 trillion to recipients in 179 countries between 2000 and 2023.
AidData researchers have come to two striking conclusions:
China’s offshore lending portfolio is much larger than previously thought
Its loans to the developed world are an order of magnitude larger than commonly believed.
The conventional view of Chinese lending is that banks are lending huge sums, mainly to Third World countries, through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The official purpose of the BRI was to help developing countries acquire critical infrastructure, but the projects are often criticized as unprofitable “debt traps,” the result of wasteful local governments burdening countries with debts to Beijing that they cannot service, jeopardizing their economic sovereignty.
Despite the BRI’s problems, AidData found that only about 20% of China’s gigantic lending portfolio is for infrastructure projects in developing countries. In contrast, the amount China lends to developed countries soared from 12% to 76% between 2000 and 2023. Ten of the top twenty recipients of Chinese loans are high-income countries.
Financing in developed countries
The report notes: “Another significant finding is that China’s state-owned lenders have financed about 10,000 projects and activities in 72 high-income countries, totaling almost $1 trillion.”
The lead author of the AidData report, Brad Parks, added that “much of the lending to rich countries is focused on critical infrastructure, critical minerals, and the acquisition of high-tech companies, such as semiconductor companies.” China has undoubtedly become the world’s largest creditor, and according to AidData’s unexpected findings, the US is China’s largest private debtor, with $201.83 billion in loans for about 2,500 projects.
The report notes: “This finding is both unexpected and troubling. As China’s main geopolitical rival, the US has spent much of the past decade warning other countries about the dangers of becoming overly exposed to Chinese debt.”
AidData documents a long list of projects in the United States financed by Chinese entities, from liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in Texas and Louisiana to data centers in Northern Virginia and airport terminals at New York’s JFK.
The report revealed that: “U.S. recipients of Chinese state-owned liquidity — through the provision of working capital and lines of credit — include a wide range of Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Tesla, General Motors, Ford, Boeing, Haliburton, Qualcomm, News Corp., and Disney.”
Other high-income countries receiving huge Chinese loans include Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, Australia, Britain, Germany, and Switzerland.
China has significantly reduced lending to the “Global South” and BRI clients, while channeling more and more money to rich countries. This has created what AidData has called a “myth”: the narrative that Chinese lending has declined because the Chinese economy has slowed.
In reality, the visible and much-discussed lending to developing countries has indeed declined sharply, but much less public lending to middle- and high-income developed countries has boomed.
Opaque and geopolitical
AidData did not paint a rosy picture of China as a lender, describing it as opaque and tied to an aggressive geopolitical agenda.
On a small note, Chinese loans to US companies appear to be driven primarily by a traditional capitalist profit motive: US companies have proven to be good customers, and Chinese entities have reaped significant profits.
The report described Chinese lending activities as “opaque and complex,” with little concrete information available.
Chinese lenders use extensive networks of shell companies, offshore subsidiaries, and “exotic financial instruments” to evade international oversight, making “much of their cross-border portfolios virtually invisible to international debt market reporting systems.”
These practices also make it difficult for other countries—including the United States—to detect or counter China’s efforts to acquire key positions in sensitive high-tech companies. The report warned that “a large and growing portion of China’s offshore portfolio is ‘in the dark.’”
Beijing is even less forthcoming about the kind of foreign aid and philanthropy that Western countries tout, but by all accounts China has largely abandoned “aid” in favor of loans.
The report concluded that China has focused on another goal: to establish its position as the international lender of first—and last—resort, one that no one can oppose or ignore.
China Rewrites the Rules of Global Lending
The sheer scale of its lending means that China is not just breaking the rules of international finance — it is rewriting them.
AidData noted that G7 countries are now making changes that were once considered unthinkable, shifting from unconditional aid programs to cross-border lending and partnerships in overseas infrastructure projects.
“Beijing’s unilateral approach is no longer the subject of derision or irony in Washington, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Ottawa. Instead, it has forced G7 policymakers to fundamentally rethink the use of aid and credit tools,” the report concluded.
In other words, for the past 20 years the free world has been practicing… socialist-style policies — extensive benefits and welfare programs — while the Chinese Communist Party has been relentlessly practicing… capitalism.
The political systems of Western governments have been doling out taxpayer money, while China has been collecting signatures on loan agreements and reaping profits. The globalists of the 2000s gave China all the money in the world — and it has invested it.
