Impacts of Mainland China’s Policies towards the World
1 China’s Leadership Role in Global Governance
• China’s transition toward global leadership has taken place gradually over the past decade or more.
• From the mid-2000s onwards, Chinese foreign policy discourses began to reflect a growing interest in the importance of a Chinese voice in international affairs;
• Chinese representation in international institutions expanded more widely across
economic, security, and legal realms of global policymaking;
• Participation in international regimes intensified.
2 The Strategic Turn under Xi Jinping
• Under the Xi Jinping leadership we have witnessed a significant strategic shift in the direction of shaping the system of global governance rather than simply navigating around it.
• To augment China’s reformist credentials while simultaneously advocating Chinese interests
and values
• In his first speech to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2013, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi set out a new framework for China’s active engagement in global governance with a pledge “to voice Chinese views, offer Chinese wisdom, propose Chinese solutions, and support more global public goods.” 3 The Strategic Turn under Xi Jinping • Speaking for the first time at the UNGA in September 2015, President Xi set out his vision of a
“community of shared future for mankind” (構建人類命運共同體) based upon sovereign
equality, inter-civilizational dialogue, win-win cooperation, and the peaceful resolution of
disputes.
• In reiterating Chinese support for the delivery of global public goods, he further announced
the establishment of a UN peacekeeping standby force of 8,000 troops (full registration was
completed in September 2017), a $100 million fund to support operations in Africa via the
African Union, and a $1 billion ten-year China-UN Peace and Development Fund 4 The Strategic Turn under Xi Jinping
• The idea of a community of shared destiny
• It reflects a desire to order the world on the basis of the principle of peaceful coexistence that renders the idea of universality untenable and supports equality among politically diverse domestic regimes.
• Xi Jinping expanded upon the idea of a “community of shared future for mankind” in a speech at the UN office in Geneva in January 2017: “All countries should jointly shape the future of the world, write international rules, manage global affairs, and ensure that development outcomes are shared by all.” 5 The Strategic Turn under Xi Jinping
• At a second CCP Conference on foreign affairs held in June 2018 it was agreed that China
should lead the reform of the global governance system based upon the principles of fairness
and justice.
• Under the new CCP mandate, Chinese elites are now confidently advocating the benefits of
authoritarian statist norms for governing the world.
6 China’s Leadership Role in the Making
Overall, current trends suggest that Xi Jinping’s new ambition to play a leadership role in global governance is driven by three primary motivations:
• To defend Chinese interests on a global scale.
• To strengthen China’s strategic role in institution building.
• To broaden China’s normative voice as a means of legitimating its role as a global
power.
7 Foreign Intervention and Peacekeeping • Within the governing realm of international peace and security, China has gained an international
reputation for its role in UN peacekeeping.
• Chinese participation in peacekeeping has increased exponentially over the past two decades.
• In 2018 it ranked second place among the top ten contributors to the UN’s peacekeeping budget
(10.25%, compared to 28.47% from the United States).
• Converging interests appear to be behind this shift, including the need to protect investments and
workers abroad, maintain a peaceful international environment for development, facilitate the
modernization of the military, and improve China’s image as a responsible power.
8 Foreign Intervention and Peacekeeping
• At a broader level, involvement in peacekeeping missions has provided useful political
leverage over the trajectory of UN humanitarian interventions.
• Humanitarian crises are now officially seen as a “legitimate concern of the international
community.”
• However, new thinking on sovereignty that holds states accountable for alleged human
rights violations is seen as a dangerous precedent.
9 Foreign Intervention and Peacekeeping
• To date, in supporting some interventions to protect civilians subject to the approval of the
UN Security Council (UNSC) and the consent of the host country, China has taken a
minimalist stance based upon pragmatism rather than conviction.
• That said, confusion still exists over its responses to crises in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and
Yemen respectively, suggesting that deep divisions over the responsibility to protect norms
remain intact.
