China’s funding of global development institutions has grown more than tenfold since 2010, according to a new report that also says the pace of growth has been slowing recently as financing becomes more selective.

China’s annual contributions to multilateral development entities rose from just under US$260 million in 2010 to over US$3 billion in 2024, according to a report published by the Washington-based Centre for Global Development think tank on Thursday.

“China appears to be more involved in that system than it was a decade ago, but on terms shaped both by Beijing’s own caution and selectivity and by what existing shareholders have been willing to concede,” analysts Beata Cichocka and Ian Mitchell wrote in the report.

They said China’s overall growth in funding had slowed in the past five years, with the fastest-growing contributions going towards multilateral development banks providing cheap loans and grants to low-income countries.

China pledged US$1.5 billion to the World Bank’s International Development Association in its last replenishment cycle in 2024. That marked a 14 per cent rise over the previous funding round and made Beijing the fund’s fifth-largest donor, despite wider donor retrenchment, the analysts said.

Climate finance attributable to China had also risen sharply, growing from US$600 million in 2017 to $5.25 billion last year, equivalent to around 5.4 per cent of total climate finance outflows from multilateral development banks, they said.

But while China’s international role has grown, its multilateral contributions are ... low relative to other providersBeata Cichocka and Ian Mitchell, Centre for Global Development Meanwhile, China’s engagement with UN bodies had become more selective, with its assessed contributions – required dues based on the relative size of a country’s economy – now the second largest, but its voluntary contributions ranking only 19th.

The report said China’s steepest growth in UN funding over the past decade was to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and the World Meteorological Organisation.

Four months after the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization, Beijing pledged in May last year to give the WHO an additional US$500 million over the following five years.

“China is a net contributor to the multilateral system,” Cichocka and Mitchell said in a separate article published on the think tank’s website on Thursday, noting that China’s borrowing from multilateral development banks had nearly halved between 2021 and 2024.

“But while China’s international role has grown, its multilateral contributions are still a very small share of its economy and low relative to other providers,” they added.

They said China’s financing was estimated at just 0.01 per cent of its gross national income in 2023, significantly lower than the 0.14 per cent average among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development members.

“This is understandable for a middle-income country,” Cichocka and Mitchell said. “But as China reaches and grows through high-income status, it could comfortably increase its role in many different ways.”