1. Ordinary people: Is it necessary for China to provide foreign aid?
Over the past 60 years, China has provided assistance within its capacity to more than 60 countries and organizations, actively supported the economic and social development of developing countries, and made remarkable achievements. At the same time, domestic people have more and more doubts about China's foreign aid. As a developing country, China has a poverty population of nearly 1 100 million. Why invest nearly 30 billion yuan every year to help other countries? Only by fundamentally answering this question can we lay a solid foundation for China's foreign aid.
(1) Foreign aid is an important part of China's foreign strategy.
Since the founding of New China, China's foreign aid has closely met the needs of the country's foreign strategy, which has enabled China to win the support of the vast number of recipient countries on major issues involving sovereignty and territorial integrity, such as restoring China's legitimate seat in the United Nations, curbing Taiwan Province Province's "flexible diplomacy", opposing "Tibet independence" and "Xinjiang independence", defeating western anti-China human rights proposals, reforming the United Nations and other major diplomatic struggles involving major national interests, as well as joining the World Trade Organization, bidding for the Olympic Games and the World Expo. Foreign aid has played an irreplaceable role in creating a peaceful and stable external environment, ensuring China's active position in international struggle and cooperation, and effectively safeguarding national nuclear interests. In recent years, the global development imbalance has become increasingly serious, and the development agenda has become the new focus of international competition. Major powers have increased their foreign aid, and some emerging powers have also increased their aid to other developing countries. Both strategic competition and containment are aimed at China. At the same time, great changes have taken place in the political life of some recipient countries, the pragmatic tendency of the new generation of political elites towards China has increased, and the expectations and demands for China's assistance have been rising. The cooperative relationship between China and developing countries is also facing new adjustment, and the competition and friction between interests have increased. Today, the vast number of developing countries are still the strategic support of China's diplomacy and the main relying force of China in major international affairs. Therefore, China's foreign aid must withstand external challenges, further increase investment, adhere to the self-confidence of development mode, and constantly innovate and improve itself, so as to grasp the initiative of economic diplomacy, show China's firm position of cherishing traditional friendship with developing countries, clarify misunderstandings and doubts of some recipient countries, and consolidate China's traditional position in foreign relations, thus ensuring the overall stability of China's foreign relations.
(2) Foreign aid is a great power responsibility that China should fulfill.
China is committed to strengthening South-South cooperation and actively undertaking its due international obligations. China has built a large number of industrial, agricultural and infrastructure projects with foreign aid, and provided a large number of applicable technologies, effectively enhancing the independent development capacity of recipient countries. People's livelihood projects such as schools, hospitals and drinking water facilities aided by China have enriched and improved the lives of local people. Through foreign aid training, China has accumulated valuable human resources for recipient countries. China's foreign aid has made great contributions to reducing poverty, improving people's livelihood and promoting sustainable economic and social development in developing countries. In addition, China also actively participated in international humanitarian relief. When catastrophic natural disasters occur, even developed countries can hardly respond in a short time, and the international community is in urgent need of a helping hand. For example, when Japan was hit by a tsunami, many victims had no electricity and oil to keep warm. China's material assistance such as fuel was provided at the request of Japan and taking into account the actual needs of the victims. In response to major disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti, the floods in Pakistan and the famine in the Horn of Africa, China launched emergency rescue operations in time, which reflected international humanitarian concerns and fully demonstrated the image of a responsible big country seeking peace, promoting development, promoting cooperation.
(3) Foreign aid is an effective way for China enterprises to "go global".
The primary purpose of China government's foreign aid is to meet the development needs of recipient countries and help them improve their independent development capacity. At the same time, through strategic investment in foreign aid, we will promote economic and trade cooperation between China and developing countries, ease the bottleneck of our own important energy resources, enhance the internationalization level of our products, technologies and standards with independent intellectual property rights, expand market space, and promote China enterprises to "go global". The government of China encourages enterprises to go abroad through foreign aid projects, and further develop business activities such as investment, trade, project contracting and labor cooperation that are beneficial to local development. Foreign aid will promote bilateral economic and trade cooperation, which will better promote the economic development of recipient countries. Great achievements have been made in China's modernization, but there are also many structural contradictions, and it is a challenge to maintain sustainable economic and social development. Developing countries are rich in resources and have huge market potential. Strengthening mutually beneficial cooperation with them is the key for China to broaden the supply channels of energy resources, alleviate the contradiction of overcapacity in some industries, implement the strategy of market diversification and get rid of excessive dependence on traditional markets.
Therefore, it is necessary for China to carry out foreign aid, both from the perspective of coordinating its foreign strategy and from the perspective of its obligations as a big country. At the same time, foreign aid has also promoted cooperation and exchanges between China and the governments, enterprises and people of developing countries, and played a positive role in making good use of the two markets and resources.
Second, the intellectual elite: how to demonstrate the value of China through foreign aid?
