Excellent video that's a little over 8 minutes. Summary:

This is a short video on the debt that precipitated the unfolding socio-political and economic crisis. He had done a much more extensive video on Sri Lanka but wanted to focus on Western claims that this crisis was caused by Chinese debt-trap diplomacy.

The lie

This ABC article names China, then Japan then "other foreign lenders" like the amount Sri Lanka owes in debt to these is in that order, most to least, when it's actually the West - the US and Western financial institutions - that holds most of Sri Lanka's debt. A similar lie found in this article from Voice of America.

The Reality

This article from DW, German media, says the crisis has been brewing for more than a decade, where international sovereign bonds (ISBs) or market borrowing constitute a major portion of Sri Lanka's foreign debt.

ISBs account for nearly half the country's total outstanding external debt. The article has a graphic breaking down the debt:

• 47% market borrowings (bond holders)

• 13% Asian Development Bank (dominated by Western financial institutions, according to Brian)

• 10% China

• 10% Japan

• 9% World Bank

• 9% Other

• 2% India

So it's not China cratering Sri Lanka's economy. It's the debt owed to all these other lenders. It's also the Russian sanctions - blocking the sale of Russian fuel, fertilizer and grain causes prices to rise worldwide, which just compounds the problems Sri Lanka was already having.

So who are the bond holders holding 47% of Sri Lankan debt? Another article in Nikkei Asia, which Brian calls a very pro-Western outlet, names the bondholders:

"The top 20 ISB holders included BlackRock, Allianz, UBS, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Prudential, according to Advocata Institute, a Colombo-based think tank."

None of these are Chinese.

There are other articles across Western media that admit this fact, e.g., The Diplomat, The Belt and Road in Sri Lanka: Beyond the Debt Trap Discussion - (paraphrasing):

"while true China invested almost $12 bn between 2006 and 2019, a recent Chatham House report paints a more complex and nuanced picture - Sri Lanka is not in a Chinese debt trap, Sri Lanka's debt to China amounts to only 6% of GDP. Sri Lanka has a general debt problem, owing about 27% of GDP to international financial markets and multilateral lenders like the World Bank"

In other words, per Brian, Western financial institutions created and compounded the problem and are now blaming China.

The Belt and Road Initiative

Brian goes on to say that China's Belt and Road Initiative is an investment in infrastructure, which every nation needs to do business and expand their economy. These are big investments but they're investments that will pay off, and they're completely different from the type of predatory lending that the IMF and World Bank and these bondholders engage in, who aren't actually investing in Sri Lanka, they're buying it up and manipulating the markets so they can control the country economically, politically and socially. Just as they've done to many countries all around the globe for as long as these institutions have existed.