China’s rise to global prominence has been coupled with a development aid approach and narrative that contradicts long-standing Western-oriented models and discourses. Using a corpus-based approach, this paper investigates the extent to which China’s political discourse finds its way into the development aid discourse either by senior party officials or through a government-managed collaborative translation mechanism. To do so, the authors designed a monolingual corpus of the speeches of top-ranking CPC party officials presented at party-organized events and bilingual (Chinese–English) corpora of the discourse used by Chinese government officials during development aid exchanges. Furthermore, they studied the terms and their contexts of use in the bilingual corpora to determine whether translation served as a medium through which China’s political discourse was possibly being introduced into its development aid discourse. The results reveal that China’s development aid discourse contains an insignificant amount of political terminology mirroring China’s own development path.