The national flag flies in front of China's central bank in Beijing in 2022. In Canada, China has built a US$21.3-billion portfolio of official-sector finance, according to an investigation by U.S.-based AidData.

A sweeping investigation into the scale of Beijing’s overseas lending has found that China has amassed a global lending portfolio worth more than US$2-trillion – a figure at least twice what earlier estimates suggested.

The totals uncovered in the study by the U.S.-based AidData, which draws on more than two decades of dealmaking across 30,000 projects, offer the most complete picture to date of China’s overseas lending and point to a system far larger and more complex than official reporting has suggested.

A significant and growing share of China’s lending since 2000 has gone

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