LONDON/JOHANNESBURG : Loans committed by China's two main trade policy banks fell to a 13-year low of $3.7 billion in 2021 due to Beijing curtailing funding for large-scale oil projects, a study from Boston University Global Development Policy Center showed.
"China's domestic priorities beyond COVID-19 are still significant, given the large amounts of debt and the swings in renminbi that may necessitate the need to be conservative with dollar holdings so they can serve as insurance on the home front." Graphic 2: China's top borrowers, https://www.reuters.com/graphics/CHINA-DEBT/CHART/mopakjyaopa/chart.png
Russia was the top recipient, with $58 billion in loans in the 2008-2021 period, followed by Venezuela with $55 billion mostly for extraction and pipelines projects, but lending to the South American oil giant halted in 2015, two years before it defaulted on its overseas debt. The Washington-based lender financed projects in developing countries worth an average of $40 billion annually between 2016-2019, before scaling up its response to the pandemic in 2020 when it stepped in with $67 billion, its largest annual commitment since 2008. The following year, commitments were almost $62 billion - 17 times more than Chinese financing.