China rises and rises, yet still gets foreign aid

Why the heck are we sending $2.5 billion in foreign aid per year to China?

ASSOCIATED PRESS: China spent tens of billions of dollars on a dazzling 2008 Olympics. It has sent astronauts into space. It recently became the world’s second largest economy. Yet it gets more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid — and taxpayers and lawmakers in donor countries are increasingly asking why.

With the global economic slowdown crimping government budgets, many countries are finding such generosity politically and economically untenable. China says it’s still a developing country in need of aid, while some critics argue that the money should go to poorer countries in Africa and elsewhere.

Germany and Britain have moved in recent months to reduce or phase out aid. Japan, long China’s biggest donor, halted new low-interest loans in 2008.

“People in the U.K. or people in the West see the kind of flawless expenditure on the Olympics and the (Shanghai) Expo and it’s really difficult to get them to think the U.K. should still be giving aid to China,” said Adrian Davis, head of the British government aid agency in Beijing, which plans to wrap up its projects in China by March.

“I don’t think you will have conventional aid to China from anybody, really, after about the next three to five years,” he said.

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