Following a more than decade-long boom in overseas lending and investment, China’s Belt andRoad Initiative (BRI) has come under pressure, as many recipient (debtor) countries in thedeveloping world experience financial distress.1 It has already been documented that Chinesestate creditors have responded to this crisis by reducing new overseas lending flows to theGlobal South and by negotiating dozens of sovereign debt restructurings (Horn et al. 2022b,2023). What is less well understood and of more recent vintage is the large and rising numberof Chinese bailouts to countries in distress over the past 15 years. This paper shows that theChinese government has created a new system of international rescue lending, which has notyet been documented or studied. We fill this gap by exploring China’s role as an international lender of last resort for the first time.