10 Selling China
• The use of culture and media by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to try to influence others and win friends is nothing new
• Soft power / international cultural communications: a range of both soft and somewhat harder ways in which a range of different Chinese actors try to promote a preferred story of China—what it is and what it wants—to international audiences
• Xi Jinping: His stated goal is to “increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China’s messages to the world” and to turn China into a “socialist cultural superpower.”
11 Goals and Drivers • The desire to gain status is intertwined with, but not identical to, the importance of respect;
• Status is about having a recognized position
• Respect is about a positive external appreciation of how that status was achieved
• It is important to acknowledge that both status and respect play important domestic roles
• Being seen to be a global power fits with the people’s own image of what China is (or should be)
• This potentially generates gratitude to the Party for delivering China back to its rightful position (status), while the recognition of and admiration for this re-emergence by others (respect) provides further external validation for the Party’s policies and strategies, reinforcing its “moral authority” to rule 12 Goals and Drivers • This entails establishing an idea of the “Chinese difference”—a country that will not simply act as other previous and contemporary Great Powers acted because it has a fundamentally different set of belief systems that emerge from a different set of histories and experiences and different philosophical precedents.
• It is an exercise in the promotion of difference and exceptionalism.
• China is engaged in an attempt to block the dominance of Western discourses and thinking by taking the lead in providing “a discourse on international affairs, as an alternative to a ‘Western’ discourse.”
13 Education and Exchanges • The promotion of Chinese language teaching was identified by the Ministry of Culture in 2003 as a key means of increasing China’s global voice by facilitating “friendship and mutual understanding.”
• The Ministry of Education produced a Plan for Study in China in 2010 that outlined the goal of China becoming the world’s biggest destination for students going abroad by attracting half a million of them by 2020.
• These students, the plan argues (or hopes), will “both understand China and contribute to connecting China to the rest of the world.”
14 Education and Exchanges
• The Institute of International Education’s Project Atlas reports 442,773 overseas students in China in 2017 • This placed China behind only the United States (just over one million incomers in 2016) and the UK (501,045 in 2017) as the world’s third biggest destination for overseas students • In 2016 there were more students from Anglophone Africa studying in China than in either the United States or the United Kingdom, and the Chinese government has formally committed itself to training more African future elites
15 Confucius Institutes • Confucius Institutes fall under the control of the Ministry of Education–affiliated Hanban, officially translated in English as the Office of Chinese Language Council International.
• Having set up the first CIs in 2004, over 500 were in operation at the end of 2018 (137 in Asia and Oceania, 173 in Europe, 54 in Africa, 110 in the United States, and 51 in the rest of the Americas and the Caribbean).
• There were also over 1,000 smaller Confucius Classrooms providing some form of Chinese language or cultural training in schools, just under half of them in the United States.
• As each of these 1,500 or so projects entails a collaboration between at least one Chinese and one foreign institution, there is now an extensive network of international institutional partnerships as well as the delivery of courses, resources, and language testing as a result of this rather rapid expansion. 16 Confucius Institutes • The CIs have become one of the most closely observed and intensely debated instruments of
Chinese cultural interactions.
• The most commonly voiced criticism is that they go further than simply promoting Chinese culture
and/or positive (in Chinese views) stories and counternarratives to the dominantly negative foreign
ones.
• They control what can and cannot be said and debated about China in the universities that host
them, either through outright controls and bans, or through a more intangible inculcation of a
culture of self-censorship among those who research or teach China-related issues.
17 Confucius Institutes
• They are increasingly seen as forming part of a multifaceted “United Front” project
through which the CCP forms relationships with political, economic, and societal elites
and groups in other countries to “support and promote . . . foreign policy goals.”
• CIs have been identified as one of the tools of influence promotion, occupying the “gray
areas” between licit and illegal forms of political interference, and their impact on political
debate has been the subject of inquiries in Australia, the United States, and the UK 18 References
• Morton, K. (2020) China’s Global Governance Interactions. In Shambaugh, D. L.
(eds) China and the World. New York : Oxford University Press.
• Breslin, S. (2020) China’s Global Cultural Interactions. In Shambaugh, D. L. (eds) China and
