Beyond confrontation? Comparing the determinants of Chinese and the European Union's development finance to Africa

China's substantial flow of development finance (DF) to Africa has sparked abundant discussions on the divergent distributive politics between China and traditional donors. This article compares the DF allocation strategies of China and the European Union (EU) and investigates the underlying motives of why they favor certain recipients than others. The comparison is incorporated into two aid allocation models in current literature: donor interest and recipient demand. The analysis draws on data covering both Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Other Official Finance (OOF) over the period from 2000 to 2017. Mapping of the data reveals the divergent strategies of China and the EU in financing volumes, geographic allocation and sectoral targeting, paired with tactical convergence including overlapping recipient focus and a shared emphasis on economic infrastructure. Moreover, China's DF conveys a mixed portfolio of OOF-dominant in aggregate yet concessional in many recipient countries. Using country-fixed effects regressions, the article finds that ODA allocations by both China and the EU are largely decoupled from economic covariates. However, EU ODA is systematically higher in more democratic and less politically stable countries. By contrast, both actors' OOF is trade-sensitive but in different ways: China's OOF comoves with both exports to and imports from China, whereas EU OOF declines with EU exports and rises with EU imports. The findings suggest that the distributive politics of China and the EU reflect a complex interplay of overlapping and cross-cutting factors, warranting context- and instrument-specific analysis.