Debts and Roads 

Nicholas Humphreys, The University of California – Santa Barbara

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Abstract

Development finance has re-emerged as one of the main areas of competition between global powers, and nowhere is this more evident than in Africa. On one side stands a U.S. architecture of financial conditionality, built through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and related tools used to alter structures and reform governance.  These interventions typically tie access to finance to changes in fiscal policy, market regulation, and organization of state institutions. On the other is China’s infrastructure-focused Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), channelled through policy banks and state-owned enterprises that promise quick delivery of railways, ports, power plants, and roads. This article argues that China’s model currently enjoys greater development and political traction in much of Africa because it generates visible assets that align with governments’ short-term priorities and projects that legitimize regimes. Yet Chinese finance also brings about new fiscal and governance risks, while U.S. conditionality has left a mark of constrained policy space and reform without development. Sustainable outcomes, the article asserts, will not come from choosing one model over the other but from hybrid arrangements that combine Western financial safeguards with Chinese capacity to deliver. Pulling from concepts of debt diplomacy, infrastructure statecraft, and negotiated interdependence, and using Zambia and Kenya as case studies with Ghana as a brief illustration, the article shows how African regimes are actively forming a hybrid development order rather than passively choosing between Washington and Beijing. 

1. Introduction: Development Diplomacy and the African Domain

Development finance, long considered a technocratic space of economists and project managers, has become a focal point in geopolitical contests of the past decades. The distribution of loans, grants, and guarantees now features clearly in foreign policy doctrines. In the twenty-first century, this contest has emerged in Africa, where the United States and China demonstrate rival methods of economic statecraft. For both powers, the point is not simply to move money or build projects, but to cultivate long-term dependence and alignment. They look to shape which firms dominate key sectors, which standards and currencies African states adopt, and which external partners they turn to in times of crisis. Because debt contracts and infrastructure networks tie budgets, trade routes, and regulatory choices together for decades, they offer both nations a relatively low-cost way to accumulate durable influence compared with more overt military or coercive tools. The United States operates mainly through multilateral financial institutions it helped to design and still influences strongly, looking to shape policy through conditional lending and governance reforms. China, by contrast, has appeared as a major financier of hard infrastructure under the banner of the Belt and Road Initiative, pairing large construction contracts with long-term credit lines backed by state institutions. 

These are not merely different styles of aid but competing structures of influence. The U.S. model is organized around rules: formal conditionality, policy benchmarks, and macroeconomic surveillance. The Chinese model is built around resources: concrete projects, economic connectivity, and long-term interdependence. Both models seek to manipulate African states’ domestic political environments and external relationships, despite their varying processes. Understanding their interaction requires treating development finance as a core tool of power, not a background humanitarian venture. 

Sub-Saharan Africa is a crucial backdrop for this competition among global powers. Gaps in infrastructure are still severe. Regional development banks estimate that annual investment needs in transport, energy, and water far exceed what domestic resources can fund. External debt stocks have inflated over the past decade, with an increasing share owed to unconventional creditors, including Chinese policy banks. Quickening urbanization and a young population create intense pressure on governments to deliver growth, jobs, and visible improvements in everyday life. African states did not choose this reliance on external finance. Colonial extraction led most economies to crutch heavily on exporting, which resulted in shallow domestic capital markets. After independence, governments inherited narrow tax bases and volatile revenues that were commodity-dependent. The debt crises and structural adjustment programs of the 1980s further dampened the means for public investment and normalized external borrowing as the main tool of development finance. These conditions make African governments both reliant on external finance and particularly sensitive to the possible political yields of each financing model. 

The central puzzle, however, is not which patron African states will “choose.” Most governments do not treat economic ties with Washington and Beijing as mutually exclusive. Rather, they consider overlapping offers from both with the goal of acquiring resources, addressing their vulnerabilities, and maintaining autonomy. The analytical challenge is therefore to explain how different architectures of influence interact, and how African actors use, resist, and blend them. The sections that follow first develop a conceptual framework, then compare the U.S. and Chinese models, examine Zambia and Kenya as stress tests of the dual approaches, and finally explore how African action is creating an emergent hybrid development order. 

