Beijing and the UN, 50 Years On

There have been several major anniversaries for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) this year, including the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921 and the 50th anniversary of U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s breakthrough first visit to Beijing in July 1971. October 29 is another date worth marking: the 50th anniversary of Beijing’s entry into the United Nations.

Until 1971, the China seat had been held by the Nationalist government of the Republic of China residing on Taiwan, a matter that became bound up not only with the legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party rule, but also with the legitimacy of the U.N. itself – an organization committed to universality of membership for those governments in control of territory and people. As U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold put it in 1955, expressing a view that over time many member states came to share, “I consider it a weakness and an anomaly that this people, one fourth of mankind, is not represented in our work.”

Some 50 years later, the PRC is well-embedded in the U.N. with status as one of the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council and influence with many states in the U.N. General Assembly. In material terms, Beijing has become the second largest contributor to the U.N.’s overall budget as well as to the U.N.’s peace operations budget and it regularly contributes contingents to U.N. peace operations. It has set up an 8,000-strong peacekeeping stand-by force, as well as a China-U.N. Peace and Development Trust Fund. That Trust Fund, established in 2016, pledged $200 million to the United Nations over a 10-year period. Chinese nationals also currently head three of the U.N.’s specialized agencies, as well as the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

The Chinese leadership promises more of the same for the U.N.’s present and future. In Beijing’s official view, it is “firmly committed to safeguarding the U.N.-centered global governance system, the basic norms of international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, the authority and stature of the U.N., and the central role of the U.N. in international affairs.” This commitment resides alongside a more general determination that China lead the reform of the global governance system, as a number of statements by President Xi Jinping have indicated.

As a further means of elevating the importance of China’s relationship with the U.N., the country’s leaders regularly remind us that China is a founding member and was the first government to add its signature to the U.N. Charter. These statements are designed to play up China’s role in the creation of the international order after World War II and its long-standing commitment to a U.N. role in order-building (although, of course, it was the Nationalist government that undertook those initial efforts). China’s leaders describe themselves as genuine supporters of the multilateralism that is at the core of a U.N.-centered international system, contrasting Chinese behavior with a hegemonic and unilateralist United States.

China’s leaders also aver that the “pursuit of peace is in the genes of the Chinese nation,” and that China, as a “responsible great power,” has accepted the obligations that P5 status have bestowed on it, including most notably in its contribution to U.N. Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs). In making this contribution, China deploys more troops to U.N. PKOs than all the other P5 members combined. Beijing also frequently repeats, for both domestic and international consumption, that the troops that have deployed receive plaudits and grateful thanks for their professionalism and fortitude.

The wider importance of these statements is three-fold. Each implies that Beijing sees the U.N. as an international organization that has some authority and legitimacy in world politics independent of the states that make up its membership. They also suggest that China is willing to have its growing power constrained through a thick form of multilateralism that takes as a priority, when it formulates policy, the principles and norms that are contained within the U.N. Charter. As Xi put it in his speech before the General Assembly on September 21 this year, “We must improve global governance and practice true multilateralism.” This is in contrast to a thin form that simply involves agreement among three or more political actors. Finally, Chinese proclamations are intended to underline that there is a settled and static interpretation of the Charter that China respects and bolsters through its ideas and material contributions.

However, closer examination of China’s relationship with the U.N. since its entry in 1971 shows that its attitude toward the body is far more ambivalent than these proclamations imply, and at times contradicts their alleged intent. First, a number of its statements and actions suggest a belief that instead of operating independently in world politics, the U.N. reflects in fact the global distribution of power, and that it is the member states that have, and should continue to have, overarching sway over the organization’s deliberations.

Thus, Beijing argues that a U.N. in which China contributes more both in terms of material resources as well as in its vision of world order should be viewed as a natural consequence of its resurgence in the 21st century. As Xi put it in 2016, “The pattern of global governance depends on the international balance of power, and the transformation of the global governance system originates from changes in the balance of power.” With respect to the U.N. itself, Xi’s speech to the General Assembly in September 2020 stated that while the U.N. had to retain its “central role in international affairs,” the body also had to be part of a global order that would “adapt itself to evolving global political and economic dynamics.”

