While the bush taxis, charcoal and chickens remain, the bush is now criss-crossed by futuristic infrastructure. Overhead are overpasses, which see freight train and haul truck traffic, and conveyor belts. Each train and truck are laden with bauxite ore — the source of aluminum, the backbone of modern power infrastructure.     

The cargo, coming from mines that resemble massive dirt-red scars on Guinea’s tropical landscape, is headed for multiple terminals, built along once-pristine mangrove estuaries. There, it is loaded with cranes onto streams of incoming hundred-meter-long bulk carriers, which bring the materials to even larger vessels anchored out at sea. These giants, measuring up to 300 meters in length, bring the precious ore to ports in China, mostly in Shandong province, home to the country’s aluminum-refining industry.

Offering both lightweight and decent conductivity at the same time, aluminum is one of the most widely used industrial materials, and has fed China’s transformation into the global manufacturing hegemon. With China’s push for electrification, both domestically and globally, it is gaining even more importance as an essential component in products such as transmission lines, solar panels and electric vehicles.

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Between 2015 and 2025, Guinea’s bauxite exports increased nine-fold from 20 million tonnes a year to 182 million tonnes, making Guinea the world’s biggest producer of the ore. With approximately 82% of the production bound for China, this surge is largely the product of Chinese capital, which facilitated the construction of the necessary port, road and rail infrastructure.

The production surge shows no signs of slowing down. As recently as last week, a consortium of Chinese companies tabled plans worth $3 billion to construct yet another railway and deepwater port, aiming to unlock another major bauxite deposit. 

Until the recent mining boom, driven largely by Chinese investment, Guinea was one of the poorest countries in the world. This transformation is representative of a wider pattern seen across the resource-rich Global South. Since the late Nineties, when China first experienced trade surplus and became a net capital exporter, it has gradually built up a near-total dominance of global mineral supply chains and offered itself as a reliable strategic partner. 

As of 2025, China accounted for about 60% of the global production of aluminum, and exercised similar dominance in the production and processing of other critical metals. Approximately half of the global supply of steel and refined copper is produced in China. Its supremacy is even stronger in a category of metals known as rare earths — about 20 elements with special magnetic and optical properties critical for the production of high-end technologies. There, China controls 60% of the global mining output and around 90% of the refining capacity. 

With the escalation of the new Cold War, China has shown increased willingness to leverage its near-total control of these supply chains. Perhaps the most humiliating confrontation with reality for the US was the April 2025 “Liberation Day”. Following Trump’s imposition of an additional 34% tariff on Chinese imports, China imposed reciprocal tariffs alongside severe export restrictions on seven dual-use rare earths – prompting a brief escalation followed by full-blown TACO, whereby Trump suspended all the newly imposed tariffs. 

But the weaponization of rare earths has continued. Last month, Reuters reported that some Chinese suppliers refuse to ship rare earths to the US for fear of repercussions from Beijing.    

The Trump administration appears to have acknowledged this as a problem. “We outsourced the manufacturing so we could focus on designing these goods. And then one day we woke up and we realized we had outsourced our economic security and our very future,” said Marco Rubio in his opening remarks at the Critical Minerals Ministerial held in Washington in February. It was easy to detect regret of the four decades of neoliberal dogma that have held sway over American economic policy-making, dictating minimal state intervention and free trade. “We were at the mercy of whoever controlled supply chains for these minerals, so my hope is that we are gathered here today as the first but important step to rectifying this mistake,” he said to a room filled with delegates from 55 partner states, with whose cooperation the administration hopes to counter China’s strategic dominance. 

But these efforts appear to have run aground. This is, for what it seems, not necessarily a function of policy-making incompetence but more reflective of deeper structural forces that allow China to engage in capital-intensive and risky projects offering only long-term payoffs. 

Freed from the whims of the four-year electoral cycle, the system allows for long-term economic and social planning. In the case of China, policies are implemented with decades-long strategies in mind.     

