From Text to Behavior: Analysis of Chinese Aid Discourse and Allocation

• In Event: Foreign Aid and Public Opinion

Abstract

China, as a non-traditional creditor, is known to use most of its development finance to build high-profile infrastructure projects. While existing literature tries to understand this feature by analyzing China’s motives for giving aid, relatively little attention has been paid to how the Chinese government frames these goals in its official discourse and whether the variation of official rhetoric has impacts on actual aid flows. I address this gap by introducing a novel corpus based on the People’s Daily online database, covering 326 text documents surrounding Chinese foreign aid from 1960 to 2020. Using both hand coding and computer-assisted text analysis, I identify a shift in predominant topics of Chinese aid discourse over time: from security to economic to global public good. I also find that Chinese aid discourse is more likely to be associated with aid spending on economic infrastructure projects than social infrastructure and humanitarian projects. These findings imply that the future trend of China’s aid discourse and flows may involve downplaying the pursuit of economic interests, emphasizing China’s contributions to the global public goods, and maintaining relatively stable aid flows. This study contributes to the literature on foreign policy-making in authoritarian settings. It also provides valuable information for beneficiary countries and other creditors on whether official discourse can be useful for analyzing Chinese aid policy.

Author

• Songtao Duan, Pennsylvania State University