李月芬：我曾告诫一些非洲国家，大量借款时要小心(13)

The media coverage sometimes doesn"t really correspond to the realities happening in the world. In the recent 2 or 3 years, you"ve seen very solid studies and papers based on empirical research to say, very clearly, that up to now, they haven"t seen one incidence of China taking over, grabbing asset of debtor countries. In Sri Lanka, clearly it was not like that. It was very important for them to get the financing and to bridge their gap. For a few countries, I"ve seen papers with tables of the claimed grabbing of assets by China through creating this debt trap, where each column said the fact was not like that, it was proved, and had not been correctly reported.
It"s difficult for a country as China with different sources of lending, private, bilateral, public, to purposely, coherently create a debt trap. I don"t see that China has this capacity. And I have not read clear, defined Chinese policy for this debt diplomacy.
I think there are rooms for improvement for Chinese lending to developing countries. For instance, for a development banks, regional development banks, or world bank, if they have a big project, they would carry out a very detailed feasibility study and look into the social aspects, cultural aspects, economic aspects, ecosystem, which means whether there is a climate change effect from this project. I think for China, when they undertake infrastructure projects, it would be good to conduct very detailed feasibility study to study all kinds of factors before starting the project, and also do a good analysis of the ability of the country to pay, the revenue situation, balance of payment situation, and the entire GDP trajectory, to see whether the country has the ability to absorb the debt created by various projects or different kinds of lending for different purposes.