The Washington-based think-tank Centre for Global Development Studies released in late March, in collaboration with AidData, a research lab at the College of William and Mary, a study of China's lending practices by offering a first-of-its-kind analysis of 100 contracts across 24 developing countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, including Montenegro, Kyrgyzstan, and Serbia. The authors identified three key features: a reliance on secrecy clauses to keep borrowing governments from revealing the details of their debt; terms meant to keep Chinese debt out of collective restructuring; and clauses allowing for the cancellation of debt or accelerated repayments, which could potentially influence the policies of debtor countries. According to the Center for Global Development study, all of the China Development Bank contracts and 43 per cent of the Export-Import Bank of China deals seen by the authors included confidentiality clauses about the terms of the loans. The study showed that all of the China Development Bank contracts and 43 per cent of the Export-Import Bank of China deals seen by the authors included confidentiality clauses about the terms of the loans. The authors note that confidentiality is a feature in many loans and in the Chinese contracts the borrowing government, rather than the lender, is committed to nondisclosure.
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