Chinese foreign aid has attracted increasing academic attention (e.g. Bräutigam, 2011; Chin, 2012; Zhang, 2017), but how China’s official media has portrayed its aid program is under-researched. This paper seeks to enrich... [ view full abstract ]
Chinese foreign aid has attracted increasing academic attention (e.g. Bräutigam, 2011; Chin, 2012; Zhang, 2017), but how China’s official media has portrayed its aid program is under-researched. This paper seeks to enrich the literature on aid transparency by analysing a corpus of 1,371 news reports of a total of 1,259,626 tokens on Chinese aid by China’s largest official newspaper People’s Daily between 1950 and 2015. Concordances and collocates of the target words foreign aid (yuanzhu, waiyuan, yuanwai) were carefully examined to determine Chinese aid sectors and recipient countries. The identified aid sectors and countries were then compared with those reported in China’s government documents and the literature on Chinese foreign aid. The paper reveals a significant difference between the different sources, and explains what, how and why the Chinese official media intends to inform the public of its foreign aid.
References
Bräutigam, D. 2011. “Aid ‘with Chinese Characteristics’: Chinese Foreign Aid and Development Finance Meet the OECD-DAC Aid Regime”. Journal of International Development 23(5): 752-764.
Chin, G. 2012. “China as a ‘net donor’: tracking dollars and sense”. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 25(4): 579-603.
Zhang, D. & Smith, G. 2017. “China’s Foreign Aid System: structure, agencies and identifies”. Third World Quarterly 38(10): 2330-2346.
