Angola’s Debt to China Looms as Nation Holds Tight Elections

LUANDA, Angola—A mountain of debt, much of which is owed to China, is eating up the gains of Angola’s burgeoning oil boom and could upend nearly five decades of one-party rule in Wednesday’s general election.

The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been in power since independence from Portugal in 1975, through a 27-year civil war that killed about a million people and a peacetime expansion that made the country sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer after Nigeria.