With unrestrained state intervention and high levels of state ownership, policymakers allocate resources to the priority sectors. In the Eighties, these were steel, cement and coal. In the 2020s, these sectors are dominated by high-tech renewable energy, electric vehicles, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. 

As China transformed into the global industrial powerhouse, its trade surplus grew significantly, spiking from $8 billion in 1994 to a historical high of $822 billion in 2025. With this massive surplus of international currency, China has obtained substantial capacity to export its capital across the globe. 

This came in the form of concerted efforts to develop infrastructure and build access to strategic resources, mostly in Asia, Latin America and Africa – activities that in 2013 took on the moniker of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.

Guinea was an obvious target for Chinese capital. Home not only to the world’s largest bauxite reserves but also to Simandou, the largest untapped deposit of high-grade iron ore, it has always been of high speculative interest for mining investors. 

The first Francophone African country to gain independence, Guinea is still deeply marked by the legacy of its totalitarian, inaugural leader, Sékou Touré, who ruled the country from 1958 until his death in 1984 – creating an oppressive and invasive state apparatus that quickly metastasized into a tool of extraction. 

Plagued by political violence and instability, deeply embedded corruption and non-existent infrastructure, the country was long considered unbankable. Rio Tinto, for example, kept its rights to the Simandou deposit, which it acquired in 1997, at arm’s length for almost two decades.

Things only started moving when the country fell into China’s line of sight. In its first major investment in the country in decades, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation completed a 240 MW hydropower plant in 2016, more than doubling the country’s electricity generation overnight. This was followed by the construction of another 450 MW facility in 2021, which again doubled Guinea’s power supply. The total investment from the two projects came to $1.6 billion.

At the same time, rich bauxite deposits in the hinterlands were being connected to the coast — where a string of new ports were under construction — by a network of railways, conveyor belts and dirt roads, equating to roughly $5 billion in investment. 

It was likewise Chinese capital that finally got the Simandou project rolling into motion. Underpinned by an investment of roughly $20 billion, the project involved several port terminals and a 670-kilometer long railway — arguably the biggest mining infrastructure investment in African history — with an estimated three-quarters of the capital coming from Chinese sources.

It was here that the dark side of Chinese engagement took shape. In September 2021, Guinea’s incumbent president, Alpha Condé, who had extended his rule into a third term with an unpopular constitutional change, was overthrown in a coup staged by the head of his presidential guard. An imposing figure at 6’5” tall, Mamadi Doumbouya — married to a former French gendarme — ultimately soured on the democratic handover he had initially promised, instead eliminating virtually all political opposition through a campaign of kidnappings, disappearances and bloody clampdowns on protests.

As the Chinese government’s 2025 Guinea Country Guide to Outward Investment and Cooperation indicates, Beijing is well aware of the regime’s brutality. But China refrains from judgment, concentrating on what these actions imply for the regime’s durability and thus investment security. “Although there have been occasional mass incidents or small-scale riots in various places, the military government has been able to handle them effectively,” it notes, adding that “the military government demonstrates a strong ability to maintain control”.  

When Doumbouya eventually dared to face the electorate in late 2025, he was able to present a track record of concrete development — a convincing counterweight to the rise in political violence and the suppression of freedoms. Since he took power, Guinea’s GDP per capita has grown by more than 50% With Chinese help, the Simandou works were completed just a month before polling stations opened.

Billboards bearing Doumbouya’s likeness — clad in sunglasses and magisterial white robes — next to the slogan “Simandou 2040, Guinea’s economic transformation” became omnipresent in the streets, while Doumbouya’s ministers toured the country promising a windfall of cash and staging dance competitions to pro-Doumbouya pop music.

What the US is able to offer pales in comparison. The collective West has just a single bauxite asset in Guinea. Producing about nine million tons of bauxite a year, Alcoa’s mine relies on infrastructure built largely in the mid-20th century.

Owing to its noncompliance with good governance standards — which include controlling corruption, upholding human rights and democratic elections — Guinea was historically excluded from the American infrastructure-development initiatives such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation. 

