Bilateral donors are fast winding down their aid programmes in China, but the World Bank is hoping the government of China will be willing to pay for continued Bank assistance in social policy and development projects, according to the Bank’s Resident Representative in China, David Dollar. The Bank’s partnership with China, he told Nick Young, may now also extend to joint projects in Africa, given that China has shown how globalisation can work for the poor.

The UK government Department for International Development (DFID) will provide GBP 105 million (nearly USD 200 million at current exchange rates) over the next three years for continuing work in China to support basic education, AIDS and TB prevention and care, and water and sanitation, according to its 2006-2011 Country Assistance Plan, finalised in March and formally launched in Beijing in May.

China’s overseas aid “bolsters [a] responsible image” according to a January 19 China Daily editorial that may herald greater transparency in China’s large—and still officially secret—aid portfolio. But there is every sign that, like other donors before it, China will use aid to promote its commercial and geopolitical interests. Here, Tina Qian reports on China’s aid to poor and landlocked Laos, where GDP per capita in 2004 was no more than USD 382, and where almost 20% of GDP comes from international donors.

A long-awaited China Human Development Report for 2005, Development with Equity, was finally published in mid-December after delays caused by Chinese government concerns that the report’s central theme—growing disparity of income and opportunity in China—was treated too bluntly.

A new English-language web portal english.gov.cn has been launched by central government in a bid to improve communications with the outside world.

The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation has announced a series of grants to Chinese scientific and policy research institutions in a bid to draw China closer into global dialogue and cooperation on arms control, nuclear non-proliferation and anti-terrorism.

China is the world’s number four destination for international tourists, and the most toured country in the world when day trippers and domestic tourists are also counted. National and local governments are keen to promote the industry, but some Chinese observers are beginning to count the environmental and cultural cost. A China Daily article (October 18) reports that visitors to Zhangjiajie, a world heritage site in western Hunan that derives more than 50% of its revenue from tourism, now find little sign of the local Tujia culture, which has been engulfed by modernity. Local residents interviewed in the article lament their loss of tradition and call for preservation of their culture. But a Beijing University professor asserts in the same article that there is no point in preserving architecture and culture. “Cultural preservation has a high cost,” he is quoted as saying. “It's practical to change Zhangjiajie into a modern city, and it's natural for local Tujias to adjust to modern life.”

A UNESCO Chair of Media and Gender Studies, recently created at the Communications University of China, is the 18th Chair sponsored by UNESCO in China but the first one in this field.

British development cooperation with China has moved from tied aid to direct, 'poverty focused' programming around Millenium Development Goals, and is now thinking about how to engage with a China whose role on the global stage has changed profoundly.