CHINA-FOREIGN AID: CHINESE SCHOLARS COMMENT ON CHINA'S NEW WHITE PAPER ON ITS FOREIGN AID POLICY

Commenting on China’s new white paper on international development cooperation in an article in the Diplomat on January 13, Zhang Chao, an assistant researcher at the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Tang Yuxuan, a research associate in the International Development Cooperation Academy at the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, observed  that this is the third such white paper that China has published on its development efforts, and the first since 2014. At around 26,000 Chinese characters, it is longer than the previous two papers combined. They said the paper reveals that China invested 270.2 billion renminbi (RMB) in aid programs from 2013 to 2018 and that a simple calculation suggests that China’s aid averaged around $7 billion per year (6.5 RMB roughly equals 1 U.S. dollar) during that period. This makes China the seventh-largest sovereign donor after the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, France, and Turkey – but it equates to only around one-fifth of U.S. aid, which totaled $346 billion in 2019. In the new paper, the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund that President Xi Jinping proposed in 2015 is recognized as a novel aid instrument and some aid areas not seen earlier are included in the new one, such as gender equality, sustainable and innovation-driven economic growth, and governance improvement in developing countries. Further, Humanitarian Aid is given an entire chapter in the new White Paper.  The authors suggested that China may give more humanitarian aid in the next few years and it could grow in importance in its foreign affairs. They also complained that the paper does not reveal more detailed aid spending data and shows that Chinese aid practitioners have been working in a fragmented aid system, without proper regulations and sufficient human resources and that China’s civil society organizations are still marginal.





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