Strategic Or Altruistic:the Determinants Of The China's Foreign Aid

China has recently been identified as an emerging donor,though the first time it implemented foreign aid was in 1950.In recent two decades,its foreign aid has rapidly been gaining momentum,which raises both the interest and concern of foreign scholars.However,Chinese government officials do not regularly publish detailed and systematic information on aid allocation.The white paper on China's foreign aid released in 2011 and 2014 only features the aggregated value or categories of aid.There exist neither official figures on aid allocation to individual countries or regions,nor breakdown numbers by sub-sectors or purposes.In October,2017,AidData established a database called Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset version 1.0.This thesis uses a subsample of this dataset for 127 countries from 5 regions between 2000 and 2014.Traditionally,research on foreign aid mainly includes three aspects.The first type of research comprises studies that are explore the effectiveness of aid on recipients.A second group of scholars investigates the determinants of foreign aid.The third group wants to know the influences of aid competition among different participants.The common trait,however,is that most of the literature focuses on traditional donors.Although in recent years emerging-country donors have increasingly gained attention,especially China,empirical studies are relatively few and far between.Due to this limited amount of research,the definition of foreign aid in a Chinese context is still ambiguous.Contrary to Official Development Aid(ODA)in developed countries,China also includes Other Official Flows(OOF)in aid allocation.In order to match the data types in AidData,this thesis mainly uses the word "aid" with a broad definition as official financing.In order to clarify the characteristics and development history of China's foreign aid,this thesis makes both horizontal and vertical comparisons.To some extent,this thesis is endowed with an interdisciplinary perspective.In the theoretical framework,three political and psychological theories,namely realism,liberalism and social exchange,are analyzed,which gives a theoretical foundation for what considerations China might have in aid allocation.In the econometric framework,selected variables are strictly analyzed for how and why they match the considerations under the theoretical framework,after which multiple regression models are applied.For measuring diplomatic effects,we choose Taiwan recognition and UNSC membership.For measuring economic effects,this author chose bilateral trade and debt to GDP ratio.For measuring humanitarian effects,this thesis uses the number of people affected by natural disasters.For measuring governance factors,a metric for government effectiveness is applied.The control variables are population and GDP per capita in recipient countries,China's GDP annual growth rate,and a dummy variable measuring whether English is the official language.After the initial analysis the research is extended.Aggregate trade has been divided into China's exports and China's imports and then subjected to econometric analysis.To test whether China has a desire to pursue natural resources such as petroleum,this author has added a binary variable measuring whether the recipient country is an oil-producer.Moreover,this thesis refines the econometric models.Three main econometric models,including pooled OLS model,panel data with fixed effects model and Tobit model with fixed effects will be applied.The main findings of this thesis are that social exchange theory combined with realism theory is the suitable approaches to explain China's aid philosophy.China's foreign aid mainly considers political and economic factors,that countries which recognize Taiwan are almost never able to obtain China's assistance,and that bilateral trade volume,especially imports from China,has a significant positive correlation with China's aid allocation.China's ODA-like assistance to oil-producing countries is significantly higher than that of non-oil-producing countries,while UNSC membership shows the opposite effect.However,compared to this,the effects of OOF-like are not yet clear.Integrating previous research,this article put forward corresponding suggestions for China's foreign aid in the final chapter.