A bombshell report published on Tuesday, 18 November 2025 by the research unit AidData of William & Mary University in Williamsburg, Virginia, concludes with the astonishing finding 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 companies, and state institutions lent 2.2 trillion dollars to recipients in 179 countries between 2000 and 2023.
(The AidData report here.)
The AidData researchers reached two striking conclusions:
1) China’s offshore lending portfolio is much larger than previously believed
2) Its loans to the developed world are an order of magnitude larger than commonly assumed
The usual perception of Chinese lending focuses on banks providing 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 extravagant local governments burdening states with debts to Beijing that they cannot service, endangering their economic sovereignty.
Despite the problems of the BRI, AidData found that only about 20% of China’s giant lending portfolio concerns infrastructure projects in developing countries.
Instead, the amount China lends to developed nations skyrocketed from 12% to 76% between 2000 and 2023.
Ten of the twenty largest recipients of Chinese loans are high-income countries.
Financing in developed countries
The report notes:
“Another major finding is that China’s state-backed creditors have financed around 10,000 projects and activities in 72 high-income countries, totaling nearly 1 trillion dollars.”
Brad Parks, the lead author of the AidData report, added that “a large portion of lending to wealthy countries focuses on critical infrastructure, critical minerals, and acquiring high technology, such as semiconductor companies.”
China has undeniably become the world’s top creditor, and according to AidData’s unexpected findings, the USA is China’s largest private debtor, with 201.83 billion dollars in loans for approximately 2,500 projects.
The report states:
“This finding is as unexpected as it is troubling.
As China’s chief geopolitical rival, the United States has spent much of the last decade warning other countries about the risks of becoming overly exposed to Chinese debt.”
AidData lists a long catalogue of U.S. projects funded by Chinese entities, from LNG projects in Texas and Louisiana to data centers in Northern Virginia and airport terminals at JFK in New York.
The report revealed:
“The U.S. recipients of liquidity from Chinese state funds, through working capital injections and credit lines, include a broad range of Fortune 500 companies, such as Amazon, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Tesla, General Motors, Ford, Boeing, Haliburton, Qualcomm, News Corp., and Disney.”
Other high-income countries receiving massive Chinese loans include Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, Australia, Britain, Germany, and Switzerland.
China has greatly reduced lending to the “Global South” while increasing lending to rich countries
China significantly cut lending to the “Global South” and to its BRI clients, while simultaneously channeling more and more money to wealthy countries.
This created what AidData called a “myth”: the narrative that Chinese lending declined because the Chinese economy slowed.
In reality, visible and widely discussed lending to developing countries did fall sharply, but the far less publicized lending to middle- and high-income developed countries boomed.
Opaque and geopolitically driven
AidData did not present a rosy picture of China as a lender, describing it as opaque and tied to an aggressive geopolitical agenda.
A small positive note was that Chinese loans to American companies appear to be driven largely by classic capitalist profit motives: U.S. companies proved reliable customers, and Chinese institutions made significant profits.
The report described Chinese lending activities as “opaque and complex,” with very little concrete information available.
Chinese lenders extensively use networks of shell companies, offshore subsidiaries, and “exotic financial instruments” to evade international oversight, making “a large portion of their cross-border portfolio essentially invisible to global debt reporting systems.”
These practices also make it difficult for other countries, including the USA, to detect or counter China’s attempts to acquire key positions in sensitive high-tech companies.
The report warned that “a large and growing share of China’s offshore portfolio exists in the dark.”
Beijing publishes even less information about the kind of foreign aid and philanthropy that Western countries advertise, but all evidence shows that China has largely abandoned “aid” in favor of loans.
“As Beijing is not trying to polish its image as a global benefactor,” the authors wrote, “the share of its overseas portfolio that can be classified as aid fell from 22% in 2000 to 1% in 2023.”
The report concluded that China has focused on another goal: establishing itself as the international lender of first, and last, resort, a power no one can oppose or ignore.
China is rewriting the rules of global lending
The enormous scale of its lending means that China is not simply breaking the rules of international finance, it is rewriting them.
AidData noted that G7 countries are now making changes once considered unthinkable, shifting from unconditional aid programs to cross-border lending and overseas infrastructure partnerships.
“The unilateral approach of Beijing is no longer mocked or dismissed in Washington, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, and Ottawa.
Instead, it has forced G7 policymakers to fundamentally reconsider their use of aid and credit instruments,” the report concluded.
In other words, over the past twenty years, the free world practiced socialist-style policies, extensive subsidies and welfare programs, while the Communist Party of China practiced unrelenting capitalism.
Western governments distributed taxpayers’ money, while China gathered signatures on loan agreements and collected profits.
The globalization enthusiasts of the 2000s gave China all the money in the world, and China invested it.
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