Belt & Road Watch is The Investigative Journal’s monthly tracker of China’s overseas infrastructure, lending, and influence activity. Figures and financing terms are drawn from public records, academic datasets, and original source documents, with allegations distinguished from findings throughout.
For half a decade, the conventional read on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was retrenchment: fewer megaprojects, smaller tickets, and a pivot to what Beijing brands “small and beautiful” investments. June 2026 complicated that story. Within a single month, Chinese state-owned contractors locked in a $2.9 billion airport in Kenya, agreed to accelerate a strategic deep-sea port in Myanmar, and saw a flagship Central Asian railway fast-tracked by two years — even as new research from AidData, the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) documented a deepening debt overhang across the developing world. The month’s developments suggest a recalibration rather than a retreat.
Kenya hands CCCC a $2.9 billion airport after the Adani collapse
The headline contract of the month came from Nairobi. According to a June 11 Bloomberg report, Kenya awarded a roughly 375 billion-shilling ($2.9 billion) contract for the expansion of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) to China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), a state-owned engineering giant. Kenyan outlets reported the award is being channeled through the country’s newly established National Infrastructure Fund, seeded in part by proceeds from the privatization of the Kenya Pipeline Company, with works structured under a 20-year master plan running to 2045.
The award is notable on two counts. First, it follows the 2024 cancellation of a $1.85 billion concession previously granted to India’s Adani Group, which collapsed amid legal and transparency objections from aviation workers and civil-society groups. Second, CCCC is no stranger to controversy in Kenya: in 2024 a Kenyan court found a CCCC entity had used shell companies to evade roughly $8 million in taxes, according to CSIS reporting on corruption along the Belt and Road. The new contract therefore hands one of East Africa’s largest infrastructure mandates to a contractor with a documented compliance record in the same jurisdiction — a dynamic that warrants close monitoring as procurement details emerge.
Myanmar’s Kyaukphyu deep-sea port moves off the drawing board
Strategically, the most consequential development came from Myanmar. Following junta leader Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to China, a joint statement issued June 17 committed both sides to accelerate the long-stalled Kyaukphyu Deep-Sea Port and the Muse–Mandalay Railway, key components of the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor, according to Burma News International. The initial phase of the port is estimated at around $1.3 billion, developed through a joint venture in which China’s state-owned CITIC consortium holds 70 percent and Myanmar 30 percent.
Kyaukphyu, on the Bay of Bengal, has long been central to Beijing’s effort to secure an alternative energy and trade route to the Indian Ocean that bypasses the Malacca Strait. The decision to push the project forward in partnership with an internationally isolated military government raises governance, human-rights, and debt-sustainability questions that records suggest deserve sustained scrutiny — particularly around the terms under which a cash-strapped junta would finance its 30 percent stake.
Central Asia: the China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway gains two years
The $4.7 billion China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan (CKU) railway — perhaps the clearest signal of the BRI’s return to large infrastructure — is now being fast-tracked. At the Tashkent International Investment Forum, Uzbekistan’s deputy transport minister said the roughly 520-kilometer line could be completed by 2028, two years ahead of the original 2030 target, the Tashkent Times reported on June 19. Officials said the corridor is designed to handle up to 15 million tons of cargo annually and to cut delivery times by an average of seven days.
Financing illustrates the BRI’s evolving model. Of the $4.7 billion cost, a syndicate of the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China extended a 35-year loan of about $2.3 billion, according to the International Railway Journal, with the remainder contributed as equity by the three partner countries — China holding 51 percent and Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan 24.5 percent each. The equity-plus-syndicated-loan structure reflects Beijing’s post-default caution about taking on the full sovereign-credit risk that characterized earlier BRI lending.
Africa’s contract wave: Congo highways, Nigerian rail
Beyond the marquee deals, June produced a steady flow of mid-sized African awards. In Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo signed three contracts worth a combined $187 million on June 3 for the Mbanga–Lualaba section of National Highway No. 2, covering 206 kilometers of road and a 714-meter bridge, Bankable reported. The contractors were China First Highway Engineering, Sinohydro Bureau 14, and a China Jiangxi International consortium.
In Nigeria, the long-running Lagos–Kano railway modernization continued to advance under the familiar BRI template of Chinese policy-bank loans paired with a single state-owned contractor. Drawing on AidData records, reporting in June noted that China Eximbank provided a $1.267 billion preferential buyer’s credit for the Lagos–Ibadan section, while the China Development Bank disclosed a $254.76 million loan for the Kano–Kaduna line, with the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation as implementer. An earlier Abuja–Kaduna loan carried a 20-year maturity, a seven-year grace period, and a 2.5 percent interest rate, according to AidData’s China research — terms more concessional than commercial markets but still adding to a sovereign debt load that analysts continue to flag.
