The Chinese Debt Trap Diplomacy Narrative: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract China’s debt trap diplomacy has been debated among academia, think tanks, and the policymaking community. Unlike previous research, which mainly focuses on China’s lending practice and strategic intentions, this study looks at the measurement of this narrative and its relations with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China threat narratives. In particular, based on Google Trends search results from 1 February 2018 to 7 November 2021, this study creatively created weekly time series data to measure the narratives. Based on an autoregressive distributed lag model, this study finds that the BRI narrative and the China threat narrative make significant contributions to the debt trap diplomacy narrative. Results based on sub-datasets show that these significant relations are mainly driven by the English-speaking Indian public and that these relations are insignificant in the United States. This study contributes to the literature on China’s debt trap diplomacy by bringing solid empirical evidence and to academia as well in methods by presenting a (still) new quantitative approach to international relations.