CHN · Outside the OECD ledger
Chinese development finance
China does not report to the OECD, so none of this appears anywhere else in these pages. AidData reconstructs it from contracts, media and debtor records instead.
Why these numbers are not a league table
It is tempting to set the figure above beside the OECD total and call one bigger. Three things make that wrong:
- Commitments, not disbursements. A commitment is money agreed. The OECD pages count money that actually left the donor. A single large loan lands here entirely in the year it was signed.
- Mostly not aid. Only $15.5bn of the total is aid-like. The rest is commercial or near-commercial lending, which the OECD would classify as other official flows and exclude from ODA entirely.
- Different dollars. These are constant 2021 prices; the OECD figures on the other pages are current prices.
For reference only, and not a like-for-like comparison: OECD ODA disbursements to the same sixteen countries totalled $265.5bn across 2000–2022.
What kind of finance
AidData classifies every project by how concessional it is. This split is the single most important thing on the page.
Commitments by year
Spikier than an aid series by construction: one signed loan can carry a whole year.
Which countries
Which sectors
Where DAC2A can only give a country total, this dataset names the sector.
Which institutions
Chinese finance is concentrated in a small number of policy and commercial banks rather than an aid agency.
Grants and loans
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