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About This Report
The rapid expansion of Chinese economic engagement in the
developing world over the past decade has raised U.S. and allied
concerns that Beijing is weaponizing development assistance to
weaken the United States’ relative position and achieve China’s
broader national security interests abroad. In the United States,
policy discussion has focused on the need to better use existing
development tools to match Chinese efforts—such as the
financing of large infrastructure projects in the developing
world—in kind. Although such calls to strengthen U.S. development
assistance as a tool for economic statecraft have grown ubiquitous
in foreign policy circles, these calls often suffer from a fundamental
problem of mirror-imaging: They are biased toward solutions that
mimic China’s behavior without regard for how China’s approach
might be driven by unique experiences, policy preferences, and
domestic pressures that are at odds with the United States’ own
interests.
In this report, we conduct a net assessment of U.S. and Chinese
development assistance and cooperation. We describe each
country’s differing approaches to economic engagement with
developing countries and conduct a data-driven comparison to
identify strategic asymmetries that could present opportunities
for the United States to better compete with China for relationships
and influence in the developing world.
This assessment reveals several key findings, including that
Chinese economic engagement in the developing world should
not be conceptualized as aid or assistance and that this
mischaracterization has potentially led to an overreliance on
U.S. development tools as a primary response. Moreover,
despite evidence of the short-term benefits that China might
gain from its development financing, it is not clear whether
these benefits are sustainable or effective over the long term
when compared with the U.S. approach. Nevertheless, China’s
efforts—in particular, its heavy emphasis on energy and
infrastructure projects, its approach to working through elite
actors in developing countries rather than broad-based societal
programming, and its willing embrace of greater risk and reduced
transparency—still create challenges for the United States.
From these findings, we propose a series of actions that the
United States can take to better align its development activities
with U.S. national security objectives related to competition with
China without sacrificing underlying U.S. normative goals of
reducing global poverty and improving welfare in the developing
world.
The research reported here was completed in March 2023.
