China has heavily funded and constructed infrastructure, energy, and port projects across the Caribbean through the Belt and Road Initiative and state-backed loans. Key developments include deep-water port expansions in Jamaica and Cuba, renewable energy and solar parks, and large-scale commercial zones that have significantly expanded Beijing's regional and strategic influence.There's a stretch of road in Jamaica that locals half-jokingly call the "Beijing Highway." It cuts through the mountains between Caymanas in St Catherine and Ocho Rios in St Ann, and it's the clearest illustration yet of a pattern quietly reshaping infrastructure across the region: Caribbean governments turning to Chinese state financing to build what traditional lenders won't, on terms that are rarely made fully public.
From highways to container ports to mega-resorts, Chinese capital and Chinese state-owned construction firms have become fixtures of Caribbean development. Here's what we actually know about how these deals are structured — and why they've become a flashpoint for debate about sovereignty, debt, and who really benefits.
Case Study: Jamaica's North-South Highway
The North-South Highway — officially Phase 2 of the Highway 2000 project — is the single biggest Chinese infrastructure investment in the Caribbean, and its financing structure has become something of a template for how these deals get done.
The structure: In 2011, a special purpose company called the Jamaica North-South Highway Company Limited (JNSHC) was set up by a Barbados-registered holding company controlled by China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) subsidiaries — CCCC International, China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC), and several affiliated engineering units. JNSHC was granted a 50-year build-operate-transfer (BOT) concession: it would finance, design, build, and operate the 66.47-km toll road, then hand it back to the Jamaican government at no cost once the concession expired.
The money: The project was financed on a 75:25 debt-to-equity split. In August 2013, the China Development Bank (CDB) issued two loans — one for US$425.5 million and a second denominated in RMB — both carrying a 20-year maturity, a 3-year grace period, and an interest rate pegged at 6-month LIBOR plus 460 basis points (roughly 5% at the time). CHEC and its partners covered the remaining equity portion, reported at around US$150 million.
Critically, under the original concession agreement, the Jamaican government committed to no direct financial investment and no loan guarantees, revenue guarantees, or traffic guarantees. On paper, the risk sat with the Chinese-backed project company.
The land: This is where the deal gets more complicated — and more controversial. Toll receipts alone weren't projected to give CHEC sufficient return on its investment, so as part of the financing arrangement the government agreed to transfer 500 hectares (1,235 acres) of state-owned land along the highway corridor to CHEC, to be developed into commercial centres, housing schemes, and hotel properties that would help the company recoup its costs. A baseline value of roughly US$2 million per acre was set at the outset in 2011; one parcel at Mammee Bay, St Ann, earmarked for hotel development, was later independently valued at US$44 million. Years after the highway opened in 2016, much of that land still hadn't been formally identified or transferred — and NROCC's own explanations for the delay have been described as opaque.
The cost to drivers: The full project, including the Mount Rosser Bypass, came in at roughly US$730 million. Tolls range from US$600 to US$3,700 (in Jamaican dollars, across four vehicle classes), and affordability complaints — from everyday commuters to the Jamaica Truckers Association — followed almost immediately after the road opened.
It's Not Just Highways: The Port of Kingston
If the North-South Highway shows how China finances new infrastructure, the Port of Kingston shows how Chinese capital moves into existing infrastructure through ownership stakes.
Kingston Freeport Terminal Limited (KFTL) has held a 30-year concession to operate the Kingston Container Terminal — the third-largest container hub in the Caribbean, handling more than 60% of regional cargo transit — since 2015. KFTL was originally a joint venture between French shipping giant CMA CGM (51%) and China Merchants Port Holdings (49%), a Chinese state-owned enterprise. In 2020, CMA CGM sold its stake to its own joint venture partner as part of a larger US$814.78 million global asset sale, handing China Merchants full control of Kingston's port operations. The U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica at the time publicly flagged concerns about Chinese ownership of port facilities in the region.
