Since the 2006 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation announced a strengthened relationship between China and Africa, there has been increasing interest about what that may mean for the forms and consequences of Chinese educational aid. This thesis aims to contribute to that discussion by comparing the Chinese approach to educational aid with the traditional Western model. These differences are investigated theoretically and empirically. The first part of the thesis compares the approaches at the level of 'donor logic', the assemblage of assumptions, histories, relationships, practices and motives that characterise and distinguish them. These are broadly summarised as the traditional logic (from the West) of 'enabling catch up' and China emphasising'win-win'. This is done through systematic reviews of the literature, with particular emphasis on the Chinese literature. The second part of the thesis consists of reports on a series of empirical investigations into how the forms of aid were experienced by their recipients, and particularly whether differences in 'donor logic' were recognised. These include periods of field work in Tanzania and China, involving interviews with Chinese and Tanzanian officials, administrators in higher education, and Tanzanian students returning from China. Reports on Chinese training programmes for African educationalists were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. The thesis concludes that there are differences between Western and Chinese donor logics and practices of educational aid, and that these are recognised 'on the ground', and it speculates on the possibility of the emergence of a Chinese model as an alternative to the Western model of educational aid.