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Over the last two decades, China has become increasingly influential in Africa, and the US policy pivoting to confront domestic challenges and withdrawing from its role in international fora has raised many concerns. Based on this global context, this paper examines the US-China soft power competition through foreign aid. It takes a relational lens to analyze their aid to the African countries. It first looks at how foreign aid could be transformed into soft power assets, and then innovatively puts the two countries side by side and examines the relational powers of their foreign aid and the impacts on the other's national image. The paper uses ordered (Ordinary Least Squares) OLS, ordered logit, and IV regression to analyze aid data and opinion poll data. The results show that foreign aid can promote the African perceptions of both countries. It also finds that Chinese aid has a negative impact on the image of the US in Africa, while American aid has no significant effect on African perception of China. This conclusion aligns with the competitive nature of the US–China relationship. China's model of aid may be preferred by Africans, while the US may need to revisit its approaches in Africa in order to turn this situation around. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on African perceptions of the Chinese presence in Africa tends to present two different perspectives on this issue. The works based on opinion polls typically emphasize the positive nature of African views on China, whereas the qualitatively grounded research often point to the presence of both positive and negative perceptions in African discourses on China. Due to the traditional friendship between Beijing and Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, the Equatoguinean people seemingly have a positive image of China, but the recent fast mounting Chinese presence in the country has started to raise mixed feelings among the bulk of the population. The local political and economic privileged classes who have benefitted most from the growing Chinese presence in Equatorial Guinea tend to be more supportive of this new phenomenon, whereas a minor group of small entrepreneurs and the main opposition parties are firmly critical of China. The present paper intends to shed some light on these contradictory views through a systematic study of the Equatoguinean people's attitudes towards China and the Chinese, which elucidate three independent variables as the basis of judgment: (1) the nature of the traditional relationship between Africa and China, (2) occupation, and (3) political affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]