A privately-funded American initiative, centering on an iron ore deposit that neighbors Simandou, has yet to see the light of day. This inertia is perhaps reflective of financial markets’ unwillingness to take long-term bets in high-risk states. And elsewhere on the continent, examples of US mining and infrastructure success stories are virtually nonexistent. Much of the discourse around the American mining investment on the continent has centered around the Lobito Corridor in Angola, which, in 2025, secured a $553 million loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation, created under the first Trump administration to counter the Belt and Road Initiative.

The fund was used to enhance the capacity of a railway connecting an Atlantic port in Angola to the Central African Copper Belt, split between the DRC and Zambia, and secured several additional billions in commitments to implement associated projects. But awkwardly, even Lobito bears the mark of Chinese capital. The former colonial railway, almost entirely destroyed during the Angolan Civil War, was originally, between 2006 and 2014, rehabilitated with the help of a $2 billion Chinese loan — part of a bigger $30 billion loan package that China spent on rebuilding Angola’s infrastructure. 

Trump’s other supposed success story, the US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement — signed in December 2025 and granting the US preferential access to Congolese minerals in exchange for settling the conflict with the Rwanda-backed rebels in the east — likewise turned out to be not much more than a PR exercise to signal Trump’s deal-making genius. 

More than a year on since the US promised to bring peace to the region, the conflict continues to rage, and American capital inflows remain to be seen.                   

This impotence has come alongside the wider recession of Western influence in the Global South. With China churning out unprecedented volumes of capital, tied to the development of hard infrastructure, the West has ultimately come up short and is incapable of offering anything remotely competitive.

For decades, the only way for developing countries to access aid was through agreeing, even if in a token way, to comply with Western norms of good governance and liberal values. This era seems to be over. Uninterested in seeing its face reflected across the globe, China is content to let partner states abide by their own norms.

The spike in Chinese investment has, therefore, given dictators and rogue regimes, previously largely reliant on the West as a sole source of meaningful finance, freedom of choice and leverage, and as the case of Guinea shows, legitimized their rule.

It is, however, questionable whether these countries were ever viable targets of liberal democratic evangelism, and the fact remains that China brought cash and development to regions with no historical experience of substantial capital inflows. Perhaps the ultimate, uncomfortable truth is that China has produced an extractive-authoritarian equilibrium that actually works, offering a modicum of stability, infrastructure and growth.

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In Guinea, Doumbouya’s militaristic regime, continuing a total war against political opponents, is set to preside over a growth rate of 8.7% this year, according to IMF, making the Guinean economy the fastest growing in Africa only after Ethiopia. IMF estimates that government revenues from Simandou alone could amount to 3.4% of GDP between 2030 and 2039, compared to just 2.2% of GDP for all mining government revenues in 2022.  

Ever more fearful of a mutiny among his armed forces, divided along ethnic lines and subject to long-standing frustrations, Doumbouya has nevertheless apparently done a decent job in entrenching his rule. With little transparency over how the proceeds of the mining windfall are being spent, the security apparatus has ballooned. Since 2021, Groupement des Forces Spéciale, Doumbouya’s de-facto praetorian guard, has grown from 500 to at least 2,500 well-paid men. Downtown Conakry, where the presidential palace is located, is now guarded by modern surveillance systems and armored vehicles and gunmen stationed at every crossroads, pointing machine guns at passing traffic. The Hotel Kaloum, a Chinese-built five star hotel not far from the palace, hosts a high-tech surveillance suite on its top floor. Doumbouya’s personal survival is not guaranteed, but the repressive state apparatus will be a formidable asset for whoever might come next.

While it is hard to argue with fast economic growth being ultimately a good thing in a cash-strapped nation like Guinea, its fruits, at least for now, are being distributed very inequitably. The mining industry is extremely capital-intensive, thus creating very few jobs. In the absence of comprehensive redistribution mechanisms, the mining boom has benefited primarily a handful of lucky contractors and those close to power. It has also come along with community displacement, rise in violence and full-blown environmental destruction — pristine forests have been erased, estuaries polluted and wildlife endangered.