Second, Beijing’s multilateralist behavior often appears as a much less demanding version than the definition of this condition implied in many of its most prominent official statements and documents. This is illustrated in its preference for nationally-determined solutions to the complex international problems that emerge onto the U.N.’s agenda, and its emphasis on state sovereignty (traditionally defined) as the primary foundation for a norms-based international order. As Chinese officials constantly reiterate, the U.N. is above all an enabler. It should “provide constructive assistance … but must respect the sovereignty of the country concerned,” as China’s former U.N. Ambassador Ma Zhaoxu put it in May 2019. From Xi’s perspective, the sovereign equality of nations and the associated principle of non-interference in internal affairs has to be accepted as the “most important norm governing state-to-state relations.”

Third, China’s attempts to impose one particular interpretation of the U.N. Charter downplay the institutional and ideational changes that the U.N. has undergone over time. Its interpretation neglects the attention that has been given over the last two decades or so to a broader concept of security, which acknowledges that internal breakdowns of a state’s security as well as large-scale violence directed at individuals pose challenges to international peace and security. As U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan most memorably put it in September 1999, our contemporary reading of the U.N. Charter means we are “more than ever conscious that its aim is to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them.” This particular understanding of sovereignty has become manifest in activities undertaken by the U.N. such as the protection of civilians in armed conflict introduced as a core obligation in 1999; the Women, Peace and Security agenda brought forward in 2000; and the norm of “the Responsibility to Protect” endorsed in the World Summit Outcome document of 2005.

These dualistic perspectives at the root of China’s approach to the United Nations – that is, a U.N. defined by the interests of major states versus a U.N. with autonomy and legitimacy –

are indicative of a tension at the heart of China’s relationship with the body, and one that has been evident since it entered the organization in 1971, as shown in what follows. A central question that China does not appear as yet to have resolved is to what degree Beijing can shape the U.N. from within – which it apparently wishes to do – while at the same time building the U.N.’s centrality as a primary, authoritative, multilateral security institution in the global governance system.

The Dualities in China’s Position in the Early Years

From 1945, Chinese Communist leaders expressed their support for the establishment of an organization designed to “safeguard international peace and security after the war.” On their assumption of power in 1949, they wanted to legitimize their sovereign control through membership in the body as soon as feasible. As an early indication of this strong desire for U.N. recognition, between the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and the outbreak of the fighting on the Korean Peninsula in June 1950, Beijing sent 18 telegrams to the U.N. and its specialized agencies calling for the removal of the Chinese Nationalist delegation, which had “lost all de jure and de facto grounds for representing the Chinese people.”

Despite Beijing’s demand for recognition, successive U.S. administrations, from President Harry Truman’s to the early part of Richard Nixon’s presidency, used their influence within the U.N. to prevent the PRC’s assumption of the U.N. seat. This policy of denial was only gradually overturned as a result of decolonization, which saw the developing world steadily expand its voting power within the U.N., and growing support for an argument that a country of China’s size, with a political system that had endured and that now had nuclear weapons capability, needed urgently to be represented.

However, also important to this change was a shift in U.S. perceptions of the role that China could play in world politics since both Beijing and Washington had come to regard the former Soviet Union as their primary strategic enemy. This fact was underlined in U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s two visits to Beijing the same year as the vote in favor of China’s entry into the U.N. took place.

Yet, despite the satisfaction that accompanied Beijing’s entry, over the 1970s the PRC appeared to accord the body a minimal role either in the advancement of its own security concerns or in goals associated with world politics more generally. It might “champion” developing world causes, but would not use its weight to further them, or formally join the Group of 77 developing countries.

As a P5 member, Beijing had a veto but only saw fit to use it twice, in a period of otherwise quite frequent veto use: for example, the U.K. vetoed on 12 occasions during these years, and the United States did so 18 times. Often Beijing chose not to participate in Security Council votes at all, especially in relation to peacekeeping operations, which it saw as vehicles for the two superpowers to further their own interests. As China’s Ambassador to the U.N. Huang Hua put it in October 1973 in reference to the Security Council’s decision to continue monitoring the ceasefire in place at the end of the Yom Kippur War: “Such a practice can only pave the way for further international intervention and control, with the superpowers as the behind-the-scenes boss.”

