A hashtag is trending on Weibo: #中资网贷在印度亏七十亿退场# (“Chinese-funded online lenders exit India after losing seven billion”). The story going around: since 2019, more than 100 Chinese-funded lending apps went into India, lost ¥7 billion, and more than 95% have shut down or left. Comment sections blame Indian borrowers, calling them freeloaders who took the money and never paid it back. Here’s what that version leaves out. 1. The number. It’s ¥7 billion, about US$1 billion, not $7 billion. It’s lost against roughly ¥18 billion invested. Chinese outlets themselves say both figures are practitioner estimates, not audited or RBI data. 2. Why the platforms went to India. Beijing cracked down on domestic cash loans in 2019. The model was pushed out of China, and India looked like the next market: 1.4 billion people, hundreds of millions of smartphones, and little bank credit. 3. Why it failed. The Chinese model depends on infrastructure India didn’t have. Only about 9% of Indians had ever checked a credit score as of March 2024, so big-data risk models were guessing. Bad-debt rates reportedly went above 50% at the big platforms and 70–80% at smaller ones. Then the RBI’s 2022 digital lending rules required borrower data to stay on servers in India, which broke the cross-border risk systems the apps relied on. 4. What the apps were doing. Many charged annualized rates in the hundreds or thousands of percent. Collection worked by scraping borrowers’ contact lists and shaming them to family and friends. India banned 94 China-linked loan apps over extortion and harassment, and the ED traced more than $255 million in criminal proceeds to illegal lending apps. 5. “Reverse harvesting.” Weibo calls it that when borrowers reported illegal collection to regulators and regulators acted. Another word for it is enforcement. The real lesson isn’t “Indians don’t pay.” It’s that a lending model China has restricted at home also failed abroad once the host country enforced its rules.