This warrants some nostalgia about once non-negotiable conditionalities in the allocation of developmental help and investment, and demands a response from the West. But the current economic model seems incapable of providing one that is adequate. Proselytizers of free trade and a small state have gone noticeably quiet. In the Trump administration’s attempts to play China at its own game, however, it is merely doing a version of it that is both incompetent and ineffective. As the fruits of China’s decades-long strategic planning continue to materialize, the collective West may find itself forced to rethink the very foundations of the existing neoliberal economic order of small government, free trade and unrestrained financial markets, built upon the dollar as the global reserve currency. As Branko Milanovic thoughtfully pointed out some years back, Trump, incapable of understanding the complexity of the institutions underpinning the system over which he presides, might turn out to be America’s very own Gorbachev. 

Now, though, this ancient school has fallen in with a very different kind of radicalism: that of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. Purchased by China Financial Service Holdings (CFSH) in 2017, UnHerd has discovered that this Hong Hong-listed company has direct links to both the CCP and the Chinese state. Nor is Thetford Grammar, deep in the East Anglian fens, particularly unique.

Over recent years, Chinese investors with strong links to the Communist Party have bought dozens of independent schools right across the country. No less striking, some of Britain’s most illustrious schools have opened branches in the People’s Republic itself, with each new acquisition sparking worry among senior officials in Whitehall.

Shadowed by similar acquisitions across the Atlantic, including New York Military Academy, the alma mater of President Trump, it all speaks to China’s soaring geopolitical heft — right at the heart of the West’s educational establishment. No less important, it hints at a sophisticated campaign of foreign influence across global education, with the British government ominously slow to react.

With fewer than 200 pupils, Thetford is not a big school, one its head Amanda Faye says is “fully committed to delivering a high-quality British education, rooted in our history and tradition, while preparing young people to thrive in today’s global society”.

That cosmopolitan perspective is arguably clear in the attention the school has enjoyed from China over the last decade. Consider CFSH’s directors, several of whom have enjoyed successful careers in state institutions. Zhang Min, its executive director, worked for over 20 years at the state-owned China Construction Bank. Chan Chun Keung, for his part, is both a long-time CFSH non-executive director, as well as a consultant to the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese — an innocuous name, but an organization controlled by a body called the United Front Work Department (UFWD).

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Like Mao before him, President Xi Jinping has described the United Front as a “magic weapon”. This makes sense: both at home and abroad, it deploys its multi-billion dollar budget, as well as a tangle of affiliated bodies, to impose ideological conformity on Chinese citizens and those of Chinese descent abroad. It also mounts aggressive foreign influence operations, targeting both institutions and individuals. One recent example involves Prince Andrew, whose friend and business partner Yang Tengbo, now banned from entering Britain, was said to have been a leading UFWD operative.

Beyond these institutional links, meanwhile, there is evidence that people connected to Thetford Grammar have had direct contact with Chinese apparatchiks. In 2019, for instance, a school trustee called Peng Kai traveled at least twice to the central city of Changsha. A British citizen, with extensive business interests in the UK, he was there to discuss Thetford’s plan to establish a kindergarten and elementary school in China. On the afternoon of 23 December, Peng did just that: with several Communist Party and UFWD officials.

The trustees’ plans to expand Thetford have since been realized, with Faye telling me it currently has two such Chinese affiliates. But what does that mean for the school itself? Some educationalists aren’t concerned. Speaking last month, Julian Fisher, a former teacher at a Chinese branch of Harrow, insists that trends of the sort seen at Thetford are innocuous. If a school is facing closure, he said, accepting Chinese ownership made sense, even if it meant “introducing a noodles option at lunch”. The new owners wouldn’t “push curriculum or approach too heavily towards China,” Fisher added, “perhaps aside from adding the Chinese GCSE, introducing table tennis and celebrating Spring Festival”.

