Except this bank has an army

More like if you owe the mob $100 and you fail to pay, you might get a broken finger. If you owe the mob $1 million and fail to pay they will gift you cement boots.

I don't know whether this should be hastily dismissed as "FUD": Do you want to live in a world where all of your country's critical infrastructure is owned by Chinese state-owned corporations as soon as your government can no longer service its loans to Beijing?

... The situation is certainly not entirely comparable, but since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, we have seen the problems Germany has had with the fact that its gas storage facilities belong to Gazprom...

Aggressively recouping your over leveraged junk loans is indication of economic health?

Great jokes and all, but the Belt and Road Initiative has been a pretty smart and successful tactical move to consolidate soft power in Africa and other developing regions, and ensuring that their governments are beholden to Beijing for the foreseeable future.

And they did it all without mobilizing a single troop, but rather by making people's lives better.

Not a fan of China, and it's obvious that the Belt and Road Initiative is 100% a debt trap, but I gotta give them credit for pulling it off.

This is definitely much deeper into the grey zone than the US's (or "the West" in general) past dalliances in colonialism which were far more black and white, and straight up horrific

Yes that's why it strange that a communist county is doing it, no?

I think in many cases China takes control of the infrastructure they built since the countries miss payments.

This was widely predicted to be the Chinese strategy: make loans to countries they knew could not pay with favorable terms for China when the country defaults.

It happened in Sri Lanka a while ago. China financed the construction of a new deep water port. The port is finished, but Sri Lanka can't service the debt so the new port is now under China's control (99 years lease agreement).

When the US builds an oil export terminal in Nigeria, the location is fully privatized and administered by western nationals. There's no path from the dockyard to the manager's office. There's no state interest in the facilities, save some meager tax revenue that's shaved to the bone by accounting tricks. There's no Nigerian retirees who get to profit off the dockyard's operations through pensions or 401ks. The ports are export-oriented, with the intention of taking Nigerian natural resources out.

When a Chinese state enterprise builds a dockyard in Kenya, there's shared ownership out of the gate. Kenyans share managerial roles. Kenyans share equity. The Kenyan state government gets a huge boost in revenues. And the ports are bidirectional, with Kenyan locals getting to benefit from cheap Chinese imports - particularly high tech imports like electronics and motor vehicles - as Chinese firms export Kenyan minerals.

Bi-directional trade is how the old English colonies worked, too. And that trade made English colonial enclaves incredibly prosperous both for the old world mercantilists and the new world plantation bosses. Its a lucrative model for everyone on the inside track.

The worst thing you can say about China is that they're simply doing imperialism better than the Americans.

This is the part where the liberals assure me China's evil plan of checks notes helping build infrastructure in the areas of the world ruined by colonialism while using a more generous lending scheme than the competition leads to them annexing half of Africa, somehow.

The difference is leverage. Having $0.9T of US treasury bonds does not give China much leverage over the US because those would likely be absorbed by other countries fairly easily. Yeah, the dollar's value would likely dip a tiny bit but nothing catastrophic. That is much different than China having a large chunk of a developing nation's debt. Developing nations constantly have issues getting decent terms on their loans so if China up and says they will not roll the loans over into a new one, the country likely has to try to finance the debt at a much higher interest rate or have lots of strings attached. China has much more leverage in these cases.