The desire among political and financial leaders in Beijing to climb the value chain in development finance is clear. But the challenges now facing a giant Chinese state-run infrastructure contractor at Nigeria’s new deep-water port in Lekki show that this is easier said than done.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is as controversial now as it was a decade ago. Yet its legacy endures. Even as Beijing cuts funding to debt-saddled BRI states, the West is emulating Xi Jinping’s flagship development plan. The BRI is not dead but is quietly mutating into something much bigger and – whisper it quietly – perhaps better.

Laos faces bankruptcy, but like another crisis-ridden Asian state, Sri Lanka, its future is not in its own hands. That role is played by China, whose aggressive lending has helped to take one country to the brink of default and the other well past it.

In just a few years, the New Eurasian Land Bridge, which conveys rail freight between China and Europe, became a key part of Beijing’s fading Belt and Road Initiative. Thanks to sanctions levied against state operator Russian Railways, that vital trade link threatens to be disrupted – and possibly severed.

Until recently, poor nations joined the Belt and Road Initiative to secure access to funds flowing to the vast infrastructure project. Then the funds started to dry up. Does this presage a full-scale financial pull-back from the world by China?

A new report by US-based AidData tears China’s enormous Belt and Road Initiative to pieces. The project has mired hundreds of nations in debt, much of which is hidden even from host countries, and the project is increasingly unpopular.

Laos has twice postponed a bond that it badly needs to issue. A small country with few financing options, hit by Covid, downgraded and in debt to China – its problems are not unique.