Faye echoed these sentiments, stating that Thetford’s Chinese owners “have no input into the way my staff teach, nor the content of the curriculum at any key stage”, and that she had never discussed this with them. “Like many schools,” she adds, “we celebrate cultural diversity through assemblies and curriculum topics. Chinese New Year has featured alongside assemblies on other world faiths and cultures.”

Others, however, are less relaxed. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Whitehall official tells me that the purchase of schools in Britain by Chinese “state-linked businesses” is part of a conscious Communist Party strategy. “The Chinese state is trying to exert influence through private schools,” he says, “and it isn’t even being discreet about it.”

Clues to the possible deeper significance of Thetford Grammar’s change of ownership can be found in a pair of key documents, both published in Mandarin and both unreported until now. The first, entitled “China Education Modernization 2035”, is a formal policy statement issued jointly by the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the Chinese government. To quote the 2019 document, its purpose is to show how education should advance the cause of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as described by the Party’s current dogma, known as “Xi Jinping Thought”. This, the document argues, will encourage “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

As the paper continues, exporting Chinese educational concepts will serve the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi’s all-encompassing plan to make China the world’s supreme power by 2049. To this end, foreign schools should be encouraged to develop partnerships with schools in China. At the same time, the document adds, China should also establish “overseas international schools with Chinese characteristics”.

This blend of education and ideology is similarly stark in another document, this one entitled “An Action Plan of Education For International Understanding”. Appearing in 2020, it was published by the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a Beijing think tank that has close ties to none other than the UFWD. And as the CCG report makes clear, buying schools abroad has an underlying political purpose. “The internationalization of China’s education must transcend mere capital outflow,” it says, and “should fundamentally represent an export of cultural ethos”. The ultimate goal, it adds, quoting the unnamed operator of a school abroad, is “to export China’s exemplary educational concepts through school acquisitions”.

As the “Action Plan” makes clear, meanwhile, this focus on primary education represents a change of strategy. Traditionally, Chinese educational policy abroad has focused on the Confucius Institutes, with over 500 launched at universities the world over. Over recent years, however, that number has fallen sharply: after Western politicians and journalists raised concerns about their influence. The CCG paper seems to acknowledge this, referencing “successive setbacks” faced by the Confucius scheme.

To avoid similar issues in future, the document instead argues, China’s effort to “go global” with its schools should reflect “an educational philosophy grounded in international understanding” — while also “preserving space for infusing Chinese culture and characteristics” on students. Overall, the document says, China must “accelerate the development of overseas schools with Chinese characteristics” by using private capital to purchase institutions in Europe, Asia and America. The report then lists some recent purchases: including Thetford Grammar.

Taken together, says Sam Dunning, director of the UK-China Transparency research group, the documents “provide clear evidence there has been high-level consideration of the strategic opportunities presented to the Chinese Communist Party by Chinese investors acquiring British schools”.

What’s in no doubt is that Chinese investors have happily taken the policy documents’ recommendations to heart. According to Venture Education, a Beijing consultancy, there are now some 73 “sister schools” in mainland China, affiliated with 30 independent schools in Britain. These encompass some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, including Dulwich College, Fettes and Harrow — which has no fewer than eight Chinese affiliates.

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That’s shadowed by the over two-dozen British schools owned by Chinese entities, with Thetford Grammar joined by Malvern St James and Wisbech Grammar, among many others. One notable example is Kingsley School in Bideford. It is owned by China First Capital Group, a management consultancy which is itself partly owned by the government in Beijing.

Not that Britain is alone here, with Beijing funding initiatives at over 180 public schools in the US. That’s mirrored in the private sector: not least when it comes to the New York Military Academy. About 60 miles north of Manhattan, and just up the Hudson River from West Point, in 2015 it was sold to a nonprofit foundation backed by Vincent Tianquan Mo, the billionaire owner of China’s largest estate listing and search website.

