BUYING HEARTS AND MINDS: ASSESSING CHINA’S PURSUIT OF SOFT POWER IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES THROUGH ECONOMIC MEANS

Abstract

In the last couple decades, China has spent billions of dollars in pursuit of soft power and global admiration. Yet, even as China and other great powers race to outspend each other and thus gain influence in the developing world, very little research has been done on the effect of economic activities on public opinion formation of foreign countries – a topic that has broad implications for how countries conduct foreign affairs. In this thesis, I focus on public opinion formation of China in Africa. I seek to make not only a substantive contribution but also a methodological one by employing novel instrumental variables based on the work of Eichenauer et al. (2018) and Autor et al. (2013) to examine causal effects of Chinese economic activities on public attitudes in Africa. Further, I check the construction of my instrumental variables with multiple diagnostic tests and find evidence for strong and valid instruments. My research suggests that Chinese foreign direct investment has a positive effect on favorable public opinion of China in Africa, while exports and aid have no average effect on attitudes towards China. These results hold across Ordinary Least Squares and logistic regression modeling techniques and have heteroskedastic-robust standard errors.