A literature review on China’s aid

Abstract

With China’s expanding global role, its growing aid and economic engagement overseas is attracting attention and analysis. Consequently there is a large and growing literature from policy organisations, academic researchers and the press on the various aspects of Chinese aid and its economic engagement more broadly, These range from “studies on China’s aid approaches and country or regional case studies, to research specifically focusing on aid data or single projects or sectors” (Gu, 2015, p.2). Given the sizeable literature and the multiple topics covered by this rapid review, this summary can only present an illustrative selection of studies and very brief synthesis of some key points made in the literature. This review has selected examples of the most recent rigorous analysis available as well as some older seminal papers that are referred to often within the literature as key texts, and some media reports for context. The search has been limited to literature written in English. Gender tends not to be a focus of analysis in the literature selected; this review did not use gender as a search term when identifying relevant literature.