China seeks a world order that defers to states and their rulers

THE TIME has come, says Xi Jinping, for China to lead the “reform of global governance” and “move closer to the centre stage.” Defenders of the prevailing order are braced for a contest over whose norms will dominate the 21st century. Some wonder if China’s goal is to replace existing rules with its own. They risk missing a Chinese plan that is already under way, to make the existing order do less, full stop.

Talk to well-connected scholars in Beijing and Shanghai about the world order, and they will complain about Western meddling. They accuse America and its allies of imposing an obsession with human rights on an order whose original, modest mission was to help states coexist and trade peacefully. China claims to be a defender of the status quo and calls America its disrupter. But behind this apparently simple complaint lies a vast ambition. China’s aim is to roll back decades of efforts to ensure that the actions of governments, international bodies and private firms are guided by core principles that the West calls “universal values”.

China’s ambitions are at their most concrete in the UN, where it is one of five permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council (the P5, in diplomatic jargon, comprising America, Britain, China, France and Russia). To buttress their case that Western interventions are a disastrous break with past tradition, Chinese scholars point to Westerners who see interest-based realpolitik as the route to a stable order. Chinese leaders praise Henry Kissinger, a former American secretary of state who calls for governments to seek “equilibrium”, often by accepting the “legitimacy of sometimes opposing values”. That find parallels in Chinese calls for “mutual respect” and “non-interference”.

Chinese officials express scorn for interventions by America and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They are especially hostile to claims that these reflected a “responsibility to protect”. That doctrine commits states to act when they detect genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity. China, along with other UN members, signed up to this in 2005. But Chinese scholars point out that there is no consensus among the P5 about how to define a humanitarian emergency that triggers the responsibility to protect, nor about how to organise an intervention. They claim that this makes it an “empty principle”. Not unrelatedly, terms such as genocide or crimes against humanity sound alarms in Beijing. Several Western governments and parliaments have used them to describe systematic discrimination against Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, from the use of re-education camps to coercive campaigns to lower Uyghur birth rates.

China has no interest in a French proposal, endorsed by 106 UN members, under which P5 members would jointly pledge not to use vetoes in a crisis involving mass atrocities. Nor have Chinese officials backed the Biden administration’s call for P5 vetoes to be reserved for “rare, extraordinary situations”. In late September, during a war-haunted UN General Assembly, France held an urgent debate in the Security Council on Russia’s use of its veto to achieve “impunity” after invading Ukraine. China was not supportive. Though China claims to be neutral over Ukraine, and has abstained in most UN votes condemning Russia’s aggression, Chinese officials have promoted Russian views that the war was provoked by America and the NATO military alliance.

A Chinese plan that is already under way is simply to make the existing order do less, full stop

China’s goal, say diplomats in Beijing, is to see Western unity crumble and sanctions fail to make Mr Putin pay a price for his war of aggression. That is because China might itself face sanctions if it ever launched an attack on Taiwan, envoys suggest. As ever, China’s main concern is China. Long before it began blaming NATO’s expansion for Europe’s ills, it denounced America’s defence alliances in Asia as an unwelcome intrusion. In 2014 Mr Xi bluntly declared: “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia.”

China’s wariness about values extends beyond war and peace. It informs its views of everything from UN peacekeeping to development aid. In the telling of Chinese officials, a handful of arrogant Western democracies, including former colonial powers with blood on their hands, have hijacked the international order to promote their values as the only form of good government. This argument requires ignoring decades of grassroots campaigns in the developing world, involving anti-corruption lawyers, environmental groups, feminists and other activists. Yet with many liberal democracies turning inward and losing interest in emerging regions, Chinese leaders sense an opportunity to create a stripped-down, interest-based world order.

Jia Qingguo, a former dean of international studies at Peking University, who sits on the standing committee of a national advisory body, traces Western activism to the end of the cold war. A crucial moment came when NATO countries intervened in Kosovo in 1998, he says, despite failing to secure a UN mandate. Then came the American-led invasion of Iraq. In the interests of peace, China wants a return to an order based on national sovereignty, he argues. That means a “world order that respects China’s core national interests, especially China’s right to national reunification, and also China’s right to run its own internal business.” Unfortunately, perhaps to distract from domestic divisions, “the US government chooses to highlight the ideological aspects of the world order,” Mr Jia says.

He praises “the wisdom of the founding fathers of the UN” in giving the P5 veto rights, to prevent great powers from walking away and acting alone, as happened to the League of Nations. He concedes that today’s divided P5 may struggle to authorise interventions. “If they cannot agree, then we can wait.” That is the reality of current international politics, he goes on. “And often, no action is better than action, as in the case of the US invasion of Iraq.”

Chinese diplomats demand deference to the P5. In a recent debate China’s UN ambassador, Zhang Jun, called the Security Council “the most authoritative and legitimate body of the multilateral security system”. Those same diplomats are increasingly willing to borrow Soviet arguments from the cold war. Mr Zhang chided countries that erect their “own security fence” at the doorstep of others, forgetting that security is “indivisible”. In the cold war, such phrases were code for grumbling about NATO enlargement and American missile defences that might undermine the Soviet Union’s deterrence. When Russians talk of “indivisible security”, they mean that great powers need a veto over neighbours’ security arrangements.

