The book "the undercover economist" talks about this alot, but how the USA and the world bank did it. Essentially US contractors go to a developing country and

The book "the undercover economist" talks about this alot, but how the USA and the world bank did it. Essentially US contractors go to a developing country and say: you need to build infrastructure for your economy to grow and so take out a huge loan to do that, and paying back will be easy because of all the resulting growth. But there are two catches, the first is that it will be US companies doing the work (or at least controlling the money), and they will vastly over-estimate the growth and hence the required infra-structure (to maximize profits of course). Country agrees, sometimes knowing full well about how its corrupt but they get a slice so who cares, and boom. You get profits for private USA companies and unpayable debts for the country. Bonus is when the debts default the loan-provider can take ownership of whatever was very valuable in the country be it nationalized industries or natural resources. The fact that China could or would do the exact same thing in Africa is a no-brainer because of course they are.