From "internationalism" to the Global Development Initiative: paradigm transformation and path reconstruction of China's foreign aid

Over more than seventy years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, foreign aid has evolved from an instrument of revolutionary diplomacy into a key arena of global development governance. Yet the dramatic expansion in scale has not been accompanied by a smooth replacement of underlying institutional logics. China continues to identify itself as part of "SouthSouth cooperation," while in practice exhibiting the characteristics of a major aid provider. The establishment of the China International Development Cooperation Agency marked an institutional effort to strengthen strategic coordination, but bureaucratic fragmentation and entrenched project-oriented implementation practices remain highly resilient. Drawing on historical institutionalism, this study conceptualizes the evolution of China's foreign aid as a process of institutional change shaped jointly by critical junctures and path dependence. The analysis shows that China's foreign aid regime has undergone three paradigm transformations, each unfolding through institutional layering rather than paradigm displacement. The core challenge today lies in structural imbalance arising from the coexistence of old and new institutional logics, manifested in three interrelated paradoxes: the misalignment between discourse and identity, the tension between coordination and efficiency, and the pull between securitization and development orientation. Moving beyond this phase of institutional layering requires, at the strategic level, elevating foreign aid from a project-based instrument to a mechanism for the provision of global public goods; at the institutional level, advancing rule-based governance through the enactment of a Foreign Aid Law; and at the discursive level, shifting from defensive rhetoric toward alternative normative frameworks such as "Development Effectiveness 2.0."