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By Christoph Zürcher
CIPS report, January 2019

• When China became a member of the UN in 1971, it strictly opposed international peacekeeping because it saw it as a thinly veiled disguise for imperialist interventions by the great powers. Fast forward to 2018, and we see China actively participating in nine peacekeeping operations, including such challenging places as Mali, South Sudan, and Darfur. China now has 2,644 peacekeepers in the field, almost twice as many as the other four permanent members of the UN SC combined, and it is the second-largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping.
• This report traces the remarkable evolution of China from an opponent to a leader in UN peacekeeping. The first part of the report describes China’s changing attitude and growing contributions to UN peacekeeping. Between 1971 and 1988, China gradually softened its stance on UN peacekeeping, and in November 1989, it sent its first contingent of civilian observers into the field to assist in Namibia’s transition to independence. Since then, China has increased its contributions to peacekeeping, in step with its growing material capabilities, its role as an emerging power, and the growing UN demand for troops and finance. It has built up its domestic capacities—including capacities for training peacekeepers, both Chinese and international—gained experience in the field, and increased its confidence as a peacekeeper.
• The report then discusses the reasons and motivations for this remarkable evolution. No one single factor explains China’s rise to its role as a key player in the field of peacekeeping. It is rather a combination of hard and soft factors. Factors of “hard” national interests—such as protecting overseas investments or gaining field experience for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—work in combination with “soft” factors—such as reputational gains, strengthening the UN and multilateralism, and seeking congruence between foreign policy activities and its own identity both as a peer of Western great powers and as a leader in the developing world. Interestingly, hard factors have less traction than soft factors. Perhaps the most important motivation for China to become a peacekeeper lies in its aspiration to become, and to be seen as, a peer of other great powers, which invariably necessitates increased engagement in the world’s most important international organization, the UN.
• The third section of the report looks at the evolution of UN peacekeeping and how China reacted to these innovations. The doctrine and practice of UN peacekeeping have come a long way since its early days in the immediate postwar era. The last two decades saw increasingly complex missions in increasingly dangerous locations, where often there is no peace to keep. Mandates have become more complex and more ambitious, and missions have often assumed a much more “robust” posture—a euphemism for larger, more intrusive, more assertive missions. China has, sometimes reluctantly, supported the conceptual and doctrinal evolution of UN peacekeeping, supporting even the most robust UN missions (arguably DR Congo and Mali), while emphasizing its unchanged commitment to an international order that respects the legal sovereignty of all countries, uses armed intervention only as means of last resort, and abstains from interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries. Some have criticized this approach as thinly veiled support for authoritarian leaders, and, in some cases, China has adjusted its foreign relations. Most notably this occurred in 2008 in Sudan where it helped convince President al-Bashir to tolerate a UN mission to Darfur. The one conceptual innovation in UN peacekeeping about which China, together with many developing countries, remains deeply skeptical is the “Responsibility to Protect,” which, in China’s view, opens the door for powerful nations to promote regime change disguised as humanitarian intervention.
• The fourth and final section of the report speculates about the future of Chinese peacekeeping. How will China’s peacekeeping footprint evolve in the future? Will it maintain its current footprint, or perhaps even increase it? What seems clear is that China’s weight in the UN will increase, and its importance in the field of peacekeeping with it, not least because other countries, among them the US, are reducing their financial, military, and idealistic support to peacekeeping. We can also expect to see China occupying more leadership positions in the UN peacekeeping architecture, to provide more military technology to UN PKO, and to increase its training capacities for military and police peacekeepers, both from China and from other countries. Until now, China has rarely promoted its own conceptual approach to peacekeeping and peacebuilding, but has mostly gone wherever the collective debate within the UN went. Lately, we observe that China has begun to promote more actively an approach to peacebuilding that emphasizes the role of economic development enabled by a strong but not necessary liberal state, and de-emphasize the role of a human-rights-based approach in peacebuilding. This trend is likely to remain, but it is not clear how such conceptual thinking might translate into policies and practices in the field.
• Western China-watchers often treat China’s engagement in the field of peacekeeping as a proxy for China’s overall foreign policy. For these observers, the way China behaves in peacekeeping predicts how China will behave in other foreign policy fields as well. In other words, they assume that analyzing Chinese peacekeeping will help uncover China’s true intentions on the global stage. There is no shortage of predictions, exaggerated hopes, and exaggerated fears about China, and its future role in global politics. As Kerry Brown writes, “half the world feels that it is only a matter of time before China controls the whole planet… but the other half believes that China will remain a low-key, inward-looking, self-interested player who looks more like a mouse than a tiger, timid and cautious in its approach to the world around it.”
• Both camps hope to find support for their expectations about China’s future role in global politics by looking at its current peacekeeping policies. But such hopes are misdirected. Peacekeeping is, by definition, a technical, very specific activity constrained by the mission’s mandate decided upon by the UN Security Council (UNSC). Once a mission is deployed, there is hardly any room for pursuing a particular national interest. A closer look at Chinese efforts in peacekeeping will thus not help us to understand its policies in the South China Sea or in Tibet. This report, therefore, cannot shed new light on China’s foreign policy in general. But it can provide a comprehensive, balanced account of China’s contributions to UN peacekeeping over the past three decades.

Christoph Zürcher is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. His research and teaching interests include conflict research, methods of conflict research, state-building and intervention, and international development. His regional focus is on the Former Soviet Union especially on Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia including Afghanistan.