Belt & Road Watch is The Investigative Journal’s monthly accounting of China’s overseas infrastructure, lending and influence operations, drawn from academic datasets, government filings and primary-source documents. Figures are cited to the research institutions that compiled them. Where a claim rests on allegation rather than finding, we say so.
A $10.2 Billion Canal, and a Record First Half
On September 16, Beijing opened the Pinglu Canal, a 134.2-kilometer artificial waterway running from Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, to the Beibu Gulf — the Gulf of Tonkin — giving China’s landlocked southwest a direct maritime outlet toward Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and the wider ASEAN market. Chinese authorities put the construction cost at 72.7 billion yuan, roughly $10.2 billion. Vessels of up to 5,000 tonnes can now transit the route.
It is, by Beijing’s own description, the first large river-to-sea canal planned and built under national coordination since 1949. Independent coverage of the opening is available from Al Jazeera and, in the United States, from the Denver Gazette. Chinese state outlets have promoted the canal heavily; TIJ does not treat those outlets as independent sources, and the cost and dimension figures above should be read as official Chinese government figures rather than independently audited ones.
The canal is domestic infrastructure, not a Belt and Road project in the lending sense. Its significance is that it feeds the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor — the logistics spine Beijing has been assembling to route southwestern Chinese exports to Southeast Asia without transiting the Pearl River Delta or the Malacca Strait chokepoint. Read alongside the port acquisitions below, it suggests a continued Chinese emphasis on controlling the physical routing of its own trade.
Record BRI Engagement — and Two Conspicuous Absences
The most consequential data release of the quarter came in July from the Green Finance & Development Center, whose semiannual accounting is a standard reference for BRI deal flow. Its 2026 H1 report, authored by Christoph Nedopil Wang, records the highest first-half BRI engagement since the initiative began in 2013.
The headline numbers: $49.8 billion in investment and $76.5 billion in construction contracts, for combined engagement of $126.4 billion across roughly 186 deals. Construction contracts rose $12.2 billion against the first half of 2025; investment fell $6.2 billion. Cumulative BRI engagement since 2013 now stands at $1.539 trillion — $926 billion in construction, $614 billion in investment.
Several findings in the dataset cut against the conventional picture of a retrenching BRI:
- Africa again led regional engagement, with Chinese BRI investment nearly tripling year-on-year to $33.5 billion — the highest figure the dataset has recorded for the continent.
- The Middle East led construction engagement at $36.5 billion, a record for any first half since 2013.
- Energy engagement reached $36.3 billion, with 56 percent of it in green energy — more than $20 billion, matching the whole of 2025, and over 20 GW of confirmed green generation capacity.
- Metals and mining reached $21.8 billion in six months, higher than any full year on record except 2025, and concentrated in processing rather than extraction — steel in Egypt, aluminum in Kazakhstan.
- Transportation grew for the first time since 2020, to $18.2 billion, entirely through construction contracts.
- The private sector’s share of engagement reached 48 percent, up from 13 percent in 2020 — a shift that complicates the assumption that BRI activity equals state-owned enterprise activity.
Two absences stand out. The dataset records no Chinese BRI engagement in Pakistan or Russia in the first half of 2026. For Pakistan — long presented as the flagship corridor, with tens of billions committed under CPEC — a full half-year at zero warrants explanation that neither Beijing nor Islamabad has publicly provided. TIJ regards this as a candidate for deeper reporting.
One item in the report deserves flagging on its own terms: a Chinese company has agreed to build a 660 MW coal-fired power plant in Zambia, with approvals still pending. That is a country already in the middle of a sovereign debt restructuring in which Chinese creditors are a principal party.
Ports: Egypt, and the Hutchison Endgame
COSCO Shipping Ports, the terminal arm of the Chinese state-owned shipping conglomerate, has moved to acquire a 25 percent stake in the new container terminal at Sokhna, Egypt, in a 30-year arrangement with total project investment reported at $375 million, according to Yicai Global. Sokhna sits at the southern entrance to the Suez Canal. COSCO has separately launched a direct maritime route linking Qingdao with Dar es Salaam, Mombasa and Durban.
The larger story remains the contested sale of CK Hutchison Holdings’ global port portfolio. Reporting by The Maritime Executive and Bloomberg indicates China Merchants Group has entered talks to join a consortium — which also includes BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and Terminal Investment Ltd — in a structure that could help finance COSCO’s participation. Reporting suggests the arrangement under discussion would allocate COSCO larger stakes in ports located in jurisdictions friendlier to Beijing, including in Africa, while other consortium members take control elsewhere.
The transaction has not closed, and the ownership structure remains under negotiation. But the direction of travel — Chinese state capital taking equity positions in terminals adjacent to two of the world’s most sensitive maritime chokepoints — is documented in the deal reporting itself.
Central Asia: The CKU Railway Advances
The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway, the most strategically significant rail project in Central Asia, is roughly 17 percent complete, The Diplomat reported in July. Eight major bridges are under construction, with more than 10,000 workers and over 7,000 pieces of specialized machinery deployed.
The financing structure is the part that merits attention. Total project cost is put at approximately $4.7 billion. China is providing a $2.3 billion loan — roughly half the project — with China contributing a further $1.1 billion and Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan contributing $573 million each, according to Global Construction Review. Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov announced in March 2026 a completion target of 2030.
Kyrgyzstan’s share of that structure, measured against the size of its economy, is the exposure worth tracking. The route would give Chinese freight a corridor to Europe and the Middle East that bypasses Russian territory — a consideration that has grown more salient, and which may bear on the absence of recorded Chinese BRI engagement in Russia noted above.
