If the people who are making the decisions have skin in the game in the form of carry, I’m less worried about bad loans/malinvestment. There might be some on the margin, but less than you’d expect from Exim etc.

On books: if you haven’t read How Asia Works, I’d start there instead of Bad Samaritans. It’s way more detailed and less polemical. And it also has good explanations for which countries did a bad job, and which got lucky. (Malaysia and South Korea both politicized some of their investments, but in SK’s case the politicization happened to be prudent. It could have gone the other way.)