China’s Scholarship Program as a Form of Foreign Assistance

Abstract

An important component of China’s official development assistance (ODA) program is the Chinese Government Scholarship Program (CGSP), which offers international students the opportunity to receive free education at Chinese colleges and universities. The purposes of this program are to familiarize scholarship recipients with Chinese culture and to build goodwill toward China while assisting the recipients to obtain a higher education, conduct research, and/or receive training in the Chinese language. The success of China’s ODA depends in part, then, on the extent to which these international students are positive about their post-secondary experience in China and the extent to which that experience gives them a positive regard for China as a nation. Despite over 50 years of history and the large number of recipients of Chinese Government Scholarships (CGSs), few systematic studies have examined if the scholarships benefit the recipients. To address this deficit, we investigated CGSP recipients’ perceptions of their higher education experience in China and their attitudes toward China as a country. However, before describing the study and discussing its findings, we background the events that led to the present-day CGSP.