From Ambivalence to Ambition

It took the significant domestic policy change of Reform and Opening, introduced in late 1978, before China cautiously began to deepen its relationship with the U.N. and with international organizations more broadly. In paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s view, China needed a peaceful international environment in order successfully to complete its development goals, and membership in international organizations, together with signature of major international treaties, were both useful ways of signalling China’s interest in helping to secure a more stable world.

One of the most significant changes that came in this period related to Beijing’s perspective on U.N. PKOs, with China now voting in support of such operations and paying its dues. In 1988 it applied for membership of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations and in 1990 sent five military observers to the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization in the Middle East. From the 1990s, Beijing started to deploy peacekeepers regularly, though still in very small numbers – around 50 to 100 personnel at any one time between 1993 and 2002. One explanation for this excessive caution was a lack of enthusiasm within high levels of the People’s Liberation Army to participate within a U.N. that many still saw as an instrument of U.S. hegemony. Others were concerned that China lacked both the financial and human resources to make a meaningful contribution.

Only in the 2000s was China ready to commit to PKOs at a more significant level. In 2002, Beijing signed an agreement to join the U.N. Standby Arrangement System and it then placed on standby a 525-person engineering battalion, a medical unit of 25 personnel, and two transport companies comprising 160 troops. Chinese peacekeeping contributions quickly grew from 358 personnel in 2003, to 1,036 in 2004 and 1,666 in 2006. Typically, numbers deployed now stand at around 2,500 and from 2012-2013 have included combat troops with the largest number of such forces deployed in South Sudan. Chinese official sources state that China overall has contributed more than 40,000 service members to 25 U.N. peacekeeping missions since its first deployment. Beijing also likes to reminds us that it has the largest number of standby peacekeeping troops of any U.N. member state.

Prioritizing Domestic Motives Over U.N. Legitimacy?

These deployments and monetary contributions have undoubtedly been valuable to the U.N. and contributed to legitimating its role in the maintenance of international peace and security. In addition, they have contributed to the building of China’s image as a “responsible great power,” have given Chinese troops the experience of operating overseas, and may have helped to defuse the notion that China’s rise in military power should only be looked at as a new and growing threat rather than as a global public good.

However, more overt domestic motives also hold a powerful place in explaining these developments, and sometimes have been promoted in ways that undermine the authority of actions that derive from U.N. endorsement. As Andrea Ghiselli of Fudan University has argued, China’s expansion as a trading and investing nation led also to the expansion of China’s “interest frontiers” and transformed its perception of threats to the Chinese political regime and its economic assets. By the mid-2000s, President Hu Jintao had started to be concerned about the security implications of Chinese economic activities abroad, including the protection of Chinese citizens that were involved in those activities. Ghiselli records some 70,000 Chinese working overseas in 2002, with numbers growing to almost 204,000 by 2010. This led Hu to engage in efforts to enshrine the concept of “Military Operations Other Than War” in China’s defense policy. Libya in 2011, in particular, was a major wake-up call since it required the evacuation of some 36,000 Chinese citizens at a time of acute crisis.

As a part of this rethink, Beijing came to view participation in U.N. peace operations as a useful means to help protect its “interest frontiers,” both for diplomatic reasons and because these operations were a means of sharing the burden. From this perspective, engagement with the U.N. could serve both to legitimize China’s security engagement with the world, and at the same time secure its overseas interests.

One clear case where Beijing seemed to prioritize its own interests to the potential detriment of U.N. authority came with its South Sudan deployment. At the time of South Sudan’s independence China held three-quarters of the new state’s oil fields and had assets in the country of more than $20 billion. Chinese diplomats apparently inquired whether its units operating under the U.N. flag in South Sudan could be used to guard its energy installations in the country. Moreover, while it gave its support for an extension of the mandate of the mission, this only came once the enabling U.N. resolution condemned “attacks on oil installations, petroleum companies and their employees” as well as urging all parties “to ensure the security of economic infrastructure.”

