【編按：本月我們挑選的《The Diplomat》收費文章，來自牛津大學Rosemary Foot教授，探討一個大家很感興趣的話題：中國是如何成為今日的聯合國領袖的。Rosemary Foot是我的老師之一，不少著作例如《Rights Beyond Border》都在探討中國與國際人權概念的互動。這篇文章分析了中國如何從加入聯合國時的矛盾心態，不斷以棄權票迴避積極取態，到今日發現可以通過收編「一帶一路」國家來搶奪國際話語權，從而非常有野心地參與所有聯合國活動。】
Beijing and the UN, 50 Years On (By Rosemary Foot)
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 an...
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