Project Diplomacy: Do Development Project Characteristics Shape Perceptions of China and Its Efforts in Africa?

Chinese development efforts in Africa have expanded massively, growing from $490 million in 2003 to $43.4 billion in 2020. One goal of these efforts has been the cultivation of soft power through “project diplomacy,” i.e. constructing infrastructure to influence public opinion. We evaluate whether a project’s impact on public opinion depends on its attributes. We hypothesize that projects that employ local labor and management and have minimal costly impacts and positive endorsements by informed actors should elicit positive project evaluations and enhance views of China; projects without these positive attributes should have the opposite effect. We evaluate these hypotheses with a vignette survey experiment among 3,200 Malawian citizens. We find significant effects of project attributes on project approval and beliefs about benefits for local communities. However, these same attributes have less effect on perceptions of Chinese development efforts and no effect at all on wider views of China’s role in Africa. Our results thus reveal important but nuanced impacts of Chinese project attributes on African public opinion.