Elsewhere, we also see a China-centered approach to commitments that Beijing prefers to depict as underlining its respect for multilateralist endeavors and for an independent U.N. role. The China-U.N. Peace and Development Fund has two sub-funds, one entitled the Secretary-General’s Peace and Security Sub-fund, which aims to finance projects and activities relating to the maintenance of international peace and security, broadly construed; the second finances activities in support of the 2030 U.N. Agenda for Sustainable Development. The latter has proven to be a vehicle to tie China’s Belt and Road Initiative – Xi’s signature foreign policy project – with that U.N. agenda. The Trust Fund also has an institutional design that all but guarantees China’s direction of the funding. The current Steering Committee is chaired by the U.N. secretary-general’s chef de cabinet, but the other four members of that committee are the current Chinese ambassador to the U.N., the Chinese head of the U.N.’s DESA, as well as senior diplomats from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Finance.

Beijing is also engaged in attempts to promote Chinese nationals in the workings of the U.N. Secretariat in the expectation that its influence within the organization will thereby be enhanced. According to researchers Courtney Fung and Shing-hon Lam, the “view on the part of the Beijing elite [is] that China’s multilateral influence is limited by the relatively small number of Chinese international bureaucrats.” To remedy that absence, Beijing has introduced domestic training and educational programs designed to increase the Chinese applicant pool.

Certainly, it is a reasonable Chinese objective to have greater representation throughout the U.N. system. Nevertheless, those aims can be tainted where there is suspicion that an individual’s fealty lies too obviously with the home state rather than with the U.N. itself. In China’s case, instilled in the training of these individuals is a strong sense that they should be Chinese first, and international civil servants second. As the former head of DESA, Wu Hongbo, is recorded to have said, “as an international civil servant, when it comes to Chinese national sovereignty and security, we will undoubtedly defend our country’s interests.”

Other such statements also point to the predicament of some Chinese nationals when they participate in international roles. For example, when the prospective Chinese head of the Food and Agriculture Organization was quizzed about his likely degree of independence from Beijing, he replied, “I am a professional scientist,” adding, “I am not a typical Chinese official, you know that, yeah?” Yet, after his election, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi undercut that statement of independence, promising: “From now, there will be one more good friend of Africa in the U.N. agencies.”

These few examples suggest that the PRC aspires for a greater presence within the U.N. predominantly in service of its interests, to further broader domestic goals, and to shape over time the higher-level workings of the U.N. bureaucracy. Beijing believes that it has a legitimate claim on executive positions within the Secretariat and beyond in large part because of the changing distribution of power in world politics. The Chinese leadership also states that its diplomats should be confident enough to offer “Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.”

That Chinese wisdom extends to its particular interpretation of the U.N. Charter and the core activities of this organization. This effort is important to chart and to understand in its own right, but it also highlights acutely China’s dilemmas as it tries to strike a balance between the protection of its interests while bolstering the U.N. as a core component of multilateral order.

Offering “China’s Wisdom”

A notable feature of China’s actions within the U.N. over the last few years has been to advance more energetically positions that challenge the U.N.’s three-pillar structure. That U.N. structure, based on the Charter, emphasizes the positive, symbiotic, relationship among peace and security, development, and human rights, and has encouraged the U.N. to place emphasis on human protection in order to achieve the primary objectives of the organization. The last four U.N. secretaries-general, in particular, supported a U.N. that would give increased attention to ways of reducing civilian harm, would be especially attentive to the security needs of women and children, would make all states accountable for their lapses in the protection of human rights, and would accept that mass atrocity crimes need to be addressed as threats to international peace and security that therefore demand the attention of the Security Council.

China, on the other hand, has attempted to constrain the advancement of this normative shift, and to return the U.N. to a primary focus on state rather than individual sovereignty. Beijing does not deny the U.N.’s need to contribute to human protection, but it has raised questions about how that can best be achieved in ways that secure the state rather than the individual. It does not see the state as a frequent perpetrator of abuse but as the best guarantor of all forms of protection.

