The United States gets more loans from China than any other country in the world, according to a massive new dataset spanning 24 years that turns conventional wisdom on its head—and shows that China's overseas loans are geared toward increasing its own national power.

While most people had long believed that China's overseas lending and its much smaller grant-making were focused on developing countries via its development and infrastructure-oriented Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the report by the AidData research lab at the College of William & Mary in Virginia says that today more than three quarters of China's overseas loans go to wealthy countries and were strategic in nature, focused on critical infrastructure and minerals, and high-tech assets.

"The overall size of China's portf

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