That 2015 purchase attracted extensive media coverage. But the Mandarin internet reveals Mo’s extensive links to CCP bodies — including the ubiquitous United Front Work Department. In 2018, for instance, Mo was among 50 digital entrepreneurs who attended a UFWD conference at which President Xi outlined his thoughts on internet security: a euphemism for online surveillance and censorship. For his part, Mo stated that “more strategic guidance” is needed for online creators. Though he sold the Academy in 2025, Mo remains on its advisory board, even as his successor as chair has also praised Xi’s leadership.

And if Congressmen are now warning about rising Chinese influence in American education, their British counterparts are moving in a similar direction. In July, the China Audit, a high-level Foreign Office review, identified numerous ways in which Britain is vulnerable to Chinese influence. Most of its report is classified — yet the Government has issued a new National Security Strategy which states that “resilience” to Chinese threats must now be enhanced. It singles out the need for “guidance” to those involved in private education where China is a “partner”.

Discussing the Audit in Parliament, the then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced a £600 million increase in intelligence service budgets. But this, the Whitehall official tells me, is nothing like enough. “You are right to be worried,” he says, “but the British state doesn’t have sufficient resources to plug this hole in the dyke when there are so many other ones. Although we have upped the money to increase our focus on China, we are still struggling to keep up with a much better-resourced adversary.”

All the while, the broad financial picture means that more acquisitions are likely, as independent schools struggle to cope with the new imposition of VAT. With 50 such schools shuttering their doors already, Chinese buyers are waiting in the wings. What this might mean for schools like Thetford Grammar remains to be seen.

In the decade since, more than a trillion dollars of investment have poured into BRI projects, a figure that rivals what Western countries together put into their aid budgets. That China found eager suitors around the world for its new largesse is no surprise, not least because Western countries had started pulling in their horns — with Britain, for instance, recently cutting an aid budget that had been a pillar of its soft power in order to build an aircraft carrier.

But in filling that vacuum, China has unsettled Western nations and few of them will attend when representatives from more than 100 countries gather in Beijing for the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. Increasingly, especially in the American foreign policy community, we hear talk that China is using the BRI to build a rival bloc to the West.

In an apparent response to the BRI, at the recent G20 Summit, the US and some of its partners announced an infrastructure programme to connect Asia and Europe. But if they’re hoping to go head-to-head with China, they may want to reconsider their tactics because one thing China is really good at is building infrastructure. In the time we’ve spent trying to make up our minds about whether to dig a short tunnel to Euston station, China has installed nearly 40,000 kilometres of high-speed railway.

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In any event, finding nefarious intent in the BRI may say more about the observers than the observed. A recurrent temptation we in the West face is to look at China’s behaviour through Cold War lenses, substituting the Middle Kingdom in the role vacated by the fallen Soviet Union. Seen this way, the BRI appears to be China’s attempt to transform its economic power into political control by drawing a string of countries more closely into its orbit. Some even detect an ideological blueprint in China’s willingness to forge partnerships with autocratic regimes, citing it as evidence that it wants to build an anti-democratic, anti-Western bloc.

In reality, though, there wasn’t much geopolitical thinking behind the original conception of the BRI. Instead, it was concocted by bureaucrats who were trying to solve an economic challenge: China’s economy had run into a wall. To overcome the 2008 global financial crisis, it had embarked on a massive fiscal stimulus and succeeded in lifting the world economy out of recession, but also left itself with a lot of excess capacity. Meanwhile, China was nearing the limits of a growth model that had relied on low-wage workers to assemble goods for export. As the huge surplus labour force was mopped up, wages rose, auguring a future in which Chinese firms would no longer be able to undercut their competitors abroad.

If it were to escape this classic middle-income trap, China would need to orient its output towards more technologically advanced production, and move its labour-intensive assembly offshore. Having built its economy by luring the waves of outsourcing that had helped deindustrialise America, it now needed to do the same and move some of its own manufacturing to lower-wage zones beyond its borders.

