Paper short abstract:

A lack of public data on Chinese official lending has fostered speculation and sensationalism and existing attempts to bridge this gap vary in their coverage and precision. This paper analyses common challenges of such efforts and presents our own approach to tracking Chinese loans across Eurasia.

Paper long abstract:

All indications suggest that official Chinese lending to Europe and the former Soviet Union has significantly increased over the past fifteen years. However, unlike traditional creditors such as the IMF, Chinese lenders do not make loan data publicly available, and we therefore lack an understanding of the true extent and nature of China’s Eurasian lending activities. This opacity has helped make Chinese loans highly controversial with claims of “hidden debt” and “debt trap diplomacy”. Attempting to address this gap, one existing project - Aid Data, hosted by William and Mary College - tracks Chinese loans globally, but its coverage ends in 2014 and it has been criticised for a number of inaccuracies. More reliable databases have been produced on a regional basis- for Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. However, Europe and the former Soviet Union, lying largely outside the traditional scope of development studies, have received far less attention and we still lack a comprehensive source on these regions.

Here we present the methodological approach underlying our nascent China-Eurasia Loans Database project. The database will track official loans from China to 46 states in Europe and the former Soviet Union over the period 2005-2020. We will analyse common problems associated with data gathering on Chinese loans and the ways in which inaccuracies can seriously undermine our understanding of China’s role as a development financier. We then set out our efforts to overcome such problems via our methodological handbook, covering five stages of data collection and verification: recruitment and training of research assistants, gathering, collating, cleaning, and triangulating media and government sources in English, Chinese and local languages, and in country verification of results.