A Benchmark Dataset of Chinese Development Finance with Climate Relevance and SDG Annotations from 2000–2021

China has become a major provider of climate finance to the Global South, yet systematic and transparent data capturing the full scope of its efforts remains limited. This study presents a refined project-level dataset of Chinese development finance from 2000 to 2021, comprising 20,985 records from the AidData Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset. Using a multi-stage approach, we identify 1,383 climate-related projects, amounting to $421 billion, and assign SDG targets to all entries. Climate relevance and SDG alignment were determined through extensive manual annotation following the Rio Marker and SDG frameworks. To ensure consistency and scalability, we conducted technical validation using pretrained BERT models for climate and SDG classification. The resulting dataset not only enables systematic analysis of China’s evolving international climate finance portfolio and sustainable development commitments, but also serves as a benchmark resource for researchers in climate and sustainable development fields to train or refine advanced language models.