When China builds infrastructure in Africa, Western governments call it a "debt trap."

 https://x.com/nxt888/status/2073069930854178836

Sony Thăng

@nxt888

When China builds infrastructure in Africa, Western governments call it a "debt trap." When the IMF lent money to African governments under structural adjustment conditions that required selling off public utilities, cutting healthcare spending, and opening markets to foreign competition that destroyed domestic industry? That was called "development assistance." The "debt trap" accusation is often exaggerated and selectively applied. Chinese lending, like all international financing, should be examined case by case, and the terms of individual projects should remain open to scrutiny. That is a fair conversation to have. But that conversation cannot be had honestly without acknowledging that the West has been running debt-based leverage over developing nations for roughly eighty years, through institutions it controls, using conditions it designed, producing outcomes that consistently benefited Western capital while leaving the borrowing nations more structurally dependent than before they borrowed. The sudden Western concern about African sovereignty when Chinese money enters the picture is not concern for African sovereignty. African sovereignty has never been a Western priority. The concern is about competition. About someone else getting access to the resources and the relationships and the political leverage that Western institutions have treated as their exclusive inheritance since decolonization produced independent governments that still needed external capital. Concern for Africa. From the people who designed structural adjustment. The audacity of it should be theatrical. Instead it is just policy.

1:42 AM · Jul 4, 2026

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https://x.com/nxt888/status/2073069930854178836