Debt Distress: Laos Remains the Sharpest Case
Among heavily indebted BRI recipients, Laos remains the most acute. Research published by the Lowy Institute finds Laotian public and publicly guaranteed debt exceeding 100 percent of GDP, with China holding 51 percent of that PPG debt — the highest concentration of Chinese exposure among debt-distressed sovereigns. Laos has not formally defaulted, but the Lowy analysis attributes that to repeated ad hoc deferrals from Beijing: roughly $2.5 billion in deferred debt service, estimated at about 8 percent of Laotian GDP by end-2022, alongside a renewed RMB 6 billion (approximately $900 million) swap line from the People’s Bank of China.
Laos is shut out of international bond markets and has not sought an IMF program. Unlike Zambia and Sri Lanka, it has no structured restructuring to point to. The Lowy researchers argue the deferral model has a finite runway.
Where China has participated in structured restructurings, the pattern documented by researchers is consistent: maturity extension and coupon reduction rather than principal reduction. In Zambia, principal on external loans was not reduced; extended maturities and lower coupons produced what analysts characterized as an effective 15 percent haircut for bilateral creditors. In Sri Lanka, reporting indicates Chinese creditors proposed new lending to retire old obligations.
The macro frame comes from AidData at William & Mary, whose research finds Beijing undertook 128 rescue-lending operations across 22 debtor countries worth $240 billion through the end of 2021 — a shift from development lender to lender of last resort. AidData’s November 2025 release, led by executive director Bradley Parks, documents a further reorientation: sharply reduced infrastructure lending to BRI participants, expanded liquidity support, and new lending into high-income economies targeting critical infrastructure, critical minerals and high-technology asset acquisition, including semiconductor firms. Parks’s framing is that the BRI and China’s overseas lending program are no longer the same thing.
For country-level detail, Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center maintains the Chinese Loans to Africa database, which records 1,319 loan commitments totaling $180.87 billion from 42 Chinese lenders to 49 African governments and seven regional institutions between 2000 and 2024. The State Department published its own congressionally mandated accounting, “The Extent of Debt Owed to the PRC in Key Regions of the World,” in May 2026 under Section 7016(b) of the FY26 appropriations act.
Digital Silk Road: Infrastructure Share Keeps Compounding
Research from Georgetown University’s Africa-China Initiative and reporting by Semafor put Huawei’s share of Africa’s 4G network infrastructure at approximately 70 percent, with active relationships across more than 25 African countries and data center investment earmarked at over $300 million by the end of 2026. Huawei announced a next-generation data center networking product for the Southern African market in July.
The competitive contrast is instructive: a $1 billion data center project in Kenya backed by Microsoft and the UAE’s G42 will not proceed, according to Semafor’s reporting. The policy question this raises is not about any single contract but about whether the sovereignty and security concerns Western governments have raised regarding Chinese telecom infrastructure are being matched by viable commercial alternatives on the ground.
Corruption and Influence: Findings Versus Allegations
China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has extended its anti-corruption campaign to BRI projects, as documented by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and analyzed by CSIS. The pattern analysts describe is that Beijing’s enforcement priority is embezzlement of Chinese funds by Chinese personnel, not bribery of foreign officials. A Guangzhou court sentenced two former officials of China Railway Tunnel Group in 2023 in a case involving bribery of Singaporean officials and embezzlement. Separately, a substantial list of Chinese firms has been debarred by the World Bank and other multilateral development banks for fraud and corruption.
Broader estimates of bribery prevalence among Chinese firms operating abroad circulate widely in the literature but rest on survey methodologies of varying rigor; TIJ does not treat them as established findings. What is documented is the debarment record and the individual prosecutions.
On influence operations, the record is firmer where courts have ruled. The Justice Department has named the United Front Work Department in multiple transnational repression prosecutions, including the 2023 case involving an unauthorized Chinese police facility in Manhattan’s Chinatown; co-defendant Chen Jinping pleaded guilty in December 2024 to conspiring to act as an agent of the PRC. Safeguard Defenders has documented at least 102 “Chinese Overseas Police Service Centers” across 53 countries.
On Confucius Institutes, Government Accountability Office findings confirm the number at U.S. institutions fell from a 2017 peak of roughly 118 to fewer than five, largely following the 2018 federal funding restriction. Research from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argues the partnerships have in substantial part reconstituted under different names. That is a contested interpretive claim rather than a settled finding, and TIJ flags it as such.
What Warrants Deeper Investigation
Four threads from this month’s record merit sustained reporting:
The Pakistan zero. A full half-year with no recorded Chinese BRI engagement in what was the initiative’s flagship corridor is either a data artifact or a significant strategic development. Neither government has explained it.
Zambia’s coal plant. A 660 MW Chinese-built coal facility proposed for a country mid-restructuring, in the same period Beijing is publicizing a record green-energy share, is a contradiction worth documenting through the approval filings.
Hutchison terminal allocation. If the final consortium structure allocates specific terminals to COSCO by geography, the resulting map of Chinese state equity at chokepoints is a public-interest document that should be reconstructed from filings rather than press releases.
AidData’s high-income pivot. Chinese lending into advanced economies targeting semiconductors and critical minerals falls outside the BRI frame entirely, and outside most existing monitoring. It is the least-covered element of the current picture.
Right of reply: TIJ did not seek comment from the Chinese government or the state-owned enterprises named in this report, as it advances no original allegations against them. Every factual claim above is attributed to a named public record, dataset, court filing or published report.