This footage exists because Ethiopia stopped paying its loans.
Ethiopia defaulted on its Eurobond in December 2023, missing a $33M coupon and joining Ghana and Zambia on Africa's distressed-debt list. China holds roughly $13.7B of the country's $28B external debt. Beijing suspended Ethiopia's bilateral payments through 2024 instead of collecting. Collecting would have ended the BRI story before the cameras arrived. The video is what the story looks like when nobody pays the loans back.
Per capita, India sits around $2,700 and Ethiopia around $1,100. The income gap is 2.5x. The 24x figure folds in the population gap, 1.4 billion vs 132 million. India funds its infrastructure from a $4 trillion economy and its own tax base. Ethiopia funds it from suspended Chinese repayments, a $3.4B IMF Extended Credit Facility, and a currency that lost 30% the day the IMF made it float.
The corridor in the video has a name: the Corridor Development Project, launched by PM Abiy in December 2022 with a grand palace at its center. The lead contractor is China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation. Amnesty International documented 872 forced evictions from two Addis sub-cities in November 2024 alone. Satellite imagery confirmed 29 hectares of structural clearing in three months. Zero compensation reported by surveyed homeowners. Phase two covers 2,000 hectares. The project is now active in 58 cities. The artist who criticized it, Azeb Worku, was arrested in September 2024.
What you're watching is debt-financed footage that nobody can pay for, filmed on land cleared without compensation, in a country whose central bank holds $2.4B in reserves and runs on an IMF program just to keep the lights on.
The cooperation worked exactly as designed. For one of the parties.