内容摘要：“El Chapo” Guzman is serving a life sentence at a maximum security prison in Colorado.

“El Chapo” Guzman is serving a life sentence at a maximum security prison in Colorado.

Still, China publishes little data on its BRI scheme, and the Lowy Institute said its estimates, based on World Bank data, may underestimate the full scale of China’s lending.In 2021, AidData – a US-based international development research lab – estimated that China was owed a “hidden debt” of about $385bn.

Does the Lowy report lack ‘context’?Challenging the “debt-trap” narrative, the Rhodium consulting group looked at 38 Chinese debt renegotiations with 24 developing countries in 2019 and concluded that Beijing’s leverage was limited, with many of the renegotiations resolved in favour of the borrower.According to Rhodium, developing countries had restructured roughly $50bn of Chinese loans in the decade before its 2019 study was published, with loan extensions, cheaper financing and debt forgiveness the most frequent outcomes.

Elsewhere, a 2020 study by the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University found that, between 2000 and 2019, China cancelled $3.4bn of debt in Africa and a further $15bn was refinanced. No assets were seized.Meanwhile, many developing countries remain in hock to Western institutions.

In 2022, the Debt Justice Group

that African governments owed three times more to private financial groups than to China, charging double the interest in the process.That includes legislation cementing some of the

Trump championed during his first term as president, in 2017. It would also increase the funds available for Trump’s “mass deportation” effort and heightened security along the US-Mexico border.Some $46.5bn, for instance, would be earmarked to renew construction of the southern border wall and other barriers, another hallmark of Trump’s first term in office.

But to pay for those tax cuts and policy priorities, the bill proposes measures that remain controversial on both sides of the political spectrum.One provision, for instance, would increase the federal debt limit by $4 trillion. Others would impose strict work requirements on programmes like Medicaid — a government health insurance for low-income Americans — and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), sometimes known as food stamps.