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Viz Project: China's Foreign Aid V1

We’re play with the topic of Chinese funded foreign aid projects. This data, along with others about governance, natural resources, infrastructure projects, and economic information, allows us to ask interesting questions about what motivated that aid package and what the effect is on the country and their diplomatic alliances, along with regional questions about economic activity and infrastructure projects.

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We’ll be starting with a data set detailing China’s foreign aid funding for the past two decades. William and Mary’s AIDDATA team gathers, cleans, and publishes tons of data, along with beautiful visualizations that underpin their foreign affairs research. One of the developers in our community, Lucas Erickson, used this data to build an ANTz visualization of this data, and we’re continuing to adapt the design of the glyphs.

Visualization Design

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The original glyph design used the default setting for glyph topology, coloring, and scaling, as well as placement for child objects below the root node. I used a simple bokeh plot to visualize the spread of values for the transaction spheres. In the first visualization, the default settings maxed at a scale of 100, with several spheres obscuring whole regions of information. I played with different colors, reduced scale ranges, (1-4 for child objects), and placement of branch level 3 objects to get them spread out and less likely to overlap each other.

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In the second visualization, it’s a lot harder to see the glyphs when looking from a global scale, so for our next iteration, we’ll play with producing a couple versions of glyph designs - one with summary information and the z axis kept static, and a second one with smaller glyph designs and much more detailed information so that the user can zoom into individual regions to inspect individual parameters.



Political Science Research with Glyphs

Because we didn’t start out with a particular question in mind, our process to build a visualization will be a lot more iterative and collaborative. Our team is reaching out to different university research centers and think tanks with an interest in China’s foreign aid investments, and we’re open to suggestions for additional datasets to include or questions to analyze. Exploring just the visualization layer we have now - glyphs for each project AIDDATA’s team found for the last two decades - the pattern echoes maps of the belt and trade initiative and natural resource deposits, but with notable exceptions. There are multiple projects on the island of Mauritius, but most BRI maps don’t even show that island. We’re curious how the foreign aid projects correlate to rankings of country’s according to World Bank governance indicators and health spending data. More to come.

Data Citation:

Bluhm, Richard, Axel Dreher, Andreas Fuchs, Bradley Parks, Austin Strange, and Michael Tierney. 2018. Connective Financing: Chinese Infrastructure Projects and the Diffusion of Economic Activity in Developing Countries. ​AidData Working Paper #64. Williamsburg, VA: AidData at William & Mary.

AidData Research and Evaluation Unit. 2017. Geocoding Methodology, Version 2.0. Williamsburg, VA: AidData at William & Mary. https://www.aiddata.org/publications/geocoding-methodology-version-2-0



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