Project diplomacy: Do development project characteristics shape perceptions of China and its efforts in Africa?

China has significantly increased its presence across Africa over the past decades. This engagement is commonly considered to build soft power through ‘project diplomacy’, i.e. influencing public perceptions through infrastructure construction. We evaluate whether the attributes of a project shape public opinion. We hypothesise that a project that employs local labour and management, has minimal costly impacts, and secures positive endorsements by informed actors should receive favourable evaluations, thereby improving perceptions of China; a project without these positive attributes should produce the opposite effect. We evaluate these hypotheses with a vignette survey experiment among over 3,200 Malawian citizens. We find significant effects of a project’s attributes on its approval and the beliefs it brings to local communities. However, these same attributes have limited effects on the perceptions of Chinese development efforts and no effect at all on the wider views of China’s role in Africa. Our results thus reveal important but nuanced impacts of Chinese project attributes on African public opinion.