Authoritarian Propaganda and Domestic Support for Foreign Aid: Evidence from China

Foreign aid is politically vulnerable because donor publics often view overseas spending as competing with domestic needs. This article examines how Chinese state media frames outgoing foreign aid and how these frames affect public support. We argue that official media link aid to national benefit, international status, and moral responsibility, creating a favorable interpretive environment for overseas assistance. Empirically, we combine an 80-year content analysis of People’s Daily coverage from 1946 to 2025 with a preregistered survey experiment of 2,954 Chinese online respondents. Text analysis shows a shift from Mao-era socialist solidarity toward contemporary frames of economic benefit, geopolitical influence, and humanitarian responsibility. The experiment shows that economic and political frames increase aid support, especially among respondents with little prior exposure to foreign-aid news. These findings show how authoritarian information environments can shape support for costly internationalism.

An earlier version of this paper was originally published as an AidData Working Paper in April, 2026, Framing Foreign Aid: Chinese Propaganda and Domestic Support for Checkbook Diplomacy