The debt trap narrative has a clean architecture: China lends to African governments at commercial rates for infrastructure projects of dubious economic value; governments default; China seizes the asset, or the port, or the mine, as collateral; sovereignty is incrementally transferred. It is a story that has been told repeatedly in Western policy circles and media since approximately 2015. It also has a significant problem, which is that the empirical evidence for it is extremely thin.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins China Africa Research Initiative, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, and the African Development Bank have spent years trying to find cases that fit the debt trap model. What they have found instead is that Chinese lenders have restructured debts, extended maturities, and in several cases written off principal — behaviour that is not consistent with a strategy of asset seizure. The Hambantota port case in Sri Lanka, the foundational example always cited, involved a port that was losing money, a government that chose to convert debt to equity, and a lease arrangement that has not, seven years on, produced the strategic military footprint that the narrative predicted.

Meanwhile the actual causes of African sovereign debt distress receive relatively little attention in Western discourse. Zambia, Ghana, and Ethiopia — the three African countries that have undergone formal debt restructuring in recent years — all have debt portfolios in which private creditors, principally Western asset managers holding Eurobonds, account for a larger share of the debt stock and a much larger share of the debt service burden than Chinese lenders. Those private creditors have been the most intransigent participants in debt restructuring negotiations, blocking deals that multilateral and Chinese creditors were prepared to accept.

The G20 Common Framework for debt restructuring, designed to coordinate creditor responses to sovereign debt crises, has been almost completely ineffective precisely because it cannot compel private creditor participation. This is a design failure with identifiable architects, and those architects are not in Beijing.

I am not writing a defence of Chinese foreign policy, which has its own problems and its own self-interest. I am writing an argument for accuracy, because the debt trap narrative has become a substitute for the harder conversation about what Western finance, Western trade rules, and Western-dominated international financial institutions have done to and for African economies over the past fifty years. That conversation is overdue and it does not begin with China.