Why do many countries prefer to loan from China and not the World Bank or IMF even if the Chinese loans are often more expensive?

A true story from Indonesia.

When Indonesia got loan from IMF in 1997, the Indonesian government was forced to terminate this project as one of requirements in order to get the loan from IMF.

The planes in the picture were N250s. The first ever plane produced by Indonesian airplane manufacturer, PT IPTN. It was in the 1997 N250 first prototype made its roll out. The plane successfully took off and conducted flight test. Unfortunately, Indonesia fell into a severe monetary crisis in 1997 and had to go to IMF to get the loan. The IMF told President Suharto to cancel the N250 project and it was mandatory before getting the loan. Suharto had no option at the time but approved it. Since then N250 project was cancelled. IMF also told Indonesia to stop funding IPTN totally but Indonesian government didn’t fully comply what IMF wanted. The funding to IPTN was only greatly reduced and its business cores were diversified in order to survive with minimum budget support from the government, now IPTN changes its name into PT Dirgantara Indonesia.

Many said and believed, IMF intentionally terminated the N250 project was to accommodate the requests from some foreign airplane manufacturers which didn’t want Indonesia to produce its own planes because they wanted Indonesia to keep buying from them.

I won’t say getting load from China will not be followed by terms and conditions but I just wanted to show you how IMF put pressures on countries that borrow money from them.