China’s growing infrastructure engagement in the Horn of Africa can be more productively understood through the lens of infrastructure statecraft, which captures how material investments translate into political influence. Rather than operating through a straightforward “debt-trap” dynamic, this engagement reshapes domestic coalitions through the combined effects of infrastructure finance, elite-to-elite linkages, security cooperation, and selective institutional learning. The study applies a comparative political economy approach to three cases, drawing on a project-level dataset of Chinese loans, contracts, and state-owned enterprise activities (AidData), process tracing of shifts in alignment within the African Union (AU) and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and interviews with Chinese embassy officials and African finance ministers. These empirical strategies are used to engage broader theoretical debates, including power transition theory, infrastructure statecraft, updated dependency perspectives in the Chinese context, and the political economy of foreign investment and host-state governance. Three core claims emerge. First, Chinese infrastructure projects reshape coalition politics by redistributing access to contracts, transport corridors, and executive discretion, empowering certain bureaucratic and commercial actors while marginalizing others. Second, these political effects vary significantly across Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Djibouti, where regime type, strategic geography, and resource endowments condition how external finance is absorbed. Third, African agency remains substantial, but is most effective when governments negotiate from coherent domestic strategies rather than under conditions of fiscal vulnerability or short-term patronage pressures.