2. Debt, Infrastructure, and Negotiated Interdependence

Financial flows and infrastructure projects are not neutral; they are mechanisms of control. Grasping the nature of U.S. and Chinese engagements in Africa therefore requires a specific vocabulary to help reveal how credit and construction reorder political authority and economic possibilities. Three concepts are crucial to know: debt diplomacy, infrastructure statecraft, and sovereign agency. 

Debt diplomacy captures the strategic use of lending, conditionality, and restructuring to influence policy. The literature on the IMF and World Bank has demonstrated how conditional loans may be used to discipline governments by tying disbursements to policy benchmarks in areas such as privatization, tariff reform, and fiscal consolidation. Even when conditions are not formally imposed, expectations about creditor reactions can induce “self-conditionality,” as governments adjust policies to preserve access to funds or reputational standing. Policy space is constrained in advance. The price of financing is compliance with a particular model of economic management. 

Infrastructure statecraft highlights a different pathway of influence. Railways, highways, ports, and power plants create durable patterns of dependence because they shape trade routes, revenue streams, and spatial distributions of economic activity. Whoever finances and builds these assets can, in subtle ways, influence future decisions about maintenance, regulation, and the direction of commerce. China’s BRI exemplifies this logic. Constraints emerge subsequently; once debts are contracted and assets constructed, future options are structured by those commitments. 

Sovereign agency refers to the bounded yet impactful capacity of African governments to traverse these pressures. States can choose among competing offers, postpone projects, look to diversify their creditor base, and renegotiate terms when circumstances change. Domestic coalitions, bureaucratic capacities, and regime types shape the extent of this agency, but they do not eliminate it. Scholars on China-Africa relations have emphasized how African actors have used Chinese finance to pursue their own agendas, from accelerating infrastructure delivery to shoring up political support at home. 

Standard narratives about “debt traps” and the Washington Consensus obscure this triadic relationship. The debt-trap discourse describes China as a unitary strategist wielding opaque loans to seize strategic assets, while undermining African decision-making and the influence of global commodity cycles or domestic mishandling in causing distress. On the other hand, conversations about the Washington Consensus tend to frame IMF and World Bank programs as technocratic solutions or ideological pressures without detail on the ways they narrowed policy space and reconfigured interests. To move beyond these binaries, this article adopts a comparative stance organized around three dimensions: mode of control (rules vs. resources), temporality (gradual reform vs. quick infrastructure), and visibility (macro indicators vs. concrete projects). The next section applies this framework to the U.S. financial order and China’s BRI.

3. Competing Methods of Influence: U.S. Conditionality vs. China’s BRI

After the Second World War, the international financial structure was designed around two main institutions: the IMF and the World Bank. While their formal mandates differ, both evolved into key instruments through which powerful economies, especially the United States, could dictate policies in borrowing countries. These policies typically involved reducing deficits and debt, liberalizing trade, and privatizing state-owned enterprises, along with changes to their monetary systems. In practice, this meant cutting public spending, opening domestic markets to foreign competition and investment, and reorienting state institutions toward said markets. Governance structures give major shareholders disproportionate influence over strategic directions. In Africa, this influence became most visible during the debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, when access to new financing increasingly required IMF-supported programs and World Bank adjustment loans. 

Structural adjustment programs required liberalization, privatization, and fiscal consolidation. Tariffs were reduced, state-owned enterprises sold or restructured, and subsidies cut. Proponents of this, namely officials at the IMF, World Bank, Western finance ministries, and some domestic reformers, argued these actions were necessary to correct issues and restore growth, while critics said they represented a one-size-fits-all approach that was insensitive to historical and structural differences. The record is mixed. Inflation was tamed in many cases and fiscal deficits lowered, but industrialization was usually hindered, manufacturing’s share of GDP decreased, and public investment was constricted by government austerity measures. For many Africans, the experience was one of reform without development. Governments complied with extensive conditions yet saw limited transformation in everyday life. 