Such language has become a staple of Chinese rhetoric this year, as officials struggle to explain how China’s supposed reverence for territorial integrity accords with its failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They try to square the circle by blaming America.

Western countries have pushed reforms to UN peacekeeping, to emphasise the protection of civilians after tragic failures in Srebrenica and Rwanda. China is proud of contributing more troops to UN peacekeeping missions than other P5 members. But it has normative ambitions, too, reports Richard Gowan, UN director for the International Crisis Group, a think-tank. In Security Council debates China questions why human-rights monitoring should be part of blue helmets’ mandates. “The Chinese line is that peacekeepers are there to support the host state,” says Mr Gowan.

In the field of development, China counsels deference to rulers. In a UN debate on Africa in August, Mr Zhang urged the world to trust African governments and direct most assistance through them. “There should be no political conditions attached to aid” or endless fault-finding about African democracy, the ambassador declared, before startling diplomats by suggesting that UN arms embargoes imposed on troubled nations including Sudan and Somalia were hampering the emergence of strong security forces.

Not long ago, many development professionals were worried that a torrent of Chinese loans, offered with no strings attached, was the main threat to “conditionality”: jargon for efforts to link aid projects to good governance or high environmental and labour standards. Fears centred on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched by Mr Xi in 2013, through which China lent hundreds of billions of dollars for roads, railways, dams and other infrastructure across the developing world. Now China’s economy is slowing, meaning that cash is in shorter supply. And some projects have gone awry, leading to anti-Chinese protests from locals.

China has duly changed tack. In a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2021, Mr Xi unveiled a new “Global Development Initiative” (GDI), aligning China with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Explaining the GDI’s launch, an international official ventures that the BRI amounted to China doing projects it wanted to do anyway, then “expecting everybody to show up in Beijing and say, ‘Thank you’”. That did not generate as much legitimacy as China hoped, he observes.

Although details of the GDI remain vague, it promotes long-standing Chinese arguments about letting each country find its own development path: shorthand for not judging dictatorships. China has pressed scores of countries to sign up as “Friends of the GDI”. The BRI was a brand name used to stitch lots of bilateral deals together, says a long-time development official. The GDI is China “playing the multilateral game, speaking the language, shaping the narrative and redefining universally accepted concepts.”

Heeding the majority is a favourite theme. After 141 governments condemned the invasion of Ukraine at the UN General Assembly, China’s diplomats warned Western envoys against over confidence. Look at the countries that backed Russia or abstained, they advised: they represent more than half the world’s population. Diplomats accuse China of bribing and bullying countries to vote the right way. A European recalls a developing country’s ambassador to the UN calling China a “1,000lb gorilla on my back”.

China has built a growing coalition of countries opposed to Western sanctions, adds Mr Gowan. China’s narrative is that humanitarian disasters in Syria or Venezuela are caused by sanctions, rather than by their rulers. Should China’s clout at the UN continue to grow, multilateral sanctions will become rarer.

The perils of co-operation

For international agencies, co-operating with China is risky. Michelle Bachelet did not seek a second term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights after her participation in a stage-managed visit to Xinjiang in May delighted China but appalled Western governments and rights groups. Minutes before leaving office, she released a damning report on Xinjiang by her staff, saying that China may have committed crimes against humanity there. China responded by suspending co-operation with her agency.

The World Health Organisation’s reluctance to challenge China over the pandemic has done lingering harm to its credibility. Despite WHO pleas, China withheld data about early human cases and wild-animal trading needed to understand the first outbreak in Wuhan, and so prevent future pandemics. Instead, Chinese officials promoted conspiracy theories that the virus came from an American military laboratory.

China often talks of being the second-largest donor to UN funds. When looking at “assessed contributions”, akin to a basic fee for membership, China is second-largest in nominal terms. But as a percentage of GDP, China’s contributions are about half as generous as those of Britain, France and Russia, a forthcoming Lowy Institute paper finds. China makes other, selective donations through trust funds that give it sway over specific projects.

In fields such as food security, where China is focused on buying up grain reserves for its own people, it all but ignores multilateral efforts. As of late September, in the midst of a global food crisis, China had given $10.8m to the World Food Programme in 2022, against $5bn from America.

One more battle of numbers interests China: its campaign to fill more UN positions. Western diplomats concede that China has a right to seek senior posts. What alarms them is how some Chinese appointees use their offices. Many governments privately accuse the Chinese head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Qu Dongyu, of downplaying the impact on food security of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a huge grain producer. They presume the aim was to spare China’s ally, Mr Putin, from criticism.

China is reportedly keen to fund hundreds of two-year postings for young Chinese officials, through the UN’s Junior Professional Officer Programme. That is reasonable. America funds 120 such posts at any one time and China is underrepresented at the UN, compared with its size. Still, a big influx of Chinese officials quietly worries insiders. They admit that many UN programmes reflect a liberal ethos, paying more attention to the rights of women, children and minorities than they did decades ago. If “true multilateralism” wins the day, that would stop.■