ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses at some key topics namely, decision-making, planning and implementation. It examines the allocation approach and packaging of aid, with a finding that "friendship" appears to be a key explanatory factor in where the aid goes but that China's own considerations – rather than the recipient countries' actual needs and conditions – often trump matters. It is on this friendship-emphasised foundation that China's foreign aid put forward three distinct foreign aid objectives in Africa. At the beginning, when this friendship was exercised through the belief in proletarian internationalism, it was materialised in the building of African industrial and agricultural foundations. With the reform policy, primarily inaugurated to resuscitate China's economy, given the financial circumstances that China was in and the pressing domestic demands, friendship was transformed into an alignment with the established foreign aid budget. The lack of human resources with appropriate language skills is an additional drawback affecting China's foreign aid implementation in Africa.