Facing criticism, the IMF and World Bank softened and rebranded conditionality in the late 1990s and 2000s. Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and governance indicators were introduced, with more emphasis being placed on consultation and ownership. Nevertheless, accessing this concessional finance was still dependent on following a particular model of economic management. Newer U.S.-backed mechanisms, like selective infrastructure compacts and development finance initiatives, incorporated a bit of project-based aid but did not significantly shift the balance toward extensive distribution of infrastructure. This scheme remained one in which rules and surveillance, rather than concrete projects, were the primary channels of influence. 

China’s entrance as a major financier and builder in Africa offered a powerful counter to the U.S. model. While associating with the BRI, Chinese policy banks and state-owned enterprises have financed and constructed railways, roads, ports, power plants, and telecom networks around the continent. Financing became tied to specific projects, with loans being extended on terms that were often less concessional than those of multilateral institutions but more attainable than those available on commercial markets. Contracts usually require the use of Chinese contractors and equipment, and in some cases were backed by future commodity exports or project revenues. 

Their strategic logic has many parts. BRI projects help export excess industrial capacity, secure access to resources and markets, and internationalize Chinese technical standards. This last point matters because it encourages African governments to adopt Chinese-built hardware, software, and engineering norms in sectors such as telecoms, power, and transport, deepening long-term technological dependence and binding future upgrades and maintenance to Chinese environments. In practice, this has meant growing reliance on Chinese suppliers for backbone networks, surveillance systems, and rail signaling, even if uptake varies across countries and often faces domestic pushback. Official discourse frames them as win-win cooperation and emphasizes non-interference in domestic politics, contrasting sharply with the perceived intrusiveness of Western conditionality. For African leaders seeking roads, power, and rail rather than policy blueprints, this rhetoric and the associated financing have strong appeal. 

On the ground, the effects are visible. The Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway has more than halved the travel time between Kenya’s port and capital. Rail links and industrial parks in Ethiopia have modified manufacturing and export geographies, all financed by China. Major post-war reconstruction in Angola was funded by oil-backed loans. These projects put tangible symbols of modernization on display to voters and regional partners. Simultaneously, they bring about vulnerabilities. Budget excesses, construction delays, and underutilization have strained public finances in several of these countries. Opaque contracts and complex collateral arrangements complicate scrutiny from the public as well as risk assessment. Debt service obligations to Chinese creditors have risen alongside obligations to traditional lenders and bondholders, intensifying fiscal stress. The contrast between U.S. financial conditionality and Chinese infrastructure diplomacy can be summarized as one between rules and roads. In the U.S. model, policy space is constrained through conditions and surveillance. In the Chinese model, it is done via the need to service debts tied to projects and keep up associated commercial flows. U.S.-style reforms are gradual and largely invisible to the public, while BRI projects are fast, concentrated, and highly visible, providing immediate political returns even when long-run economic performance is uncertain. Yet there are areas of convergence. Both Western and Chinese actors have been more attentive to debt sustainability, and both have begun using language of partnership and country ownership at a higher caliber. These similarities and differences directly alter, but do not determine, the background in which African states operate. 

4. Case Studies: Zambia and Kenya as Stress Tests of the Dual Regime

Zambia and Kenya offer physical windows onto how dual architectures of influence function in practice. Both have engaged extensively with Western and Chinese creditors, yet their trajectories highlight different facets of negotiated interdependence. 

Zambia’s experience shows how repercussions of Western debt and new Chinese loans can combine to produce acute fiscal strain. After debt relief in the mid-2000s, Zambia regained access to international markets and credible, official lenders. Governments borrowed funds to finance infrastructure and operating costs, issuing Eurobonds and contracting loans from a wide breadth of sources. Chinese policy banks became major financiers of power plants, roads, and other projects. By the late 2010s, external debt had risen sharply relative to GDP and exports. Tanking copper prices and depreciating currency undermined the ability to follow through on obligations. In 2020, Zambia defaulted on its Eurobonds, making it the first African state to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic. The default exposed the complexity of Zambia’s creditor situation. Bondholders, bilateral Western lenders, multilateral institutions, and Chinese banks all had a stake, with differing degrees of transparency and seniority. An IMF program required assurances that other creditors would dispense comparable relief, while Chinese leaders wanted to protect their balance sheets while keeping their long-term relationships. Neither the IMF framework nor the Chinese negotiations could progress independently. The eventual course of action involved IMF action, turning to the G20’s common structure for debt treatment, and extended negotiations among official creditors that included China. 

