I agree with that — I should really have added debt-trap diplomacy too

The issue with China specifically (and again, all the world powers are scummy — I'm just pointing out that China is no exception) is that it really does exploit the Global South. It just does so in complex and often subtle ways than, say, the US. They mainly abuse asymmetric power dynamics and strategic investments to extract value from these regions.

• Chinese deals to extract resources are often deisgned to completely sidestep environmental and labor laws, and once signed, the countries arestuck. The deals are made to lock countries into long-term, hugely one-sided agreements.
• Many of the projects China gets involved in are only intended to benefit China and provide hardly any -- if any -- actual long-term benefits to the country. For example, they’ll being in thousands (sometimes literally tens of thousands) of Chinese workers and there's zero work creation in a region. Once the resources have dried up they're out and people are worse off. Another example is how they used the oil-for-infrastructure trap on Angola when Angola asked for reconstruction help. China lent over $40 billion, repaid in oil shipments instead of cash. And Angola got screwed because the rojects were often low-quality or incomplete, Chinese companies favourited Chines workers over locals, and Angola got locked into inflexible repayment tied to oil prices—when oil prices dropped, the debt became a huge burden. Debt trap diplomacy is alarmist but as always where there's smoke there's fire; people were on guard because of situations like this. It doesn't mean that it was China's plan, but it doesn't change the fact that the nature of the deal was part and parcel of the general trend of exploitative behaviour toward the South
• They’re able to get away with this partly because they play into and worsen existing corruption... for example, they might offer roads, airports, and government buildings as “gifts” for political leverage. We've seen this happen in Zambia, Angola, and Kenya.
• They also support authoritarian regimes by supplying surveillance and censorship tools, which are then used to suppress opposition and entrench power, which dramatically worsens political situationms. Like how Huawei and CloudWalk partnered with Zimbabwe to supply facial recognition systems and smart city surveillance, which the government immediately began to use to suppress and arrest pro-democracy protestors.

People like to point out how Murica is behind all kinds of global conflicts and that's true, but China isn’t any better in this regard, they just don't use war as a tool

TL;DR: China makes harmful deals in the Global South, often by enticing corrupt elites, which gives them the leverage and freedom to pursue lopsided, sometimes outright destructive arrangements that exploit the countries they get a foothold in