Mapping China’s Overseas Financing - with Yunnan Chen and Teal Emery

In this episode we continue our series on China’s overseas investment trends. In the first episode, we talked with Christoph Nedopil about Chinese investment in the Belt-and Road Initiative (BRI) countries, how both green and dirty investments surged in 2025, and how big deals are back, as opposed to small-is-beautiful we heard a few years ago. In the second episode with Mathias Larsen, we delved into the regional aspects of China’s overseas energy investments in batteries, EVs, solar and hydrogen.

Today, we’re going to go a step deeper, discussing a report published by ODI Global: “Greener on the other side? Mapping China's overseas co-financing and financial innovation.” The report discusses the ‘changing ecosystem’ of China’s overseas finance, pegging a part of that ecosystem as supporting green investment, while other parts do not. The report also discusses a ‘mismatch’ between some lending ‘and the regions and sectors most in need of energy transition support.’

Dr Yunnan Chen is a Research Fellow in ODI Global’s Development and Public Finance program, where her work focuses on the changing global financial governance of development finance and export credit, and China’s overseas finance in the global south. She obtained her PhD from Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington DC, where she was also a researcher at the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative (CARI), as well as with the BU Global Development Policy Center and the Center for Global Development (CGD).

Teal Emery is the founder of Teal Insights, where he is building an open-source ecosystem of tools for sovereign debt and climate analysis. Previously, he spent seven years as an emerging markets sovereign research analyst at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, traveling regularly to China, Africa, the Middle East, and across the developing world. He has been looking at China's role in global finance for over a decade. He co-authored several papers on sovereign debt and sustainable finance at the World Bank.

Today's episode covers:

• The new pressures that Chinese banks face, and how these pressures force them to take measures to reduce risks -- with implications for green lending.
• Why green lending is still dominated by multilateral development banks and development finance instead of by commercial banks.
• For green lending from China that does take place, what are the biggest mismatches between today's green lending and the actual need for green investment?
• The role of cooperation on project preparation, and specifically the MCDF (Multilateral Center for Development Finance), which was supposed to provide support for least developed countries to prepare projects for receiving green loans.

We did have an unexpected guest on the programme today, a young infant who woke from a nap at just the wrong time! As a result, about 40 seconds of the program had to be cut out. The text from Yunnan Chen's final answer that got cut off was as follows:

"If you look at what MCDF has been doing so far it’s been quite successful in creating collaborations between MDBs and institutions in the global south. In terms of capacity it’s small, its funds are in the tens of millions and it suffers from some of the same problems that some of these global project preparations have. It’s small, there’s too many of them and it’s a very fragmented ecosystem."

For further reading:

Yunnan Chen and Teal Emery, "Greener on the Other Side? Mapping China's Overseas Co-financing and Financial Innovation," ODI Global, 2025, at https://odi.org/en/publications/greener-on-the-other-side-mapping-chinas-overseas-co-financing-and-financial-innovation/.