Dear Editor,
In a recent commentary on the latest CARICOM meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the author briefly noted that Washington’s renewed focus on the Caribbean has a great deal to do with China’s growing footprint in the region. That passing remark provoked a familiar question: “What is China really up to?” The suspicion is that something must be wrong whenever Beijing finances a port, a road or a solar farm.
Yet if the starting point is the realities of Caribbean and other small island developing states (SIDS), a different interpretation emerges. The more uncomfortable story is less about China misbehaving and more about others failing, for decades, to deliver what these countries have clearly said they need.
Across SIDS, the diagnosis is well established. These states are among the most climate vulnerable in the world, yet many are classified as middle or high income, which makes access to concessional finance and debt relief extremely difficult.
They often pay more in debt service than they receive in climate finance, while the annual adaptation finance gap runs into billions of dollars.
One hurricane can wipe out the equivalent of a year’s GDP overnight. Leaders have said bluntly that the global financial system was never designed with their economies in mind.
Even when money exists on paper, getting to it is a maze. Accessing climate and development funds means high transaction cost, long delays and a bias toward large projects and loan based instruments that deepen already heavy debt burdens.
Many development banks and philanthropies still perceive small islands as “high risk, low scale” clients: too small to matter, too complex to fit standard project models. In practice, countries on the frontlines of climate change are kept at the back of the financing line. In that context, it is hardly surprising that Caribbean and other small island governments are paying close attention to what China puts on the table.
Over the past 15 years, Chinese state lenders and firms have become major players in Latin American and Caribbean infrastructure and energy, extending tens of billions of dollars across the region and backing ports, transport links and power projects. Globally, the Belt and Road Initiative has driven record levels of overseas construction and investment, with a growing share in renewable and “green” sectors.
For small states struggling to finance resilient infrastructure, these are not abstractions; they are potential roads, hospitals, fibre optic cables and solar parks that domestic budgets and traditional partners have not delivered at scale.
China has also branded itself as a demand driven, South-South partner. Its official discourse stresses mutual benefit, non interference and respect for national development plans. Where traditional donors often favour small, incremental projects and heavy policy dialogue, China has been prepared to discuss larger, more visible infrastructure packages that sit squarely on ministers’ priority lists. In market terms, Beijing has chosen a segment others under served: big, executable investments in countries with high needs and few alternatives.
At this point a basic question arises, one that sits in the background of any CARICOM-US conversation about “competition” in the region. Nations, just like firms, operate in a world of competition for market share – of influence, trade, investment and ideas. Competition and diversification are applauded when private companies or Western governments vie for contracts.
Why should that same competitive logic suddenly be suspect when the player is China? If it is considered healthy for European or American actors to fight for infrastructure or telecoms deals in the Caribbean, on what principled basis is similar behaviour by China treated as inherently improper?
None of this means the risks are imaginary. There are serious concerns about debt sustainability, opaque contracts, environmental and social safeguards, and the dangers of leaning too heavily on any single partner – China, the United States, Europe or anyone else for that matter.
The wider region already offers examples of underperforming projects, cost overruns and governance strains linked to external financing. Caribbean institutions and citizens are right to demand that every deal – Chinese or otherwise – meet tests of value for money, resilience and sovereignty.
But acknowledging risk is not the same as declaring China’s role illegitimate. Its growing presence is better read as a symptom of a deeper structural problem: a persistent mismatch between what the traditional aid and climate finance system offers and what small, vulnerable economies actually need.
The 2024 SIDS conference in Antigua and Barbuda, for example, called for a retooled global financial architecture, for vulnerability based access to concessional resources and for far more adaptation and transformation finance. These are moderate asks: align rules with the realities of economies whose per capita income hides extreme exposure to shocks.
Progress has been sluggish. In that vacuum, China and a few others have moved faster to respond to infrastructure and connectivity gaps in small states.
Seen from this angle, the real scandal is not that China is willing to finance ports, hospitals or solar plants in small islands. It is that, after decades of speeches about shared vulnerability and climate justice, it took so long for anyone to respond at scale to clearly articulated needs.
China’s rise in the development marketplace exposes a hard truth: the current menu of instruments from traditional donors and institutions still does not match the risk profiles, fiscal constraints and project realities of SIDS.
The strategic question for Caribbean and other small island governments – on display in every encounter with Washington, Beijing or Brussels – is therefore not “China or the West?” but “How do we use competition to get a better deal from all of them?” That means insisting on transparency and strong safeguards in Chinese backed projects, while pushing multilateral and traditional partners to modernise their products: more grants and guarantees for resilience, simpler procedures, and tools tailored to small administrations and small but urgent projects.
For vulnerable island societies, the imperative is to stay clear eyed about every external partner and to defend long term interests with discipline. But they should also reject narratives that cast them as naïve pawns in other people’s geopolitical games.
When China steps into spaces others have left empty, it is not automatically breaking the rules. More often, it is behaving like any competitive state in a crowded marketplace – reading demand, adjusting its offer, and reminding the rest of the world that needs ignored for too long will always find a new supplier.
Michael Willem
