AidData
The Latest Publications
The first Gates Forum will address Strategic Communications. Below are selected publications from AidData on this topic. Learn more about AidData’s efforts to quantify the Chinese government's reach and influence at aiddata.org/china-public-diplomacy.
Explore Beijing's Public Diplomacy
Featuring two reports that enable readers to dive even deeper into the data— a new interactive dashboard on China's public diplomacy activities has also been launched, containing information from both reports focused on East Asia and the Pacific.
Ties That Bind: Quantifying China's public diplomacy and its "good neighbor" effect
This first-of-its-kind report quantifies multiple aspects of China's public diplomacy—financial, cultural, exchange, and elite-to-elite diplomacy—across 25 countries to assess how it is received by foreign publics and leaders and determine whether it is meeting Beijing’s objectives.
Beijing's public diplomacy overtures
In Silk Road Diplomacy, the authors analyze this data to illuminate which tools Beijing is deploying, with whom, and to what effects for recipient countries and strategic competitors.
Quantifying Beijing's public diplomacy in South and Central Asia
This narrative offers new, comprehensive detail on the nature and impact of various informational diplomacy and student exchange activities in a region important to China's strategic interests: East Asia and the Pacific (EAP).
Listening to Leaders
Listening to Leaders 2021: A report card for development partners in an era of contested cooperation analyzes the results of a survey of nearly 7,000 public, private and civil society leaders from 141 countries and territories around the world.
China's Global Development Spending Spree
The Chapter in Strategic Asia 2019 quantifies how Beijing wields its official finance abroad to advance its national interests and discusses the implications for recipient countries, the United States, and U.S. allies.
How China Lends: A Rare Look into 100 Debt Contracts with Foreign Governments
China is the world’s largest official creditor, but we lack basic facts about the terms and conditions of its lending. Very few contracts between Chinese lenders and their government borrowers have ever been published or studied. This paper is the first systematic analysis of the legal terms of China’s foreign lending.
AidData is a research lab at William & Mary's Global Research Institute. We equip policymakers and practitioners with better evidence to improve how sustainable development investments are targeted, monitored, and evaluated. We use rigorous methods, cutting-edge tools, and granular data to answer the question: who is doing what, where, for whom, and to what effect?