December 14, 2020 Advertisement China is in no way a newcomer to the Caribbean in terms of providing development assistance: Beijing’s first foreign aid project in the Western Hemisphere was a brick factory in Guyana built in the 1970s. More recently and much more substantially, it has been estimated that over the last two decades, China’s policy banks have provided close to $9 billion in lending to the states of the Caribbean Community states (CARICOM), with the overwhelming majority of these loans coming from the Export-Import Bank of China (Ex-Im Bank). The Caribbean has received less attention than most other regions in terms of the evaluation of Chinese lending practices. This is ironic in that the Caribbean could have served as “the canary in the coal mine” of Chinese lending long before the Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) Hambantota port debacle in Sri Lanka came to light and governments began to reconsider their relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature global initiative.