American taxpayer dollars intended to help countries weather the global downturn could flow into Chinese Communist Party coffers, U.S. officials and analysts fear.

“You’re going to have countries that are going to be applying for IMF and World Bank funding, and then they’re going to be looking to China for that funding too,” the German Marshall Fund senior fellow Jonathan Katz said. “And we really have to be careful that these multilateral institutions aren’t used to pay off bad Chinese loans.”