A group of civil servants came up with a plan to achieve this: by creating transportation networks that would give it access to overseas markets, supplies, and labour, and then exploiting those links to develop its partnerships, China would be able to expand its economy beyond its national borders. It would not use a classic aid programme like the Marshall Plan to do this, though. Instead, Beijing would encourage its banks to stump up the capital on commercial terms, something they were quite able and willing to do given the vast pools of capital accumulated in a country that saves nearly half its output, and where the list of high-yielding opportunities at home has been diminishing.

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The policy proposal landed at a propitious time. With Xi Jinping having just gained power, Beijing was growing increasingly concerned that its good relations with Western trading partners would come under increasing strain. Barack Obama’s ascent to the US presidency and his administration’s pivot to Asia, which boosted America’s military presence as a counterweight to China, solidified this perception. China’s subsequent exclusion from negotiations around the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership only reinforced that belief in Beijing. Xi made the BRI his own, and it soon became a linchpin of his new economic policy.

While the BRI was crafted as an economic programme, it soon became apparent to the Communist leadership that it could drive a new geopolitical strategy too. For one thing, the BRI gave China the chance to showcase a whole new model of development. Whereas the Western approach to global development focused on using multilateral financial institutions, such as the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization, to engineer pro-market policy regimes, then assist their implementation with targeted aid, China believed that building infrastructure was the key to development. Meanwhile, China regarded the regime of development or governance or human rights a country might choose to use as entirely its own business, a position which reflected its tradition of non-interference. Given the widespread perception in the developing world of Western countries as arrogant imperialists imposing their own moral or economic agendas, China’s standoffishness proved a refreshing change.

All the same, the BRI hasn’t created an alternative global financial architecture — at least not yet. Unlike the multilateral order created at Bretton Woods in 1944, it has more limited ambitions. The IMF, World Bank and WTO operate all over the planet; China’s BRI is focused primarily on Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania — in effect, in those parts of the world that could at a stretch be called its hinterland. And when it comes to diplomatic engagement, China still prefers to avoid multilateral regimes to focus on the more modest but practical approach of bilateral relations.

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This approach, though, is causing China some growing pains as it engages with the world in a way it’s never seriously done before. On the one hand, the BRI is serving the country’s goal of expanding its export potential. But in many countries, especially in Africa where China has a large and growing presence, the administrative capacity to manage complex infrastructure programmes is lacking. As a result, the initial euphoria over Chinese largesse has in recent years given way to a more sober assessment, as payments have come due and some governments have struggled to meet them.

This has led some Western commentators to latch onto the concept of “debt-trap diplomacy”, the idea that China has loaned money with the aim of later swooping in and seizing assets when the debtor defaults on payments. Often cited as an example of this is the case of Sri Lanka, which allowed China to take direct control of one of its ports on a 99-year lease when its government found it couldn’t pay its debts.

But the reality is probably more prosaic. China is learning the hard way what Western governments have dealt with for decades — the problems of insolvency in sovereign debtors. In response, it appears to be re-orienting towards a somewhat more Western style of “small but beautiful” lending that prioritises smaller, targeted projects. Over the years, Western governments have developed an elaborate global architecture through such institutions as the Paris Club, which facilitates the quick resolution of fiscal crises. But China has resisted joining such bodies, instead working through problems on an ad hoc basis. That hasn’t always been easy. Debt diplomacy seldom is, and China is finding that the role of benefactor can ultimately carry a hidden price.

The hype of the BRI’s early years has given way to a more sober assessment of the costs and benefits of engagement with China, as its partner countries find the role of an aspiring hegemon goes beyond just doling out goodies. Many countries still find it useful to have a rival pole they can play off against the US-led alliance, but Italy’s recent reconsideration of its participation in the BRI can probably be seen less as an instance of the Western allies circling the wagons, than of many countries rethinking the degree of dependence on China they’re willing to countenance. China has built its soft power and cut its teeth on diplomacy, but it too is finding that the fun part of the BRI may now be over.