With the expansion of China's foreign aid, there are more and more criticisms of China's aid from western traditional aid countries. Through western media and social networks, intellectuals in China have seen another picture: "China's aid is opaque" and "China's aid breeds corruption in recipient countries". Then, compared with western donor countries, can China's soft power be demonstrated? This issue directly reflects the effectiveness and sustainability of China's aid. To solve this problem, we should start from two aspects.
(1) Optimize the structure of foreign aid
Infrastructure construction is not only the most important form of China's foreign aid, but also an area that western countries are gradually withdrawing from. China should continue to attach importance to the infrastructure construction of recipient countries, consolidate China's advantageous areas, and focus on livelihood projects such as agriculture, education, medical care, water supply, electricity consumption, affordable housing and environmental protection. However, with the promotion of national strength, China's foreign strategy is shifting from "interest and strength orientation" to "interest and value orientation". This requires strengthening soft aid, and transforming China's "road self-confidence, theoretical self-confidence and institutional self-confidence" into an intangible force recognized by the international community by doing a good job of "people".
1. Highlight the theme of national aid projects. China's foreign aid has always followed the way of "spreading pepper noodles", presenting to each recipient country "miscellaneous vegetables" with similar tastes, integrating materials, complete sets of equipment and technical cooperation. This "all-encompassing" actually ignores the prominence of the aid theme, and it is difficult to formulate differentiated aid policies for the development shortcomings of recipient countries. Therefore, we should strengthen soft assistance such as planning consultation and do our homework in the demand research of recipient countries. According to the specific situation of each country, set up short-term assistance plans to focus on solving the development problems in a certain field. On the premise of clarifying the theme and direction of assistance, increase corresponding engineering projects, technical cooperation and send relevant experts. Take the small island countries in the South Pacific as examples, such as Micronesia, Tonga and Samoa. Facing the serious threat of climate change, China can launch a package of aid programs for the South Pacific region with the theme of clean energy. In this case, cooperating with soft and hard projects such as solar power generation and biogas technology promotion can not only effectively solve the poverty reduction problem, but also show China's position on climate change and win the support of small island countries with practical actions.
2. Strengthen the development of overseas human resources. Not long ago, the president of an African country visited China, and foreign media trumpeted that he was unhappy because he didn't get the ideal assistance. Although the rumor is false, it reflects the lack of aid from China to some extent. The aid method based on hardware facilities can easily be dwarfed into a simple "money relationship". In contrast, western developed countries began to send volunteers to recipient countries as early as the 1960s to carry out humanistic care. For example, almost every poor corner can see the shadow of the American Peace Corps, which has more or less restored the arrogant international image of "Uncle Sam". In addition, Japanese players and silver-haired volunteers also add a lot of color to their overseas activities. In the future, China's assistance should, on the one hand, strengthen the dispatch of volunteers, appropriately extend the dispatch time, pay attention to cultural communication and cultural exchanges, and enhance the external influence of China's soft power. At the same time, improve the volunteer selection and training system, and establish an assessment and incentive mechanism linked to returning to China for employment. On the other hand, start overseas training programs. According to the different needs of recipient countries, experts are sent to carry out skills training in the fields of education, science and technology, culture, health, agriculture, environmental protection, mining, economy and technology at the grassroots level, so as to effectively convey China's development concept to local people.
3. Be good at contacting local non-governmental organizations. Undeniably, due to the imperfect democratic system, some recipient governments are seriously corrupt. At present, China's aid model only focuses on the current government of the recipient country, which inevitably gives people an opportunity. Coupled with the lack of publicity, some people even think that the China Foreign Aid Engineering Team is here to rob them of their jobs. In view of this, China cannot repeatedly ignore the role of civil organizations in recipient countries. Because in some weak government countries, social organizations have played a "second track" to check and balance the government; In some countries in transition, social organizations are actively promoting "the rule of the government and the people". In order to build foreign aid into a platform to display China's traditional values and development experience, we can try to include influential NGOs in the recipient countries into soft aid. Referring to the experience of the Global Environment Facility of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), a special fund will be set up to carry out joint research and technology sharing with local NGOs in recipient countries aimed at promoting poverty reduction.
(B) Flexible use of tripartite cooperation platform
In recent years, emerging donor countries such as BRICS countries have sprung up, and traditional donor countries have also begun to actively explore cooperation with them in the development field. For example, Britain is vigorously promoting poverty reduction projects in Asia under the framework of Sino-British strategic cooperation, and the field of development assistance is also an important part of the Sino-US strategic economic dialogue. Under the new situation, the flexible application of tripartite cooperation in foreign aid can expand the influence of China's soft power. To this end, China can take the following measures:
1. Establish the mentality of an open big country and actively explore tripartite cooperation in foreign aid. At present, the pattern of international development assistance is undergoing profound changes. On the one hand, tripartite cooperation has developed rapidly among donor countries and has gradually become a major aid method. North-North-South, North-South-South and South-South cooperation are becoming more and more common, and international organizations such as the United Nations and the Asian Development Bank have joined in. A development assistance revolution aimed at establishing a "global partnership" is brewing. On the other hand, according to OECD standards, China has graduated from the list of recipient countries, and the West has gradually stopped its aid to China and turned to tripartite cooperation.