Cambodia’s debt to China grows to $4 billion, official says

Cambodian debt to China now stands at $4 billion, 35 percent of last year’s gross domestic product and more than half of the country’s total outstanding debt to foreign donors, according to a senior government official. The amount of money Cambodia owes China has been growing steadily in recent years. The latest payment from China came last week in the form of a $500 million loan for post-flood infrastructural development. “The European [Union] countries are having an economic crisis, and its 27 members are struggling, so we only have China,” Cheam Yeap, chairman of the National Assembly’s commission on Economics, Finance, Banking and Auditing, said on Monday. He added that Cambodia’s total amount of outstanding debt has reached $7 billion, a figure that includes $1.8 billion in debt to Russia and the US that was accumulated in the 1970s and 1980s…