New Delhi: China’s funding to development-focussed multilateral institutions increased to more than $3 billion in 2024, registering a ten-fold increase from $260 million in 2010, according to a study conducted by the Center for Global Development.
This makes China the fifth-largest donor to the International Development Association (IDA), which is the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, up from the 28th position it held in 2010.
China rose the ranks thanks to its latest pledge of a whopping $1.5 million to the latest replenishment. China’s funding to multilateral development banks or MDBs — that provide grants and loans on favourable terms to poorer countries — has increased by 92% over the past five years. MDBs are funded by multiple countries to finance large development projects that emerging economies may struggle to fund alone.
The study, authored by Beata Cichocka and Ian Mitchell, also found a sharp increase in China’s multilateral climate-finance footprint, from $600 million in 2017 to $5.25 billion in 2025.
Although China’s contributions to the development-oriented multilaterals have grown more than tenfold since 2010, they remain highly selective. In other words, China is not uniformly amping up funding across various multilateral banks.
It ranks only 19th for voluntary contributions to the United Nations and contributes to just seven of the 26 vertical funds (like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; the Global Fund; or the Green Climate Fund). Its funding is concentrated in MDB concessional windows that provide loans on more generous terms, especially the International Development Association, and in climate finance. Hence, China remains a modest vertical fund donor and a limited voluntary UN funder.
Its overall contributions to vertical funds have fallen by 32 per cent.
More funding; less borrowing
At the same time, China is borrowing less from development banks—its borrowing from MDBs has fallen nearly by half, from over $8 billion in 2021 to $4.7 billion in 2024. At the World Bank too, China has plummeted from being the largest borrower in 2017 to only the 18th largest borrower in 2025. In fact, the World Bank estimates that China will stop borrowing altogether after 2031.
China’s borrowing from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a multilateral development bank it helped establish and is its largest shareholder, has also declined markedly since 2017.
However, China’s growing financial contribution has not led to it becoming more influential at these development banks. China’s voting power has largely remained unchanged since 2021.
Despite holding 6 per cent of the shares in the World Bank, it holds lesser voting power than the around 12 per cent implied by the Bank’s own shareholding formula.
In addition, Chinese nationals now hold fewer top UN jobs than they did five years ago, having lost leadership positions at WHO, ITU, UNIDO and WMO. Chinese nationals lead just two of the 56 development-relevant UN bodies examined and make up only 1.3 percent of the wider UN staff, despite China accounting for around 17 percent of the world’s population.
China is indeed neither withdrawing from the existing multilateral system nor simply replacing traditional Western donors within it. It is becoming more deeply embedded across a range of institutions—notably, the World Bank’s IDA and WHO—while engaging on terms that preserve its flexibility.