Framing Foreign Aid: Chinese Propaganda and Domestic Support for Checkbook Diplomacy

Foreign aid has become increasingly contested in many democratic donor countries, yet China has expanded its overseas development engagement over the past decade. This divergence raises questions about domestic support for foreign aid in authoritarian donor states and the role of state-managed information in shaping public opinion. Focusing on China, this study examines citizens’ attitudes toward foreign aid and the mechanisms through which official media narratives influence those attitudes. We combine a pre-registered survey experiment with 2,959 respondents and a systematic content analysis of foreign aid coverage in People’s Daily from 2015 to 2021. Text analysis identifies three dominant state media frames, including economic benefits, political gains, and humanitarian concerns, that portray foreign aid as advancing both national interests and global responsibility. Survey evidence indicates high baseline support for foreign aid among Chinese respondents, while experimental results show no average framing effects, likely due to extensive pre-treatment exposure to historical and contemporary foreign aid narratives. These findings suggest that sustained state propaganda shapes baseline attitudes and attenuates the marginal impact of short-term persuasion, contributing to debates on foreign aid politics and authoritarian opinion formation.