Is China The Colonial Power Of 21st Century? Understanding the 'Debt Trap Diplomacy' Of China

 Is China a Colonising Small Countries?

In the history China has been humiliated by the colonial powers for many years, Whether it be the Britain, Portugal, Japan everyone has exploited or humiliated china and occupied some portion of its territory. China also had to give Hong Kong for 99 years of lease to Britain, because they lost the opium wars against British. But is China doing the same thing with other countries, which it had suffered for centuries in the past? Is China becoming a colonial power of 21^st Century? In this blog we will look into this question.

Let’s Understand China’s Debt Trap Diplomacy:

China is currently giving lots of loans to small developing countries for execution of various developmental project, under its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. One such country is Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka took huge amount of Chinese loans to build various projects in their country and all of them turned to be useless. These projects couldn’t return the money which were invested o them, as a consequence of this Sri Lanka had to give one of its ports to China for 99 years of lease. Similar things happened with many other small African countries.

How Does Debt Trap Diplomacy Works:

The most important part of these developmental projects are that China gives the loan, only Chinese companies are allowed to work on these projects, so only Chinese people get employment, and the country in which these projects are built ultimately gets nothing. China gives them huge amount of loans, knowing that these small countries would never be able to return that money back, So when a country is unable to pay back the loan, China gives them more loans to payback the previous loans, in this way they fall into China’s debt trap. And when any country is not able to pay back the loans even after getting loans for paying back the previous loans, China takes a apart of that country’s land  for lease. Geopolitical experts call it China’s ‘Debt Trap Diplomacy’.

Various small countries has knowingly or unknowingly fallen into the debt trap. China give loans to those countries, whom IMF and world bank hesitate to give loans. IMF and world bank only gives loan to countries after assessing their economic strength. But China doesn’t care about all these things, they just give huge loans to those countries.