@article{oai:kokushikan.repo.nii.ac.jp:00012576,
 author = {Bozzato, Fabrizio},
 journal = {Asia Japan Journal = AJ Journal = AJJ = アジア・日本研究センター紀要},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {In the last decade, the People’s Republic of China has risen to prominence in the Pacific Islands Region as one of the largest aid donor. In the past, China’s engagement of the region was triggered by the principle of developing country international solidarity and Beijing’s diplomatic rivalry with Taiwan. Presently, China is allotting aid and investing in the Pacific Islands principally to demonstrate the significance and importance of its role as a major Asia-Pacific and world power. Foreign aid is in fact an important part of the Chinese government’s ‘go global’ strategy. Notably, China’s aid is not conceived as a separate policy; aid flows are but one element within China’s economic statecraft. Moreover, in the Chinese context, aid - which is normally negotiated and imparted bilaterally – tends to blur the traditional line between development assistance and foreign investment, and is intended as mutually beneficial. In the region, Chinese largesse amounts to a ‘silent revolution’, as aid recipients find themselves with a new source of funding and a wider set of partners. This, in turn, is changing the regional economic and geopolitical landscape. While Australia and the other traditional donors are expected to remain major players, China now offers a new port of call, and fresh economic options and opportunities, with the possibility of large-scale interventions. Therefore, Beijing’s aid commitment to the region has led to a heated debate about its effects and implications. Two issues in particular drive the analytical unfolding of this paper. The first issue centers on the interplay of China’s identities as a development partner and international stakeholder being a vector of aid provision. The second problem hinges on China’s role in recasting the regional aid paradigm and the discourse it spins. The growing aid-propped Chinese presence and influence are likely to partially erode regional support for the established regional partners. This has elicited a robust strain of analytically distortive narrative framing China as a security threat. This investigation concludes that Beijing’s aid provision will retain strong ‘Chinese characteristics’ due to the success of the Chinese aid model and suggests that traditional partners and Pacific Islands countries devise proactive and flexible strategies factoring China in the regional future., application/pdf},
 pages = {17--35},
 title = {Gifts that Bind : China's Aid to the Pacific Island Nations},
 volume = {12},
 year = {2017}
}