Since 2010, Africa’s been the largest recipient of Chinese foreign aid, even as China’s ties in Asia have grown to be more geopolitically consequential.
However, when reviewing data in the recently-published white paper on Chinese international development, analysts at the Beijing-based consultancy Development Reimagined noted that “the share of China’s aid to Africa has fallen from 51.8% over 2010-2012 to 44.65% now, but that still means an absolute increase from $2.1 billion to $3.1 billion annually over 2013-2018.”
Development practitioners from traditional donor states in the U.S., Europe, and Japan would probably not recognize a lot of China’s financial contributions as “aid” in the classical definition. Concessional loans make up almost half of all of China’s financial assistance to developing countries, according to the new white paper on international development recently released by the State Council.
The Chinese refer to this kind of assistance as “diverse forms” of aid by providing access to low-cost capital to build infrastructure. But a lot of these concessional loans are also contributing to debt distress in developing countries. Even though China has agreed to more debt deferrals than any other creditor in the G20, Beijing has so far refused to cancel any of those concessional loans that are presumably seen, in part, as “aid.”
