China’s Aid And Bilateral Political Relations

In the field of international political economy,how economic dependence affects the political relations and alliances of partner countries is the focus of many scholars.As early as the 18 th century,classicists put forward that economic interdependence and open economic order are important driving forces to reduce conflicts between countries.However,with the outbreak of World War I,"trade peace theory" began to be questioned.In the process of discussing the interaction between economy and politics,most of the literatures focus on the relationship between trade and conflicts between countries,and there is a lack of discussion on international aid.The scale of aid from developed countries in Europe and the United States,international organizations such as the world bank and emerging economies such as China is expanding.However,there is still no consensus on whether international aid is a stabilizer to promote the positive political interaction between countries and an important force to maintain the harmonious and stable political relations between China and other countries.In recent years,the influence of emerging donors represented by China has become increasingly apparent.Based on the perspective of China,this paper uses the database of China’s foreign aid projects from 2000 to 2014 to accurately identify the causal relationship between China’s foreign aid and the similarity of bilateral diplomacy by using the instrumental variable method,and excavates the influence mechanism from the economic and political perspectives.The results show that with the increase of China’s aid scale,bilateral political relations have improved significantly.Through a series of robustness tests,this paper proves the robustness of the results.Through the test of institutional heterogeneity,this paper finds that the impact of aid on bilateral political relations will show different situations with different types of aid: compared with ODA,the impact of aid on bilateral political relations will be different,The impact of other official funds is stronger;there are also differences between economic infrastructure aid and other aid in improving bilateral political relations: China’s economic infrastructure aid can significantly improve bilateral political relations,but other types of aid have no significant impact.At the same time,there is no evidence to show that China’s aid has a strong impact on the foreign political relations of the United States and the European Union.Finally,this paper further finds that the international political effect of China’s aid is rooted in the both economic and political effects: on the one hand,the implementation of aid projects creates broad employment opportunities for recipient countries,improves people’s welfare level,and provides impetus for economic growth,which makes both sides willing to carry out more cooperation and makes bilateral political relations more harmonious and stable.On the other hand,China’s aid has significantly improved the domestic security situation of recipient countries,reduced the probability of domestic armed conflicts,and made the people and politicians of recipient countries willing to maintain closer political relations with China.The research of this paper will help to comprehensively and accurately evaluate the contribution of China’s foreign aid to the harmony and stability of bilateral political relations,and provide reference for the distribution and policy-making of China’s foreign aid in the future.