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Article 1: China has risen to become a global political and economic power rivaling the United States, but its foreign assistance activities have yet to be compared systematically within the context of this rivalry. By analyzing the differences between established donors like the United States and emerging donors such as China, I show that they are operating on fundamentally difference principles that effect how they conduct their foreign assistance activities. One of the main ways this materialities is through their choice of aid and/or debt. I show how China utilises both aid and debt globally and regionally for Sub-Saharan Africa, while the United States overwhelmingly selects aid. The differences in principles and type of assistance utilised raise question relating to outcomes of foreign assistance that researches should consider going forward.
Article 2: China has been compelled by economic and security concerns to invest and dominate the critical minerals market, with Sub-Saharan Africa offering the largest opportunity to achieve this goal. China’s use of State-Owned Enterprises and infiltration of each phase of the critical mineral supply chain suggest the importance of this industry for China leading to finding empirically that there is a relationship between Chinese assistance and a recipient’s production of critical minerals. This finding is then situated within the context of the United States-China rivalry that impacts the effect of aid, but not debt from China and raises further questions regarding the type of assistance a donor chooses to use.
Article 3: Vote buying in international organizations has been a topic of interest for many studying international relations, however, not much research has been dedicated to the impact of competition and rivalry since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China in recent years. While the United States has been more transparent about the relationship between support in the United Nations and foreign assistance, China has only more recently started to increase its engagement with the world’s most prominent decision-making body. In time-series cross-sectional analysis of assistance and recipient agreement scores, we find minimal evidence of this relationship for both China and the United States. Instead, I find that historical trends are better equipt to explain agreement with the United States and China, which are hard for either to change or overcome. This finding may go some way to explain the mixed results of vote-buying in the foreign assistance literature.