In Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China's Overseas Development Program, the five authors portray a comprehensive picture of China's development financing projects around the world, with detailed examination of China's policy objectives and its impacts, including economic, political, social, and environmental, on the recipient countries. With impressive breadth and depth, this timely and ambitious book reveals the logic, approaches, and procedures of Chinese development financing by collecting, processing, and analyzing a comprehensive dataset, AidData. This dataset tracks financial flow from Chinese development institutions and provides an overview of China's foreign lending and grant giving across 165 countries between 2000 and 2014. The impressive data collection enables the authors to rigorously study China's development finance globally, not specifically by country, region, or project.

The book contains nine well-structured chapters. The first two chapters provide a detailed account of how China has evolved itself from an aid recipient to a donor/banker within a short period of three decades. It traces the policy background of Chinese government's policy toward “going out” since the turn of the new century, the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, and its involvement in international