China’s belt and road could fill ‘vacuum’ after Trump’s USAID freeze: analysts

With the future of the US development agency in doubt, China could step in to continue funding infrastructure projects for countries in need

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A funding freeze has left the status of the United States Agency for International Development in doubt. Photo: AFP

Published: 9:30pm, 4 Feb 2025

US President Donald Trump’s spending freeze for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) could allow China to fill the resultant gap under the aegis of its Belt and Road Initiative, analysts said.

The 12-year-old initiative provides low-interest loans for highways, ports and power plants in scores of developing countries – many of which are also recipients of funding from USAID, an agency whose operations Trump halted this week.

Countries reliant on the 64-year-old aid programme may turn to China for support or other concessional investments in infrastructure projects – unless China offers first.

“There is a vacuum,” said Sharif Naubakhar, a professor of public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Even though the belt and road is not aid, it is infrastructure, it is energy, clean water.”

China would be a “winner” of the USAID closure as it seeks “access to vital resources abroad” and tries to “build alliances that are not in US national interests”, said Cornell University applied economics and policy professor Christopher Barrett in a statement on Monday.

Economically troubled Bangladesh is likely to be among the first to approach China if USAID pulls out, according to a January 29 analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank.