Chinese diplomats have rebranded their country as a defender of international order. In reality, they’ve manipulated the U.N. to suit Beijing’s interests.
As the U.N. approaches a century of existence, its chief challenge will be to grapple with authoritarian attempts to remake it from within.
D uring the U.N. General Assembly opening debate last month, the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to assume greater control over international organizations was on full display.
This year, “UNGA Week,” as the high-profile general debate of the assembly is called, took place primarily over video conference, and the in-person gatherings that make up the bread and butter of U.N. diplomacy prevented many important interactions. No matter for the Chinese delegation: In addition to general secretary Xi Jinping’s address to the Assembly, he participated in a side event on the U.N.’s 75th anniversary, and other Chinese foreign-affairs officials participated in other meetings throughout the week.
Xi set the tone of the Chinese delegation’s message. Sadly, it’s been accepted by too much of the U.N. system, and by some smaller states that have yet to awaken to the brutality of the Chinese regime. As the U.N. turns 75 this year, the CCP made its case for why the country it rules over is a leading defender of the multilateral order. “When in competition, countries should not breach the moral standard and should comply with international norms,” Xi said, during his UNGA speech. “In particular, major countries should act like major countries.”
The CCP, of course, is gaslighting the world, and the authoritarian regime’s grip on international organizations is perhaps the biggest threat facing the principles laid out in the U.N. Charter. “How China Is Taking Over International Organizations, One Vote at a Time” was the title of a Wall Street Journal front page article this past Thursday morning. The piece described precisely what the headline suggests it would: the Chinese government’s co-optation of U.N. organizations, often by coercion, over the past several years.
As the Journal reports, Chinese nationals now lead four of the 15 U.N. specialized agencies, many of which are tasked with setting technical standards on everything from air travel to telecoms. (The Chinese head of the International Telecommunications Union has promoted Huawei while in office.) To secure these seats, Chinese officials have engaged in underhanded tactics, such as photographing delegates as they cast secret ballots and cajoling small states with threats to pull aid.
Beijing has gotten this far without too much coordinated pushback for two reasons: Many of its contributions to the U.N. system sound innocuous; and as a result, it’s taken until now for many countries (including the United States) to recognize the problem. Jeffrey Feltman, a former U.N. under-secretary-general for political affairs, writes in a recent essay for the Brookings Institution that China’s cooperation with the U.N. secretariat was an invaluable contribution for officials who needed eyes and ears in countries without a U.N. presence. Some Chinese work within the U.N. system has actually advanced the organization’s mission, irrespective of Beijing’s malign activity.
And that’s the issue: This support has provided cover for the heavy-handed aspects of Beijing’s influence campaign in the past couple of years. One example is its efforts to get CCP-approved language into U.N. resolutions, including at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. In these resolutions, the emphasis has been to call for cooperation — such as when, for instance, the General Assembly approved two resolutions in September 2019 referring to “win-win cooperation,” a favorite phrase of Xi’s. However, bolstering the CCP’s agenda-setting power, not ensuring cooperation, is the goal.
Chinese officials intervened during the U.N. meetings last month in similar fashion. During a Security Council meeting about post-COVID global governance on September 24, Zhang Jun, China’s U.N. ambassador, rejected U.S. ambassador Kelly Craft’s assertions that the CCP covered up the coronavirus and pressured the WHO to toe its line. Zhang’s rebuttal took the form of a condescending lecture, in which he argued that the United States is truly to blame for the crisis: “If someone should be held accountable, it should be U.S. politicians themselves.”
Unfortunately, some well-credentialed figures have accepted the CCP’s framing of events at the U.N. The response to Xi’s General Assembly promise that China would reach carbon neutrality is a case in point. “Did Xi Just Save the World?” was the title of a Foreign Policy essay by Adam Tooze, a Columbia University professor. Tommy Vietor, an Obama White House official, used the promise to bludgeon conservatives: “Time to update these talking points and perhaps consider putting the fate of the planet ahead of GOP orthodoxy.” China’s promise to reduce its carbon emissions might sound enticing, but talk is cheap, and the Belt and Road Initiative is shaping up to be a colossal source of greenhouse-gas emissions.
All of this goes to show that Chinese diplomats have rebranded their country as a defender of international order. In reality, they’ve merely manipulated the U.N. to suit Beijing’s interests — which run against those of true advocates for human rights and international norms.
Now that the problem is out in the open, the question is how the United States and other democracies will address it. The Journal reports that European governments are frustrated with the Trump administration’s U.N. policy. As they tell it, Washington’s lack of focus on multilateral bodies is exactly what allowed Beijing to run the show. More accurately, though, some of the blame goes both ways. Those same governments that champion multilateralism as an end in itself have been hesitant to take on CCP influence directly. Meanwhile, Trump’s emphasis on combating “globalism” has passed over important opportunities to engage with the U.N. and push back against Beijing. To be sure, this has been partly overcome by his administration’s work to double down on its leadership at the U.N. through creating a team dedicated to fighting malign influence there. (This approach notched a win during the election for the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization in March.) But there’s more work to be done, and as China has shown, mere rhetorical commitments to such bodies can go a long way.
The U.N. at 75 faces many challenges. But as it approaches a century of existence, its chief challenge will be to grapple with authoritarian attempts to remake it from within.