In her first book, Chinese Aid and African Development, Bräutigam discusses three rice-growing demonstrations by China and Taiwan in The Gambia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
[3] In her second book, The Dragon’s Gift, Bräutigam turned to the topic of whether China's engagement with Africa has been a harmful or beneficial enterprise.
[7][8] Through extensive field work in a series of countries,[7] Bräutigam rebuts these claims, concluding that "The Chinese are not building a new empire on the continent" of Africa.
The morning after, a BBC broadcast recording used clips of the brief interview with Bräutigam and misrepresented her position on the debt-trap issue, discarding all the evidence she brought forth that the "conventional wisdom was not correct."
[14][15][16] An apology for the error was issued by BBC on the same day noting that Bräutigam had explained why the ideas of Debt-Trap diplomacy have little basis in fact, but those comments were edited out of the broadcast interview.