China

Where it is on record

Commitments are summed at each country's interior point, sized by the twenty-one years of money; the 150 largest projects are drawn where AidData places them, in the map's status colours, and every one of the 2,487 is on the main map. CNPC's and CNOOC's pipelines are drawn as routes, the cables with a Chinese carrier as dotted lines, power units with a Chinese owner as diamonds. Debt owed to Chinese creditors is off until switched on.

A commitment and a debt are two views of the same money at different dates: the commitment is what was signed, in 2023 dollars; the debt is what is still owed, in current dollars, after drawdowns, repayments and restructurings. The two are shown side by side and never added. The 2Africa, SeaMeWe and PEACE cables run far beyond the frame and are cut at it.

Projects: AidData's reconstruction

AidData's method, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows, assembles each commitment from official documents, contracts, debt reports, press and company statements, and records what it could and could not establish: the lender, the implementer, the terms where known, the implementation status, and the amount, estimated where no figure was published (94 of the 2,487 records). The map's layer keeps the infrastructure subset as AidData flags it, and leaves out the 872 umbrella agreements whose money reappears in the projects beneath them, the 510 pledges and memoranda that AidData itself excludes from its totals, and the 6,738 commitments that are not physical infrastructure, so no dollar is counted twice and the layer has no announced records.

0 of the commitments are ODA-like, 0 other official flows at or near market terms; 224 were co-financed with other lenders, and AidData flags 490 as having gone into financial distress. By sector the largest is transport, USD 59.1 bn. Status: 1,738 operating, 497 under construction, 196 approved, 56 stalled.

Who lent

Debt owed to Chinese creditors: World Bank International Debt Statistics

The debtors report; the World Bank publishes, by creditor country. For China the bilateral series, the one the other profiles use, misses the part that matters: the loans of Chinese commercial banks and other non-official creditors are filed under private creditors, not under the bilateral heading. The table therefore leads with all public and publicly guaranteed debt owed to Chinese creditors, and shows the bilateral official part beside it. Africa's stock owed to Chinese creditors rose from USD 2.7 bn in 2000 to a peak of USD 91.9 bn in 2021 and stood at USD 82.2 bn at the end of 2024.

Sovereign and sovereign-guaranteed borrowing only, as reported by the debtor; resource-backed loans to state companies outside the guarantee, and loans to countries that do not report to the Debtor Reporting System, are outside the series. A country whose last reported balance predates 2024 is shown at that last figure.

Pipelines, power units and cables with a Chinese owner

The map's energy and connectivity layers carry an owner field; this table is those records filtered for a Chinese company. The pipelines are CNPC's: the Niger–Benin export line, the Greater Nile line in Sudan and South Sudan, the Mtwara line in Tanzania, with CNOOC in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. The power units are mostly the hydro and coal projects of Gezhouba, Sinohydro, PowerChina and the provincial companies, many of them stalled. The cables are the ones in which China Mobile, China Telecom or China Unicom hold a share, 2Africa among them, and the PEACE cable from Pakistan to Marseille with its East African landings.

Ownership is not finance: a Chinese-built plant financed by China Eximbank and owned by the host utility is in the AidData table, not here, and the two tables overlap only where a Chinese company also kept a stake.

How to read this page

One record is

In the projects table, one official commitment as AidData records it: one loan, grant or buyer's credit from one or more Chinese official lenders to one recipient; a railway financed in three tranches is three records. In the debt table, one country and one year. In the energy table, one GEM power unit, one pipeline (its segments counted) or one cable.

Status

AidData's implementation status maps as on the map: Pipeline: Commitment is approved, Implementation under construction, Completion operating, Suspended and Cancelled stalled; pledges are left out, so there are no announced records. Debt has no status.

Money

Commitments are AidData's figures in constant 2023 US dollars, estimated where marked. Debt is the World Bank's stock in current US dollars. The two describe the same money at different dates and are never added, to each other or to the map's other lenders.

Location

Country bubbles sit at the country's interior point. Projects use AidData's placement, stated in every tooltip: precise (on the OpenStreetMap feature), within 5 km, the centre of a named administrative area, or the country's interior point (609 records). Pipelines and cables are the map's routes, thinned; power units carry GEM's coordinates.

Not here, and why

• Commitments after 2023. AidData's CLG 1.0 release ends with 2023 commitments; the page and the map say so wherever the layer is described, and the debt series is the only part of the record that reaches 2024.
• China's own statistics. The Ministry of Commerce publishes outward investment and contracting by country in an annual PDF bulletin, with no project level; the OECD holds no Chinese records; China does not publish to IATI.
• Collations without a licence. The China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins redistributes the ministry's investment and contract-revenue figures as spreadsheets, and Boston University's Global Development Policy Center keeps a loan-by-loan database to 2023; neither states a reuse licence, so neither is on the site.
• Oil and gas fields with Chinese operators are in GEM's Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker, released through a request form only; the pipelines are the open part.

Sources and licences

• AidData, China's Global Loans and Grants Dataset 1.0 (ODC-By 1.0), located with the Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset 3.0 and its Geospatial GCDF 3.0 footprints (ODbL, traced in OpenStreetMap), as the map's layer; release CLG-Global 1.0 · locations from GCDF 3.0 and GeoGCDF v3.0.1. The 157 records new in CLG 1.0 have no published location yet and sit at their country's centre.
• World Bank, International Debt Statistics, source 6, counterpart area 730, series DT.DOD.DPPG.CD and DT.DOD.BLAT.CD with their commitment and disbursement series; CC BY 4.0, release of 3 Dec 2025.
• Global Energy Monitor, Global Integrated Power Tracker and Global Gas and Oil Infrastructure Trackers, as the map draws them; CC BY 4.0. TeleGeography, Submarine Cable Map; CC BY-SA 4.0.

Download

Everything on this page, with the commitments by country, year, sector and funder, the twenty largest records, the two debt series per country and the filtered energy records with their routes: china.json. The debt series are re-fetched with every data refresh; the project records follow the map's AidData fetch.