This chapter provides historical context for China’s evolution into a development banker during the 21st century. The People’s Republic of China has been involved with development finance—as both a recipient and donor of foreign aid and other development flows—since its founding in 1949. This chapter describes earlier efforts by researchers to track Chinese-financed development projects around the world. It then outlines basic shifts in China’s approach to development finance over time, and separates China’s approach to development finance into four stages. During the “Early Years” (1949–1959), revolutionary foreign policy under Mao (1960–1977), and the “Reform Era Recalibration” (1978–1998), important building blocks were set in place that help understand the nature of contemporary Chinese development finance. During the fourth and current phase, beginning with the “Going Out” strategy, China’s government has made the transition from an aid donor to a global development banker. The chapter shows how the benefactor-to-banker shift was a product of China’s long history as a development financier. It also provides an historical framework to help readers disentangle novel features of contemporary Chinese development finance from preexisting motivations, institutions, policies, and practices.

Social science research on the aims and impacts of Chinese development finance remains in its infancy because Beijing shrouds its overseas portfolio of grants and loans in secrecy. This chapter introduces the Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) methodology that the authors have developed to assemble a comprehensive dataset of Chinese aid and debt-financed development projects around the globe. It also provides an overview of previous attempts to quantify Chinese development finance, and explains how the authors’ methods and data are different from those of others. This chapter also tests whether an alternative approach—field-based data collection—might yield more useful and reliable re- sults. Drawing upon evidence from a “ground-truthing” exercise in Uganda and South Africa, the authors demonstrate that field-based and TUFF-based data collection methods produce similar results. However, the TUFF methodology is less vulnerable to detection bias and more readily scalable than field-based data collection.

This chapter explores the extent to which businesses have assimilated in their practice the internationally recognized standards of responsible business conduct and the SDGs framework in an integrated and mutually reinforcing way in an effort to contribute as partners to the realization of sustainable development. To this end, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) will be under focus for two reasons: first, they are cited in Agenda 2030; second, they constitute the most authoritative source among global standards of expected conduct by businesses to address and prevent the negative implications of their activities on the dignity and welfare of affected individuals and communities. Human rights pertain to all three aspects of development as put forward by the SDGs, whereas the latter are suffused with language that reflects clearly the substance and underlying norms of human rights law. Hence, the interplay between the two regimes, i.e. human rights and development, cannot be refuted. As such, the UNGPs are the predominant, until such time as the proposed Business and Human Rights Treaty is adopted, ‘normative’ roadmap for businesses to achieve the SDGs.

This chapter gives more clarity on indigenous peoples as communities that, given their special social and cultural connection with land and natural resources, are inherently vulnerable to the global spread of projects that necessitate significant, and often irreparable, land disturbance and the transnational legal dynamics and behaviours that facilitate that disturbance. Far greater effort is needed to think about the indigenous movement in a more pluralistic framework: as specifically vulnerable to development projects in a much broader outlook, that is, beyond settler-colonial geographical area and one in which private concessionaires and financiers are, through contractual and policy mechanisms, shaping the movement with significant impacts for rights recognition and implementation. This chapter also defines the specific characteristics of modern development projects that matter for indigenous land rights issues, including the diminished role of the state in these projects and the implementation gaps that appear in development finance mechanisms for resettlement. The chapter concludes by examining the private legal nature of the plural contracts that secure a development project.