The debt overhang: 80 percent of the portfolio under strain
The new construction lands atop a portfolio under visible stress. An AidData working paper finds that an estimated 80 percent of China’s overseas lending portfolio in the Global South currently supports countries in financial distress, and that 55 percent of China’s loans to low- and middle-income countries have entered their principal-repayment windows — a figure projected to rise to 75 percent by 2030. Chinese development banks and development-finance institutions are now managing an estimated $1.1 trillion in outstanding debt, according to an April 2026 working paper by economist Yan Liang for the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.
That paper adds important context often lost in “debt-trap” framing: as of 2023, China held just 2.2 percent of the long-term public and publicly guaranteed debt stock of low- and middle-income countries, compared with 27 percent held by multilateral development banks and 58 percent by private bondholders. The data show China is a major bilateral creditor facing real repayment risk — not, on these figures, the dominant holder of the developing world’s debt. Recipient countries that records and prior coverage identify as acutely strained include Pakistan, where the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has generated an estimated $30 billion in obligations as it enters its 2026–2030 “long-term” phase, according to The Diplomat, alongside earlier defaulters Zambia, Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Suriname.
“Going dark”: opacity and rescue lending
AidData’s November 2025 Chasing China report reframes the entire picture. Tracking 30,000 projects worth $2.2 trillion across 217 countries from 2000 to 2023, the report finds that BRI infrastructure lending in the developing world now accounts for only about 20 percent of Beijing’s overall portfolio, while the share supporting high- and upper-middle-income countries has climbed from 12 percent to 76 percent. Crucially for accountability researchers, AidData reports that the discoverability of China’s lending records fell 62 percent between 2010 and 2023, and that the share of the portfolio routed through hard-to-track “non-standard” credit instruments rose from 49 percent in 2014 to 93 percent in 2023 — a portfolio, in the authors’ words, that is increasingly “going dark.”
A parallel trend is rescue lending. AidData’s research on China as an “international lender of last resort” documents more than $240 billion in emergency support to over 20 distressed debtor countries, much of it via People’s Bank of China swap lines, with such loans tending to be opaque, comparatively high-interest, and almost exclusively directed at BRI borrowers. The pattern, the data suggest, is a shift from building assets to defending the balance sheets of countries that can no longer comfortably service what they have already borrowed.
Corruption enforcement and influence: the persistent questions
On the accountability front, CSIS’s Reconnecting Asia work and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre have linked roughly 35 percent of surveyed BRI projects to scandals involving corruption, environmental harm, or labor violations. China’s own anti-graft body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has extended its anti-corruption drive to BRI projects since 2021, though analysts note enforcement has focused largely on the embezzlement of Chinese funds rather than on the bribery of foreign officials.
The influence dimension also remains live. A December 2025 analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argued that although nearly all U.S. Confucius Institutes have closed — from roughly 100 to fewer than five, per the U.S. Government Accountability Office — many of the underlying partnerships have reemerged under new names, while Chinese Students and Scholars Associations continue to feature in united-front activity, according to letters from members of Congress. The closures, in other words, may have changed the label more than the function — a claim that remains contested and merits independent verification campus by campus.
What warrants a deeper TIJ investigation
Three threads stand out for follow-up. First, Argentina’s Paraná waterway: a preliminary $10 billion, 25-year dredging concession awarded June 4 to Belgium’s Jan De Nul has drawn scrutiny because the winning bid’s local partner, Servimagnus, has acknowledged roughly two decades of project work with China’s state-owned CCCC Shanghai Dredging — whose parent has been under U.S. sanctions since 2020 over South China Sea island-building — per Bloomberg and CNN reporting. Both Jan De Nul and Servimagnus deny any Chinese involvement in the waterway tender; the contested award is a textbook case for documentary verification.
Second, CCCC’s dual record in Kenya — a fresh $2.9 billion mandate alongside a 2024 tax-evasion finding — invites a closer look at the procurement process and oversight provisions of the JKIA award. Third, the financing terms of Myanmar’s Kyaukphyu stake deserve examination: how an internationally isolated junta funds its share, and on what collateral, speaks directly to the debt-sustainability concerns this column tracks. As always, TIJ’s standard applies — every claim tied to a public record, allegations kept distinct from findings, and parties afforded a right of reply.
Sources and datasets: AidData (William & Mary); AidData, “Chasing China” (2025); Boston University GDP Center (2026); CSIS; CSIS Reconnecting Asia. Project reporting as linked.