This “triadic model,” as I have termed it elsewhere, draws on what China depicts as its own experience since Reform and Opening and which has allowed it to reach moderate levels of prosperity amidst what it claims has been a stable domestic society. This model accords a commanding role to the government in power – one that focuses on long-term economic development in order to build effective domestic governance structures, and that offers a stable domestic environment attractive to investors and entrepreneurial activities.

In service of state-centrism, China’s positions show a desire to narrow the concept of what represents a genuine threat to international peace and security, and therefore to narrow the range of items that come onto the agenda of the Security Council. Thus, even in this critical year for matters connected with climate change, China has resisted a more systematic Security Council engagement with climate-related security risks. In Beijing’s view, the balance of U.N. concerns should tip back toward supporting governments in power and accord those bodies the primary role in protecting civilians, even to the point, for example, of regularly using its veto (in tandem with Russia) in support of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It urges the international community to provide constructive assistance to a state experiencing breakdown, but also argues that the government of the target state should be the body to decide on the forms of assistance that it requires. National ownership of accountability mechanisms is also underlined, with domestic judicial institutions taking the lead role in seeking redress where there have been wide-scale civilian atrocities inside a state.

The focus on development in China’s triadic model finds expression in the often-expressed view that the root causes of conflict are related to poverty and under-development, and that in turn results in mass violence against individuals. Thus, in China’s formulations, the U.N.’s Women, Peace and Security agenda basically becomes a question of empowering women through increasing their economic opportunities rather than focusing on representation in decision-making, conflict resolution, field operations, and peace negotiations, or supporting mechanisms to deal more effectively with conflict-related sexual violence. China’s approach to the norm of the Responsibility to Protect emphasizes that it is the state’s responsibility to prevent atrocities, and that building the preventive capacities of fragile states unable or unwilling to prevent atrocities should be tackled as a development rather than a reform issue, with the U.N. offering the assistance that the state in question determines is needed.

The official Chinese perspective on human rights emphasizes legal sovereign equality as the most important norm governing state-to-state relations and vital to the protection of human rights. It also elevates development as a foundational human right from which other rights (might) eventually flow, and since 2017 has had some success in passing resolutions at the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) that give some support to this formulation. Xi reiterated this perspective in his 2021 U.N. speech, stating that human rights should be protected and promoted “through development.”

China’s attachment to its notion of social stability manifests itself in statements indicating that it is the duty of governments to maintain public order; that the use of social media inside a state needs to be controlled; and non-governmental actors – such as those operating in support of U.N. action – need to be guided in their work by the government in power. Recent Chinese attacks on the hitherto consensual understanding of the category of “human rights defender” have included the argument that “there is no clear and universal definition worked out through intergovernmental negotiation” of this term, and that “countries have different views on who can be defined” as a defender of rights.

What Role for the U.N.?

On the basis of these initiatives, were China’s influence within the U.N. to grow in further substantial ways, we could see a reduced U.N. role in world politics. The U.N. could emerge, even more than is the case today, as an inter-state governance mechanism where individual governments requiring assistance decide on priorities, and the organization acts as an enabler of the government in power.

In more specific terms, were this Chinese vision to be given greater prominence, we would likely see a U.N. that is involved in fewer, less complex, and less intrusive peace operations, a body that gives less priority overall to human protection and places more emphasis on its development arm. The HRC could evolve into a body that focuses overwhelmingly on collective rights and the right to development, and become one where the Universal Periodic Review process loses its ability to hold rights-abusing governments to account.

The outcomes that may derive from a Chinese determination to give renewed emphasis to state sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs hardly seem adequate in a world that expects the U.N. to address climate change, mass atrocity crimes, the causes and consequences of refugee flows, as well as global health pandemics, among other major threats to global order. Moreover, the planetary scope of these challenges makes China’s triadic model – one that is built on nationally-determined priorities and experiences – essentially anachronistic.

In sum, China’s approach threatens to undermine, perhaps fatally, its articulated preference to maintain the centrality, stature, and authority of the U.N. in world politics, since that legitimate authority derives from an ability to reach beyond the strategies and objectives of major states. If Beijing wishes to give credence to its stance of supporting a U.N.-centric global order, this tension in its position needs to be recognized and addressed.