Fixing China’s humanitarian aid architecture: what are the lessons from the European Union and the United States?

Abstract

The global humanitarian situation has deteriorated drastically since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the Russian–Ukrainian war. The European Union and the United States are forerunners to providing global humanitarian aid, but China’s visibility and role in global humanitarian affairs has significantly increased. Although China has been contributing more, its humanitarian aid concept remains vague, its aid mechanism is fragmented, and its approach to providing aid is rigid. These factors make China unprepared for tackling future humanitarian challenges. There are notable divergences in terms of concepts and mechanisms for and approaches to humanitarian aid among the European Union, the United States and China. Despite the pitfalls in the humanitarian aid architectures of the European Union and United States, China can learn from them to strive for an architecture that can help it aid more effectively. In particular, China should build coherence and consistency among aid concept, mechanism and approach, streamline aid mechanism, and give full play of non-governmental actors.

Keywords:

• Humanitarian aid
• aid architecture
• COVID-19
• noninterference principle
• multilateralism

Acknowledgement

I thank the anonymous referees for their valuable and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Today, the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations is in charge of the European Union’s humanitarian aid duty. However, it continues to use ECHO as the abbreviation.

2 Feed the Future is an initiative that the Obama administration proposed in 2010, which aimed to alleviate hunger and malnutrition in recipient countries by improving their agriculture sectors and strengthening food security. There are twelve target countries across Africa, South Asia and Central America. See: https://www.feedthefuture.gov/.

3 The sector code of AidData dataset is based on the OECD’s sector categorization scheme. The humanitarian aid sector constitutes emergency response (720), reconstruction relief and rehabilitation (730), disaster prevention and preparedness (740).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China, under Grant 22CGJ043.

Notes on contributors

Chao Zhang

Chao Zhang is Assistant Professor at the Institute of European Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has conducted research on a range of topics including the European Union’s development and humanitarian aid polices, China’s foreign aid, China-European Union relations in the fields of development, environment, climate change, and energy. He has published many papers in journals such as Asia-Europe Journal, China Report, The Journal of International Studies, and Chinese Journal of European Studies. His current research project focuses on analysing the European Union’s aid activities in economic infrastructure, the development consequences of Global Gateway initiative and its interactions with China’s ‘Belt and Road’.