Oh, so, now China is the new IMF? Are they also requiring governments to privatize and cut social spending in education, health and housing like the IMF does?
No. China doesn't do that. That's why corrupt leaders love Chinese loans.
Unlike the IMF, China simply doesn't care that the loans will not actually lead to any improvements for the citizens of the recipient country, and are happy for the leaders to simply pocket the money in return for the country and its citizens paying China high rates and then eventually giving away the project to the Chinese.
The IMF/World Bank have been consistently maligned, but it's increasingly clear that their demands for prudence is beneficial to the actual citizens of the country. The negative consequences are not a result of the financial prudence they require, but rather, a result of the mess the country got themselves in so they needed to go to the IMF to get money in the first place.
The difference between the IMF and Chinese loans is that the IMF is a lender of last resort, whereas China's loans are for greenfield projects to country that are in perfectly fine financial situations.
The Chinese loans are attractive to leaders of countries because it allows them to advertise huge development projects, which are in many cases unsustainable and fiscally destructive, while pocketing most of the money, and letting the actual negative impacts, which show up a few years later, be dealt with by a future administration and the citizens of the country.
A closer analogy to the Chinese loans are World Bank loans, and while they have strict requirements, they've not really ever led to countries facing these massive debts, even though countries have been borrowing from the World Bank for far longer than from China.