Zambian activity in this process was constrained but present. Governments highlighted both their willingness to reform and the developmental importance of past borrowing. Political competition within the nation, which included a change of government, formed negotiating positions and public narratives about who was responsible for the debt increase. Civil society organizations also tried to scrutinize loan contracts and call for accountability, despite their limited access to key information. From the perspective of this article’s thesis, Zambia illustrates the double-edged nature of Chinese influence. BRI-style infrastructure contributed to growth and connectivity but, combined with other liabilities, helped push the country into crisis. Finding a resolution for said crisis required hybrid mechanisms that pulled from both Western and Chinese practices. 

Kenya’s case provides a separate vantage point that hones in on the politics of ambitious infrastructure expansion. With a long history of working with Western donors and financial institutions, Kenya chose to embrace Chinese finance to help realize a vision of the country becoming a regional logistics and services hub. The flagship project was the Standard Gauge Railway linking Mombasa to Nairobi and later extending into the interior. Chinese policy banks financed most of the project, with a Chinese state-owned enterprise as the main contractor. 

The economic and political rationale was straightforward. The railway promised to reduce freight costs, improve connectivity, and support regional integration, while providing a highly visible symbol of modernization. Early in the operation, it displayed a clear symbolic achievement and some improvements in logistics. However, projected freight quantity and revenues did not reach anticipated levels. Overhead costs were higher than expected, and questions popped up about the contract terms and the allocation of commercial risk. As debt service obligations to Chinese lenders increased, concerns about fiscal sustainability sharpened. 

These concerns began to seep into Kenyan electoral politics. The railway and other Chinese projects were blamed by opposition parties and civil society actors for contributing to broader issues of corruption, wealth disparity, and external dependence. The courts reviewed procurement processes, while auditors investigated cost inflation and revenue shortcomings. Simultaneously, Kenyan authorities worked with the IMF and World Bank on stressing fiscal consolidation and governance reforms, with the goal of taming markets and maintaining access to non-Chinese financing.

Since then, Kenya has recalibrated its stance gradually. While it continues to work with China as a primary infrastructure builder, Kenya has looked to diversify its sources of finance, ponder refinancing and restructuring options, and boost transparency in future deals. Western and multilateral institutions are framed as partners in governance and technical support, while Chinese entities are associated with delivery. The result is not a simple embrace or rejection of either model but a more nuanced attempt to manage and combine them. Thus, Kenya shows how BRI’s initial advantage in visibility can erode as projects encounter economic constraints, prompting moves toward more explicitly hybrid financing strategies. 

5. African Agency and the Emergent Hybrid Order

The Zambian and Kenyan cases underline a broader pattern: African states are not simply acted upon by U.S. and Chinese architectures of influence. They also use, hedge, and reform them. Three elements are central to this emergent hybrid order. 

First, many governments push toward diversification. Rather than exclusively aligning with one set of creditors, they maintain IMF programs, utilize World Bank or regional bank support, issue Eurobonds, and sign BRI infrastructure deals. Additional newer options include the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or the New Development Bank. Financial diversification provides these nations with leverage, specifically the ability to indicate exit options, organize interactions with creditors, and link concessions in one relationship to gains in another. 

Second, renegotiation and pushback have become common characteristics of this domain. Debt distress, exceeding the budget, or changes in political leadership often lead regimes to revisit and tweak the terms of previous agreements. African states have made it a priority to extend maturities, negotiate for grace periods, or reduce interest rates on loans from the Western and Chinese creditors. Projects face delays, rescaling, or even cancellation. Parliaments, auditors, and civil society organizations leverage the political sensitivity of these high-profile contracts in order to achieve transparency and accountability. These processes are uneven and constrained, but they show that external conditions and project designs are contested, not fixed. 

Third, domestic politics determines how external offers are processed and used. Competition in election cycles can push governments to prioritize financing that results in quick, visible benefits, oftentimes at the cost of higher long-term risks. Elite coalitions may favor particular external partners because associated contracts and rents accrue to specific networks. Media narratives can either legitimize or delegitimize Chinese and Western engagements. The internal distribution of power between executive and legislative, central and local authorities, and ruling parties and oppositions affects the capacity to bargain coherently with creditors. 

Ghana illustrates these dynamics in a relatively stable setting. Long regarded as an IMF success story, Ghana has undergone repeated rounds of adjustment and reform, building a reputation for macroeconomic discipline. This has facilitated access to concessional finance and international markets. At the same time, Ghana has engaged with Chinese financiers for infrastructure projects where needed, particularly energy and construction. Rather than discarding its connections with Western institutions, Chinese agreements have been layered on top of existing relationships. This has resulted in a blended financing profile. Authorities have used the credibility acquired through the success of their economic reforms to secure more favorable terms or diversify funding. Along with this, they rely on Chinese-built infrastructure to confront bottlenecks that Western partners have been unwilling to finance at large scales. 

This pattern of simultaneous adherence to elements of U.S.-aligned financial governance and uptake of Chinese infrastructure finance represents what might be called blended sovereignty. Sovereignty in this case does not mean insulation from external influence; it describes the ability to rearrange various external paths in ways that broaden policy options. In practice, blended sovereignty is messy, with necessary trade-offs that cause fluctuations in transparency, speed, concessionality, scale, stability, and visible delivery. Yet it is a meaningful form of agency in a world of pervasive interdependence. 

6. Policy Implications and Conclusion: China’s Traction, Hybrid Futures

The analysis developed here suggests that China’s infrastructure model currently provides greater visible developmental traction in many African countries than U.S.-style financial conditionality, but it also can create new vulnerabilities. The U.S. framework, for its part, promotes fiscal discipline and some governance improvements but often falls short of delivering on the infrastructure and productive investment needed for system transformation. Each model exposes the other’s blind spots. Sustainable development for African nations will not come from choosing one over the other, but from combining elements of both models. 

To design a more functional hybrid regime, improving debt transparency and creditor coordination is mandatory. Shared standards for reporting loan terms, collateral agreements, and contingent liabilities would help regimes and citizens to better assess risks and hold adjudicators accountable. Systems that help restructure agreements that include China and traditional Paris Club members can reduce delays and uncertainty in periods of crisis. Co-financing arrangements, in which multilateral institutions provide safeguards and oversight while Chinese entities deliver engineering and construction, could better align risk management with delivery capabilities. 

African institutions, however, will be immensely crucial in forming such a system. Regional development banks, ministries of finance, and local economic communities can articulate shared positions on sustainability, transparency, and internal content. This will strengthen bargaining power with regard to external partners. Continental initiatives on infrastructure planning and debt management can also create a platform for information sharing and standards of negotiation. Without collective efforts such as these, hybridization risks becoming a mosaic of skewed bilateral deals that worsen asymmetries rather than mitigating them. Reframing the rivalry between the U.S. and China in this way shifts attention from a two-sided contest to a growing discourse determined by debtor strategies, not external pressures. The two superpowers may seek influence, but their capacity to impose coherent models is limited by their mutual interdependence and by the agency of borrowing states. African and other Global South actors are increasingly co-authoring the rules of engagement, using debt diplomacy and infrastructure statecraft for their own purposes as much as they are shaped by them. Recognizing this does not deny the real constraints imposed by debt and power, but it highlights the domains in which those constraints are negotiated. If the goal is a development order that supports both structural transformation and fiscal responsibility, then understanding and backing the hybrid strategies emerging in African capitals may matter more than defending any single blueprint, whether Washington’s or Beijing’s, as the sole path to progress.