Borrowing in the Shadow of China

China's rise as a major lender to emerging economies since the early 2000s has introduced a unique form of lender power: borrowers cannot default on the subsidized loans they receive, but may still face sudden rollover demands outside their control. We argue this distinctive structure—bilateral rollover risk without default risk—disciplines recipient countries' borrowing on international markets. In a quantitative long-term sovereign debt model, we show that such rollover-prone nondefaultable Chinese loans expose market debt to dilution risk: governments may need to tap international lenders when repayment to China comes due, and therefore choose to deleverage from private markets when Chinese inflows arrive. Market debt and bond yield dynamics in the data are consistent with this “disciplining effect.” We then use the model to study two geopolitical scenarios: a bloc-formation exercise in which China offers take-it-or-leave-it loans to induce the borrower's exit from international debt markets, and an optimal exposure-to-China problem under the risk of a permanent and sudden retrenchment of Chinese funding. Together, these results show how official finance à la China can simultaneously improve market borrowing conditions and become a new destabilizing force to the global sovereign debt architecture as geopolitical alliances shift.