Chinese Debt Trap Diplomacy in Africa: The Experience of Ghana

Abstract

Following its so-called “Go Out” policy, The People’s Republic of China has in recent times come under international scrutiny for deliberately burdening the world’s most impoverished nations with excessive public debt. Using the conceptual lens of neo-colonialism espoused by Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah, combined with relevant documentary data, we seek to scrutinise the experiences of Ghana in relation to this so-called Chinese debt diplomacy. Consequently, we conclude that while Nkrumah’s assumptions on neo-colonialism are in their entirety far-fetched relative to the Chinese investment capital in Ghana at the moment, disturbing phenomenon such as Chinese foray into Ghana’s retail market, collateralization of Chinese loans using Ghana’s natural resources and the Chinese citizens’ involvement in the illegal small-scale gold mining in southern parts of Ghana are some of the dangerous pitfalls that can be pointed out as the symptoms of  this centre-periphery relations.