The $2 trillion shadow lending empire that targeted the U.S. for two decades—China’s global financial offensive.

By Didi Tang, Bernard Condon and The Associated Press, published by Fortune.com

Summarized By Probe International

For the original article this summary is based on, see the publisher’s website here: ‘China Was Playing Chess While the Rest of Us Were Playing Checkers’: Bombshell Study Finds $200 Billion of Secret Loans to u.s. Businesses over 25 Year | Fortune.com

A bombshell investigation released by research lab AidData (College of William & Mary) has blown the lid off the most sophisticated state-directed financial infiltration campaign in modern history.

China’s actual overseas lending from 2000–2023: more than $2 trillion

That figure is double every previous public estimate and larger than the entire U.S. foreign-aid budget over the same period—combined. And the most dangerous part? A huge chunk of that money didn’t go to African ports or Pakistani highways.
It flowed quietly, secretly, into the United States and other advanced economies—to buy pieces of the technologies that will decide who wins wars of the future.

Beijing’s lenders—policy banks and state-owned giants ultimately controlled by the Communist Party’s Central Financial Commission—operated under an iron rule: strategic goals first, profits optional. To evade detection they built a global labyrinth:

• Western-sounding shell companies in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Luxembourg;
• Offshore branches (more than 100 new ones in recent years) that lend to offshore entities, erasing any Chinese fingerprint;
• Confidentiality clauses and deliberate mislabeling that fooled international databases.

The AidData report documents dozens of previously unknown cases where Chinese state credit financed acquisitions of sensitive U.S. assets. U.S. regulators only discovered Beijing’s hidden hand years later and forced divestment.

From robotics to rare-earth processors to semiconductor design houses to biotech companies working on gene editing— a hit list of U.S. crown jewels were touched by invisible threads of Chinese state money.

This global pattern wasn’t confined to just America. Chinese state credit quietly financed stakes in:

• An Australian rare-earth miner crucial for F-35 magnets;
• A Dutch semiconductor equipment firm;
• Portuguese power-grid assets;
• Canadian companies with Arctic mineral rights.

Every single one a potential economic chokepoint in a crisis.

This was never about charity or even normal commercial ambition. The AidData team watched in real time as Beijing pivoted its state-lending apparatus from “build roads in poor countries”—as part of its Belt & Road Initiative—to acquiring the technologies and resources that could potentially disrupt advanced economies.

The full AidData report is now public.