"Mixed Report Card: China’s Influence At The United Nations" - By CWP Alum Courtney Fung
China is of growing importance to the United Nations. Beijing aims to exert influence at the world body to legitimise and disseminate its foreign policy values and interests. This report contextualises China’s growing presence at the United Nations by examining publicly available data on four metrics that gauge Beijing’s success in steering the global governance agenda. Those metrics are: funding for UN departments, programs, and initiatives; staffing of executive-level personnel positions; voting in the UN General Assembly and UN Security Council; and the use of PRC-specific discourse and language in UN-generated documentation. The United Nations has become progressively more reliant on China’s general contributions, and in turn China has used a combination of levers to elevate its position within the UN system. However, this report finds that China is still selective in its overall approach to UN participation and that efforts by the PRC do not necessarily translate into successful influence at the body. The report makes three recommendations for UN stakeholders. First, a deeper understanding must be gained of what China contributes across different UN agencies and functional areas to establish a more complete picture of its multilateral input. Second, efforts should be made to shape China’s engagement in multilateral issues, in particular those that the PRC is yet to prioritise, such as refugee management. Third, it is vital to articulate an inclusive multilateral vision for a rules-based international order that specifies under which conditions China’s contributions are embraced, rather than framing PRC input solely as a source of concern.
COURTNEY J. FUNG & SHING-HON LAM DECEMBER 2022 - https://www.lowyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/2022-12/FUNG%2C%20LAM%2C%20China%20at%20the%20UN%2C%20PDF%20v5.pdf
Courtney J. Fung is Associate Professor in the Department of Security Studies & Criminology at Macquarie University. She is concurrently Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University and also Associate Fellow at the Lowy Institute and Chatham House. Courtney is on the editorial board of Contemporary Security Policy, the Australian Journal of International Affairs and H-DIPLO ISSF. Her research examines how rising powers address the norms and provisions for global governance and international security, with an empirical focus on China.
Courtney was previously an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong; a research fellow with the East Asia Institute (Seoul) in their Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia, and a post-doctoral research fellow with the now Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program.
Courtney is author of China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), which explains the effects of status on China's varied response to intervention and foreign-imposed regime change at the United Nations. Her book was shortlisted for the BISA LHM Ling Outstanding First Book Prize and received the 2019 - 2020 HKU Research Output Prize for the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Security Policy, Cooperation and Conflict, Global Governance, International Affairs, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, PS: Political Science & Politics, The China Quarterly, Third World Quarterly, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, and International Peacekeeping.
Courtney holds a PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. She serves on The Fletcher School Board of Advisors.
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