‘A Chief Instrument for Overseas Expansion’: Revisiting the Conceptual Roots of Chinese Foreign Aid through Anti-West External Propaganda (1958-1961)

Abstract

China pursues an official policy of overseas expansion – what leader Xi Jinping describes as becoming ‘a leading global power’ – with foreign aid playing an important role. Forgotten among the criticisms and countercriticisms of Chinese aid as a power expanding tool is that during the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government criticized American and other Western aid on precisely this basis. This article explores this early Chinese thinking on Western aid, making use of the voluminous opinions on aid in the Peking Review from 1958 to 1961. It finds that beneath the anti-imperialist hyperbole, Western aid is understood as a tool of economic, political and military expansion. This past conceptualization of Western aid prefigures the competitiveness and expansionism in China’s present aid-mediated foreign policy.