DAKAR—The terms of China’s loan deals with developing countries are unusually secretive and require borrowers to prioritize repayment of Chinese state-owned banks ahead of other creditors, a study of a cache of such contracts showed on Wednesday.
The dataset—compiled over three years by AidData, a U.S. research lab at the College of William & Mary—comprises 100 Chinese loan contracts with 24 low- and middle-income countries, a number of which are struggling under mounting debt burdens amid the economic fallout from the COVID-10 pandemic.
