‘Doing some things’ in the Xi Jinping era: the United Nations as China's venue of choice

A more powerful China under the seemingly confident leadership of President Xi Jinping has committed to a more activist global policy. In particular, this commitment has influenced Beijing's policy towards UN peacekeeping operations, with a long‐awaited decision to add combat forces to the engineering troops and police and medical units that have been features of its past contribution. In addition, Beijing has doubled the size of its contribution to the UN peace operations budget. This article explains why the UN is a key venue for China to demonstrate its ‘responsible Great Power’ status and expressed willingness to provide global public goods. The main explanatory factors relate to the UN's institutional design, which accords special status to China even as it represents a global order that promotes the sovereign equality of states. Moreover, there are complementarities between dominant Chinese beliefs and interests, and those contained within the UN system. Especially important in this latter regard are the links that China has tried to establish between peacebuilding and development assistance with the aim of strengthening the capacity of states. China projects development support as a contribution both to humanitarian need and to the harmonization of conflict‐ridden societies. The Chinese leadership has also spoken of its willingness to contribute to peacemaking through stepping up its efforts at mediation. However, such a move will require much deeper commitment than China has demonstrated in the past and runs the risk of taking China into controversial areas of policy it has hitherto worked to avoid.     

Chinese strategies in a US-hegemonic global order: accommodating and hedging

China's economic, political and military influence has been increasing at a time when the United States, as sole superpower, dominates the international order. This article outlines Chinese elite perspectives on the current global order and shows not only how these perceptions have affected China's policies towards the United States, but also how they have influenced China's regional and global policies more broadly. It argues that variants of realist logic that interpret Chinese behaviour as a form of balancing are not particularly helpful, and do not capture the essence of Chinese strategies that are underpinned by an overwhelming focus on its domestic development needs. The article posits that Chinese leaders have accepted that they operate in a unipolar order and have chosen not to stick out for negotiating positions that the United States would see as seriously detrimental to its interests. However, Beijing couples this accommodating approach with policies designed to ensure that, were relations seriously to deteriorate with Washington, China could draw on deepened regional and global ties to thwart any US effort to interrupt its domestic objectives. China's hope is that a more 'democratic' international order will emerge, which means not multipolarity as such but a 'concert of great powers system' that will operate to forge multilateral cooperation among the major states.