The financing behind Kingston's port upgrades has actually been more multilateral than the highway: the Inter-American Development Bank led with a US$125 million "A-loan" and a US$90 million "B-loan," while the China Infrastructure Fund contributed a smaller US$50 million loan. Jamaica's port expansion has continued into 2025 through several concurrent projects — an US$80 million Westlands Expansion Project and a further US$50 million in investment announced by the Port Authority of Jamaica, neither of which involve a Chinese contractor. Separately, CHEC was awarded a Kingston Port Container Terminal Yard Phase I contract by KFTL in June 2025, a 25-month engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) job — CHEC's own regional office describes the award but doesn't disclose a contract value. Chinese trade media has reported the CHEC contract at US$320 million, but that figure hasn't been corroborated by Jamaican outlets and should be treated as unconfirmed.
The Antigua Model: Land-for-Development at Scale
Antigua and Barbuda offers a third variant — where the primary currency isn't a loan repaid in tolls, but land itself.
In 2014, newly elected Prime Minister Gaston Browne signed a memorandum with Chinese investor Yida Zhang for a US$740.7 million mixed-use tourism project on Guiana Island and roughly 600 hectares of land previously owned by convicted fraudster Allen Stanford. The plan — branded "Singulari" — envisioned five luxury hotels, 1,300 residential units, a casino, a 27-hole golf course, and the Caribbean's largest casino complex, built out over a 1,600-acre special economic zone with its own tax waivers. Separately, Browne announced a US$255 million Chinese-financed rebuild of St John's port itself.
More than a decade on, the project remains a case study in how these deals can drift from their original terms. Reporting has since described the zone as effectively "a state within a state," with Yida's Antigua-based entity controlling thousands of acres inside the country's largest marine conservation area and holding exclusive rights to process Citizenship-by-Investment applications from Chinese nationals — rights only stripped in 2025 amid a broader ownership shake-up, after Yida Zhang's own assets were frozen by Antigua's High Court over an unrelated US$5.4 million debt judgment.
The Regional Picture
Jamaica and Antigua aren't outliers — they're part of a broader wave. Trinidad and Tobago became the first Caribbean nation to join China's Belt and Road Initiative in 2018, followed by Suriname, Guyana, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and Barbados; Jamaica and the Dominican Republic joined in 2019. By 2023, Chinese direct investment across Caribbean island nations reached an estimated US$3.3 billion, with infrastructure contracts totalling US$32.2 billion. Chinese state firms also built the North Abaco Port in the Bahamas and financed the Nassau airport gateway project — both less than 200 miles from Florida — adding a geopolitical dimension that hasn't gone unnoticed in Washington.
So — Debt Trap, or Lifeline?
This is the part of the story where reasonable people land in very different places, and it's worth laying out both sides rather than picking one.
The case for concern: China has become the world's largest bilateral creditor, with overseas lending now exceeding US$1 trillion, and several of its highest-profile projects globally — a Laos rail line costing the equivalent of half that country's GDP, an Indonesian high-speed rail line now in restructuring talks — show what happens when debt-financed infrastructure doesn't generate the revenue projected. In the Caribbean specifically, critics point to the North-South Highway's unresolved land transfers and the Antigua zone's expanding footprint as evidence that "temporary" financing arrangements can harden into long-term leverage over sovereign territory.
The case against the "debt trap" framing: Independent research complicates the narrative. A Rhodium Group study found China renegotiates loan terms far more often than it seizes assets — the oft-cited Sri Lankan Hambantota Port case is more the exception than the rule. And proponents note, accurately, that Caribbean nations have turned to Chinese financing largely because traditional partners — the U.S., European nations, multilateral lenders — have been slow or unwilling to fund infrastructure at the scale the region needs, particularly for energy, transport, and broadband gaps that are decades old.
What's harder to dispute is the opacity. Loan terms, land valuations, and concession agreements in deals like the North-South Highway and the Antigua Special Economic Zone have rarely been fully public at the time of signing — leaving citizens, and often even parliaments, to find out the details years later, through leaked documents or investigative reporting rather than government disclosure.
Caribshout will continue tracking Chinese-financed infrastructure across the region as new deals emerge — including recent port expansion contracts in Kingston and ongoing developments in the Antigua Special Economic Zone. If you have firsthand knowledge of how these projects have affected your community, we want to hear from you.
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